Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

some interesting-looking things shortlisted for the Goldsmith's Fiction Prize this year:

Kudos by Rachel Cusk (Faber)
Murmur by Will Eaves (CB Editions)
In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne (Headline)
The Cemetery in Barnes by Gabriel Josipovici (Carcanet)
Crudo by Olivia Laing (Faber)
The Long Take by Robin Robertson (Picador)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/sep/26/novel-senses-of-new-the-2018-goldsmiths-prize-for-fiction-shortlist

I'm interested in Murmer. I was interested in The Cemetery in Barnes too but I read a preview of it and that put me off slightly.

I want to read Rachel Cusk but every time I pick up Outline I recoil anew at the inexplicable choice of Optima as a body font. Not to like shit on Zapf but it looks all wrong.

actually, more than slightly. it struck me as being quite artificially "refined" in a similar way to the dreaded Ishiguro. xpost

i liked Murmur - a James Morrison recommendation. Just started Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (2016), which 20 pages in is really excellent. Tho i’m aware that the almost algorithmic arbitrary strangeness of the youngest thomas the tank engine board books might seem excellent after forbidden line by paul stanbridge (2016).

in that list great to see dewitt (obv) & maggie nelson. also - cosign woof on satin island, which no matter how much tolerance you may be able to gen up by framing it in intentional cheapness (there’s a little wiggle room for that reading) was crap.

Goon Squad, yes. i know it got mixed reviews from people on here, but i liked it.

and i liked against the day, big messy and fun.

oh and i do want to read cusk after that review in the lrb.

josipovici i really react against in what is possibly an unfair way. i’ve only read everything passes and a bit of goldberg:variations. the first was quite striking in some respects - broken prose incantation (ie kind of looks like a poem on the page but isn’t). but it also seemed pompous - that is to say its manner suggested a high level of importance which was in the end it seemed to me as much if not more tonal than in terms of the subject matter. i wrote a little about it here.

goldberg i couldn’t get on with at all. it seemed supremely and unjustifiably satisfied with its own cleverness. my response if it were a person would be “yes i suppose you are but the problem is i don’t like you very much”. i realise this is not good lit crit and i would like to break down exactly how that response is constituted in the text. but it will do for now.

I like it.

jeez i loved satin island wtf

really hated goon squad though especially the heavily footnoted chapter from the perspective of the bitter journalist who assaults someone. just a bunch of lazily-written short stories arbitrarily bent into each other

i guess i can see how satin island could be a little overweighted with cliché "deep" anthropological ideas but idk the writing was so good, i got pretty caught up in it

wow i hate most of the books on this vulture list lol

the line of beauty yes absolutely but the goldfinch uuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh

lol 1q84 i love lists that are just like "here are a bunch of books that came out in the past twenty years that had some kind of buzz around them but not necessarily any inherent value"

i agree that the goldfinch and 1q84 suck

however I'm reading the last samurai thanks to that list and it's great

I should clearly be recommending that book in more threads, more often.

the last samurai does rule

MURMUR is wonderful, he repeats

The Long Take by Robin Robertson: this is interesting but not deserving of the praise it gets, and I say this as a devotee of the film noir movies it revels in. It's a novel in verse, but if ever there was some poetry that was just obviously prose with regular line breaks put in, it's this.

Murmur is phenomenal, I read it in one sitting on the beach but I keep casting my mind back to it. It's full of narrative tricks but they're only ever enhancing rather than undercutting the big thematic stuff and its (substantial) emotional heft.

I absolutely loved In Our Mad & Furious City as well, but a coming-of-age London novel full of grime music and racial/religious tensions was never not going to appeal to me, but the potential to have done something utterly cringeworthy and try-hard was vast and he manages to avoid all that entirely.

There is lots of good stuff in that Vulture list but plenty of eyeroll moments as well.

The inclusion of Mary Gaitskell's Veronica in there made me genuinely happy but everyone concerned should be embarrassed to appear in a list alongside Capital.

Just ordered Murmer on the back of those mentions.

or off the back?

I think it's "off the back"?

I realized that Edward St Aubyn wasn't on that list either which is, imo, another pretty bad omission for such an anglophile list.

