post itt writers you think are bad

no need to explain yourself, thread is for catharsis not debate

ok i already regret this mods lock thread

j/k

these books are made for junkin

every single writer at every single metal site I regularly use for recommendations is bad

Goethe

ok lock thread now

There are many ways for a writer to be bad, many fewer ways for them to be good, and almost all of them yield somewhat mixed results. If they have a following, there's bound to be something mixed in with the crappy aspects that their followers rate much higher than you do, while what disgusts you hardly registers with their fans.

For me, the worst writers are not those who write appalingly bad sentences, but those who reinforce their audience's worst traits and convince them those traits, like selfishness, hatred or arrogance, are not really bad at all, but actually good in ways that others are too blind or stupid to see.

Or, I could just say 'Jordan Peterson' and leave it at that.

roth

stalin

noah berlatsky

Nathan J Robinson

Having read two of her books — one which I liked a lot until the end absolutely shit the bed, and one which I disliked all the way through — Ottessa Moshfegh.

lauren oyler

roth

― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, February 9, 2021 10:39 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Crazy From the Heat is a great read

Orlando Bloom

jeet heer

neal stephenson

guy who wrote the Bible. boring af

uh, there were a bunch of guys who wrote it ... they even like named some of the books after themselves?

no i think it was a guy named Michael Bible?

All those postwar realist "big" American writers, Bellow, Updike, Roth etc

xpost Thx, very nearly sprayed a mouthful of soup across the room just then

Nathan J Robinson

he's a great choice for this thread

Joan Didion

dave marsh

Poe

Lovecraft

George Gissing

ben lerner

Brad i love you but this will just turn into yet another "the pictures are not on trial" fuckwits of ilx thread

i say "will"

Jurgen Habermas

Not sure if I entirely mean this or not but dang he can be a slog, however insightful

No bad writers, read everything.

this thread should have been about other ilxors only for that extra needle

I am a bad reader

I don’t necessarily think Ann Beattie is a bad writer, but I’m not sure whether she’s a good novelist.

https://bookandfilmglobe.com/fiction/book-review-a-wonderful-stroke-of-luck/

Read what terrifies you. Read tweets.

I don’t necessarily think Ann Beattie is a bad writer, but I’m not sure whether she’s a good novelist.

https://bookandfilmglobe.com/fiction/book-review-a-wonderful-stroke-of-luck/

― We’re Up All Night To Get Lochte (Raymond Cummings), S

I have the same problem with her stories. I read ...Dana Falcon at the start of lockdown.

going for maximum controversy here, everyone ready?

David Walliams

Brad i love you but this will just turn into yet another "the pictures are not on trial" fuckwits of ilx thread

― The Scampo Fell to Earth (Noodle Vague), Saturday, February 13, 2021 5:27 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i feel like “this thread is a terrible idea” is there subtextually in the opening posts

Anyway Comrade Alph otm everything is good nothing is forbidden lol for biden

it is important to recognize what is bad so it can not be respected and/or repeated

ok yeah i know that recognizing it doesn't actually help

My moaning about other people's moaning is just as bad

Anyway D H Lawrence is for shit

otm

I dig many of his poems and stories, though I'm frightened about rereading WIL.

Bob Vickery

fucking orwell

also, nick cave (having seen a couple of passages from his books shared online)

fucking orwell

pvmic

Donna Tartt

A.J. Jacobs

(Actually that's it. Those are the only two bad writers. They happen to be bad in the same way - roughly, an Ivy-League idea of clever - but pretty much everyone else is okay, carry on.)

i used to dislike donna tartt, but then i read the goldfinch and loved it. i do think the secret history is not that good.

The Secret History isn’t good-good but it’s bad-good, is how I think of it.

The Secret History, The Little Friend, The Goldfinch were at least memorable

this one feels so boringly obvious but i might as well say it: bret easton ellis

yeah fuck that dude imo

i disliked him, which colors this opinion, but christopher hitchens's prose was a bit overwrought, no?

No bad writers, read everything.

― xyzzzz__, Saturday, February 13, 2021

Khaled Hosseini

don't remember much about The Kite Runner but liked A Thousand Splendid Suns

What do you think of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life? I was kind of shocked by how tortured and emotionally extreme it was but was also mesmerized by it

can understand people might see it as questionable though, it almost felt abusive to the reader

i love his short stories but found ‘hopscotch’ by julio cortazar unbearably pretentious

What do you think of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life? I was kind of shocked by how tortured and emotionally extreme it was but was also mesmerized by it

― Dan S

One of the worst books I've ever read: endless, masochistic drivel.

