Literary Clusterfucks 2013

sandra newman has announced a forthcoming novel, in which all humans with a Y chromosome mysteriously disappear, called ‘the men’

― mookieproof, Sunday, March 6, 2022 5:41 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't really know who she is, but she explained that the title is a reference to something more specific within the novel, not to the people who have disappeared.

The book may well turn out to be problematic, but it seems like a lot of assumptions are being made about it based on the title and premise.

I’ll be sure to read this YA novel and engage with the great discourse

The book may well turn out to be problematic, but it seems like a lot of assumptions are being made about it based on the title and premise.

Sometimes a premise is enough, imo.

plus a past novel written entirely in AAVE…

I read some of the excerpts floating around Twitter and I don’t know what the fuck that was but it wasn’t AAVE

More accurate to say it’s written in a goofy made-up lingo by someone who has never heard more than 30 seconds of someone speaking AAVE but thinks they are an expert in it

I’d also like to point out the book vg mentioned has multiple Black characters talking about going back to Massachusetts, only they’ve decided to call it “Massa”

oh no

holy shit

I’d also like to point out the book vg mentioned has multiple Black characters talking about going back to Massachusetts, only they’ve decided to call it “Massa”

― castanuts (DJP), Monday, March 7, 2022 7:21 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes, i saw this. unbelievable...

you wonder why people simply cannot refrain

i don’t really have any thoughts on her new book beyond that it will have to be remarkable to overcome such a hackneyed premise

those excerpts from her previous book that djp mentioned are jaw-dropping tho. not in a good way

wow

oh I see, this is one of those "I had a neural net system write a novel" things

oh, i guess this was the premise

In the ruins of a future America, fifteen-year-old Ice Cream Star and her nomadic tribe live off of the detritus of a crumbled civilization. Theirs is a world of children; before reaching the age of twenty, they all die of a mysterious disease they call Posies—a plague that has killed for generations. There is no medicine, no treatment; only the mysterious rumor of a cure.

When her brother begins showing signs of the disease, Ice Cream Star sets off on a bold journey to find this cure. Led by a stranger, a captured prisoner named Pasha who becomes her devoted protector and friend, Ice Cream Star plunges into the unknown, risking her freedom and ultimately her life. Traveling hundreds of miles across treacherous, unfamiliar territory, she will experience love, heartbreak, cruelty, terror, and betrayal, fighting with her whole heart and soul to protect the only world she has ever known.

genuinely stunning to imagine writing even one of the sentences in the bit mookie posted

"never had no tato patch nor cornfield" keeps sending me into horrified giggles

like, this patois kept the "nor" construction but got rid of the word "potato"

this made sense to someone

And mind you, they didn't keep the existing word "tater"; they went for "tato"

So yeah, assuming the best of intentions behind all of this, the previous execution is so blindingly bad that I am not going to assume much of the newest effort

how do these weird YA novels I've never heard of (like The Country of Ice Cream Star) has thousands of ratings and reviews on Goodreads?

like 2635 white women who look like your supervisor rated this book and it has an average of 3.62.

goodreads is actually just a front for Big YA

the water is wide
I cannot cross o'er
I never had
no tato patch

omfg

https://www.npr.org/2015/02/16/384112222/ten-hearts-for-the-country-and-language-of-ice-cream-star

Saw that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/books/review/the-country-of-ice-cream-star-by-sandra-newman.html

This is a positive review but it still contains this:

The entire book is written in what we would think of as a patois, but is apparently the standard dialect of the future. At times, this can sound a bit like Jar Jar Binks narrating an audiobook of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”

If you think of dialects as broken versions of "correct" English it's easy to write in dialect, because you don't have to follow rules you don't believe exist.

Has this been mentioned yet?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2360064.How_Not_to_Write_a_Novel

If you think of dialects as broken versions of "correct" English it's easy to write in dialect, because you don't have to follow rules you don't believe exist.

don’t think this author is YA, or at least is not primarily marketed as such

Seems like she should be but yes, I wouldn’t but my sweet tato on it.

YA in this case stands for Yikes, Always

Weird that none of these reviews mention Riddley Walker, which seems like the obvious model for something like this.

I would love it if How Not to Write A Novel was The Country of Ice Cream Star with a different title

Was thinking the same thing.

Riddley Walker the most obvious predecessor yeah. More recently there was also The Wake, by Paul KIngsnorth.

No Country for Old Ice Cream

The Wake was a stunning achievement which I will always stan tbh

Let's not ignore Mason & Dixon in the 'doing it right' column too

the fact that this terrible book was apparently intended for adult readers is somehow more upsetting to me than if it were just another shitty YA novel

half expect there to be a drink called "Milk Minus" in it

I call for all of these books where a certain percentage of the population dies/disappears (not because of a nuclear war) to be called Thanos Snap Lit.

many xps
A Nest Of Fire And Ants
is how I read that

"never had no tato patch nor cornfield" keeps sending me into horrified giggles

― castanuts (DJP), Monday, March 7, 2022 10:03 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

And mind you, they didn't keep the existing word "tater"; they went for "tato"

― castanuts (DJP), Monday, March 7, 2022 10:05 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

This was nearly, "I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no 'taters."

oh no I read too many excerpts and now I actually want to know if there's a stated reason there's so much French in it: is the population descended from francophone immigrants?

let's not pull Haitians into this mess

that was my best guess, and you're right: I probably don't want to know the answer

Roos all got one clothing, same as Beef-a-roni do.

I'm a little annoyed by the reflexive criticism of the new book, but yeah, I also saw excerpts of The Country of Ice Cream Star and thought "yikes."

Also this interview:

How did you go about creating the voice of Ice Cream Star (and the groups who live in Massa) and how did you sustain that for an entire novel?

I didn’t initially intend to write the book in an invented patois. But when I started to write the book, it had to be set in a future world, and I wanted to the voice to feel absolutely real. I’ve always been the kind of writer (and reader) who needs a story to be completely convincing. When I was writing the book in standard English, I just couldn’t believe in it. A hundred years had passed. Obviously English would have changed in that time, especially if there were no schools and no media, and the language was only being spoken by children and teenagers.

So from there, the language ended up being informed by African-American English. I’ve given a lot of reasons for this, but the bottom line is just that it’s my favorite English, and probably objectively the best English going. It also gave me not only a model for innovation in the vocabulary, but a starting point for innovation in the grammar. And finally, most people are familiar with it to some degree, so readers have a starting point for understanding it.

Once I had the flavor of African-American speech in the language (and don’t get me wrong – it’s not African-American Vernacular English as spoken now, but it’s obviously strongly influenced by it) it felt like the characters should be black. Or, put another way, why shouldn’t they be black? I mean, it became a choice to make them anything but black.

And then, as soon as I thought of them as black, the book came to life in the most incredible and inexplicable way. It began to write itself. I don’t know why this is, since the book isn’t about race – or it’s only very occasionally, tangentially, about race. It just suddenly felt like a real world I had discovered, rather than an imaginary world I was inventing. Everything fell into place.

I was very aware that this was a controversial thing to do, as a white person. I thought about it a lot, and questioned my position, and etc But after a while, I couldn’t really help writing the book that way because it worked. Also, the characters very quickly became real people to me, who demanded to be written about as they were.

Sustaining it for an entire novel was time-consuming, but incredibly rewarding. In fact, I now find it a little sad writing in normal English, because it’s just not possible to be as inventive. And, just as with any foreign language, there are words in Sengle English for which there are no exact equivalents in contemporary English, so I sometimes end up feeling like my normal speech is an inadequate translation.

every sentence a red flag