I came across a copy of Dunbar, his entry in the Hogarth Shakespeare Series, "updating" King Lear which I'm looking forward to reading. Will also stan for Helen Dewitt's Lightning Rods. Did anyone read the collection of short stories she published earlier in the year?

Yes! Pick 'em up. It'll make you believe in yourself.

Jesus christ, Murmur destroyed me. I read much of the last sections with my eyes itching with tears.

There's swathes of it I didn't understand but I'll get some thoughts together once I've pulled myself together!

I realized that Edward St Aubyn wasn't on that list either which is, imo, another pretty bad omission for such an anglophile list.

his best books came out in the '90s

Mallarme's The Book has had its first complete translation!

http://exactchange.com/shop/mallarme-the-book/

a friend of mine wrote a very well received (apparently radical) translation of (some of) Mallermé's poem's xyz. could be of interest to you:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/stephane-mallarme-poems-in-verse-review

Thanks!

I realized that Edward St Aubyn wasn't on that list either which is, imo, another pretty bad omission for such an anglophile list.

his best books came out in the '90s

― Number None, Monday, October 8, 2018 10:45 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Controversial! I think Mother's Milk and At Last were the best of the Patrick Melrose books.

it's controversial to think those are the best ones.

xyzzz and jed, thanks for both Mallarmé recs!

Lol, no it's not but it does seem like his reputation and recent popularity (fwiw) over the last 5-6 years hinge more on his recent work.

seems like a good list https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/pa5b7m/best-books-2018-poetry-short-stories

maybe i just want to read The Incendiaries

That intro paragraph is pretty self-congratulatory given the list features only American writers. (Although, tbf, one of them lives part of the time in Canada)

Not sure where to put this so

This is my favourite thing on Twitter today. It’s beautiful! pic.twitter.com/BbUCgI8H5e

— Bethany Black (@BeffernieBlack) February 10, 2019

Lol

:D

some very good looking things here. v interested in the two Joyce-related books, Lucia and Dedalus.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/republic-of-consciousness-prize-2019-longlist/

They announced the shortlist in the last day or two, in case you missed it - both the Joyce-related things made it through. https://www.thebookseller.com/news/shortlist-unveiled-republic-consciousness-prize-small-presses-965176

It does look a good list, I'm looking forward to reading the Lord Kitchener one, and I'm very pleased for the Henningham Family Press people, who I've run into once or twice and who seem like righteous folk.

I did miss it, thanks Tim.

That's a badly written article!

Haha I didn’t even read past the list.

The Wendy Erskine stories are v good.

NYRB:
Uwe Johnson - Anniversaries
Varlam Shamalov - Kolyma Tales

Penguin:
Dag Solstad - Armand V/T Singer
Svetlana Alexivech - THe Unwomanly Face of War

Other Publishers:
Wolfgang Hilbig -The Tidings of the Trees/The Females
Helen DeWitt - Some Trick
Gerald Murnane - The Plains
Emily Wilson - The Odyssey

― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 21 January 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Adding these as notable new releases. Penguin have been doing good by euro/foreign fiction:

Pavese - The Beautiful Summer
Violette Leduc - The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

Lots and lots from New Directions:

Dasa Drndic: https://www.ndbooks.com/author/dasa-drndic/
Natalia Ginzburg: https://www.ndbooks.com/author/natalia-ginzburg/
Two new Hrabals: https://www.ndbooks.com/author/bohumil-hrabal/

NYRB have put out

Serge's Notebooks is probably the most interesting they've put out this year (but that's just me lol): https://www.nyrb.com/products/notebooks?variant=7060384055348

As to what is forthcoming this is an interesting collection:

https://www.nyrb.com/collections/forthcoming/products/the-storyteller-essays?variant=9273236586548

Genet: https://www.nyrb.com/collections/forthcoming/products/criminal-child?variant=14170567049268

Musil: https://www.nyrb.com/collections/forthcoming/products/agathe-or-the-forgotten-sister?variant=14728883109940

As for Archipelago I am quite looking forward to these Onetti short stories, the guy is due a revival:

https://archipelagobooks.org/book/a-dream-come-true/

In terms of re-issues I haven't read I'll get this:

https://www.andotherstories.org/tamarisk-row/