Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

Which of these Filmmakers are Most Overrated?

the word 'overrated' should be removed from all discourse imo

real talk

Others hide behind a smokescreen of unreadable inimitability--Marilynne Robinson, for example

OK is this writer an imbecile?

Also, if critics of the 1920's were so "perceptive" why they'd pick so many Pulitzer winners which are, by the writer's estimation, unworthy?

i would like to stand up for my man Mark Gluth and say that "The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis" is the best novella of the year, imho.

also markers, 'The Child in Time' is clearly the best McEwan novel. i've been pretty 'meh' about everything else i've read by him, but that book is just undeniably gorgeous.

seriously, amy tan is not my cup of tea either, but ascribing to her the power/role of "ruining ethnic/minority fiction" is totally insane/absurd/blaming an author for a marketing/publishing industry issue

guess i'll never read anything by an asian american again, bc joy luck club sucks

getting so mad just thinking about it; i need to not read the rest of that thing

^^^good idea

haha right?

i just dont read articles with the word "overrated" in them anymore because if i want to raise my blood pressure i might as well eat deep fried oreo or something, at least that way i enjoy myself

i know i'm such a sucker

articles about fiction are to me as fox news is to my dad

hahaha me too

that could go either way

Yeah I couldn't even get to the second page. Ugh @ the first paragraph - it sounds like something from my high school written exams.

i just dont read articles with the word "overrated" in them anymore because if i want to raise my blood pressure i might as well eat deep fried oreo or something, at least that way i enjoy myself

^^^^ with a vengeance.

quick show of hands: who's going to read the new jonathan franzen?

hand up

hand up (in paperback)

i just noticed it comes out three weeks later in england! cockgoblins

hand up
the uk cover's also kind of a monstrosity

http://nozama.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54ed05fc288330133f294f045970b-600wi

i p much always prefer us covers to uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/aug/23/jonathan-franzen-freedom

oh god

i predict this novel will be 'sort of alright'

also, i wouldn't want to judge between those two covers without seeing physical versions - i think the drop-shadows on the uk one might be better, and the colour tone on the us one less obnoxious, in person. BUT OH, WHAT IS THE SYMBOLISM OF THE BIRD

hang on which cover is which? one on the left with the bird is by far the most dreadful.

i just realised i have them the wrong way round, i thought the one with the bird was the uk one? but i guess it's the us one since it says 'A NOVEL'

yessssss

neither of them are above kindergarten level really. uk one is portentous-by-numbers (pretty low numbers at that) but the us one is just 'clip art photoshop filter will this do'?

otm. why could they not have got better designers? i guess it's obv gonna sell so no one cares but still

guys apparently one of the subplots of this novel is about the quest to save a lesser spotted warbler or something, that is why there are birds on the cover

Still, that is a very weak cover.

Also, my hand is way up. I'm on the request list at the library, but according to the online catalogue they haven't even ordered it yet.

i just pre-ordered it, but i am hell of sick of the discussion surrounding it already

yeah that's true. also, so much of the discussion making it sound like no good books have come out since the corrections

doubt the insta-reviewers have like, read it, tbh

it's mainly how for most of the last ten years if he was mentioned it was 'ha ha that goofy self-obsessed jonathan franzen, and those overeducated white male novelists and their overeducated white male preoccupations' - which is totally correct, nb - and once there's a new book and the marketplace steps in this viewpoint is nowheeeeeeeeere

xpost i definitely plan to review it without reading it

it's mainly how for most of the last ten years if he was mentioned it was 'ha ha that goofy self-obsessed jonathan franzen, and those overeducated white male novelists and their overeducated white male preoccupations' - which is totally correct, nb

i dunno if either of these things are true? i mean obviously one shouldn't be too educated or white, and the best people to say so are... literary critics? academics? bloggers? but ppl were saying franzen was a good element iirc.

yeah, i think a part of my issue is my bias in terms of the media outlets i choose to expose myself to

like maybe the default broadsheet opinion on franzen would have been a lot closer to his current position over the entire period '01-'10, i just wouldn't encounter it because without the new book he hasn't been so publicly visible in terms of these things. whereas in terms of lit crit and lit blogs and nerds on message boards and er talking to people who read these things in real life the default opinion on him is a little more context-aware.

conversely, i probably need more exposure to sophisticated 'omg this writer is white and well-educated he probably sucks and gets all his college friends to write nice things about him' type blogs

I hate spoilers, so I've managed to avoid reading any of the reviews in full. I read the first paragraph of the NYT one and that will do until after I'm finished it.

Super Sad True Love Story remains mostly unread :-/

there's a new book and the marketplace steps in this viewpoint is nowheeeeeeeeere

― thomp, Thursday, 26 August 2010 16:18 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it's somewhere - http://www.theawl.com/2010/08/behind-the-franzenfreude

But really, we're still doing the thing where we elevate a fiction-writing white men as the Greatest Thing In American Writing Today?

yeah ima stop reading when it gets this sassy

curse those white men though, curse them!

the author of that just started following my tumblr after a post of mine kvetching about franzen got reblogged ... she's pretty smart & a good writer, i think

the awl needs subeditors tho. "a fiction writing white men"?

it stops being sassy and becomes earnest, but it's all kind of ehh to me. if one aspires to writing novels it's probably more interesting.

Even the Brits agree that Franzen has tapped into some kind of shared experience psyche: the Guardian called The Corrections "a report from the frontline of American culture."

It seems a fair question, in that context, to ask: "What's this 'we,' white man?"

well the guardian is being glib, but doesn't this suggest that franzen does address people outside brooklyn? she doesn't say whether the guardian writer is white/a man/_______, and perhaps said writer isn't any of those things. if there isn't a 'shared experience psyche' (great phrase huh) i guess literature is p much fucked.

What collective American experience do these critics envision Franzen as describing? I have a suspicion they simply imagine their own white, male, middle class experiences as the "American experience," because it's always been presented that way to them, not least in the novels of Updike and Mailer and sometimes Roth that they so often list as favorites.

and this is kind of hmmmmmm too -- critics, ime anyway, talk about roth in terms of jewishness a whole lot of the time, not of 'universal' american experience. not, and this is the point with all of them surely, that he is defined by his jewishness.

I really liked Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart and The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, they're probably the two best new books I've read this year, but it feels like there's a trend of these like literary novels that humorously treat their heroes as grotesques, like constantly talking about how gross they look and how fat they are and how people don't like them very much. I don't know, I guess maybe it's not a "trend" since I can't think of any other examples but Shteyngart and Lipsyte in particular are very similar in doing this, across all of their books that I've read. It's interesting.

I'll probably read the new Franzen eventually but I'm not like superpumped about it or anything.