She did say that the story got away from her. I still liked it.

Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was another hyperemotional novel I liked that I can see people coming down hard on

My moaning about other people's moaning is just as bad

Anyway D H Lawrence is for shit

― The Scampo Fell to Earth (Noodle Vague), Saturday, February 13, 2021 9:41 AM (thirteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

― horseshoe, Saturday, February 13, 2021 10:31 AM (twelve hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is reassuring - all my attempts to read him were painful and I assumed I was missing something

i disliked him, which colors this opinion, but christopher hitchens's prose was a bit overwrought, no?

― horseshoe, Sunday, February 14, 2021 12:48 AM (three hours ago)

yeah, the last couple times i tried to reread hitchens didn't go well.

Tom Friedman is a very bad writer in addition to being a professional nincompoop but that’s not a particularly spicy take.

I couldn’t stand trying to read The Scarlet Letter in high school, so I didn’t, don’t really know if that means I think Hawthorne was bad. Probably wouldn’t venture an opinion.

Honestly I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten mad at a writer for being bad in the same way I am mad about, say, Forrest Gump.

James Fenimore Cooper

William Golding (as a writer for high school children, not adults)

Lauren Oyler (again)

China Miéville

Gillian Flynn

Craig Stanley Robinson

Jill Lepore

Richard Florida

Jonathan Chait

Fuckin Wilbert Audry

Oops I meant Craig Shaw Gardner

Simon Rich

Tom Robbins

Simon Rich is bad in the same way as A.J. Jacobs but Jacobs is much worse. Rich at least has some unique premises on which to unleash his bad writing

Camille Paglia

Hawthorne's stories are... non-good

nonsense

Okay maybe I need to revisit the subtle messaging in "Young Goodman Brown." I mean, are we supposed to interpret the name "Goodman" as... hear me out... GOOD MAN? Like is the character supposed to be a good man? Or, maybe, not good? Oooh, perhaps it could be irony. This is a story about going to meet a mysterious spectral figure in... a forest. At night. Perhaps this forest and this night are metaphors.

The mind boggles at the authorial wizardry at work here. Clearly a master of his craft at the height of his powers.

Oh, and maybe to heighten the drama his wife could be named something potentially symbolic. How about "Prudence"? "Charity"? "Mercy"? Naw.

Ooh ooh I know, how about "Faith"?

He’s definitely not subtle, and I get why the heavy handedness turns people off, but I think it works in the short stories.

I like “Young Goodman Brown” and I love “The Minister’s Black Veil.”

Melville (roughly contemporary) could be heavy-handed as well, but brought more inventiveness and playfulness to his maniacal projects.

they are very different writers! i don't disagree that Melville was more inventive (his writing is crazy!) and i prefer him, but hawthorne was Good imo.

chuck_tatum finally bringing in some genuinely spicy takes!

yes, i confess i can't see Lepore as a bad writer.

I love the story ideas that Hawthorne recorded in his note-books - they're like précis of stories that Borges never got round to writing.

https://biblioklept.org/2013/05/09/ten-ideas-from-nathaniel-hawthornes-note-books/

As with movies, I tend to do a pretty good job of filtering out stuff I won't like. One exception that comes to mind is a Cintra Wilson collection I read--excruciating.

those are great, Ward Fowler! i appreciate how Hawthorne seemed to think in fairy tales about how American Puritanism is fucked.

6. To make one’s own reflection in a mirror the subject of a story.

This was the original inspiration for my memoir, My Greatness.

Oh yeah, Anthony Lane. Awful.

Focusing on a couple of ILX faves, I dunno if he's a "bad writer" but I despise 2666, and Gene Wolfe has yet to show his face to me

i despise a lot of poets but that doesn't mean much here.

Film critic John Simon was utterly useless as a critic and writer both. His bad reviews were spiritually and emotionally malignant and his good reviews were preening about his superior taste.

There's an ILX thread on him, with posts before and after his death.

The John Simon Thread

There a big discussion of him in some other thread where I may have been the only person (can't remember) offering a measured defense of him. He wrote some horrendous things, for sure.

William Golding (as a writer for high school children, not adults)

not sure what this means? i’ve read a few of golding’s later books and i can’t imagine anyone thinking they were targeted toward high school age readers. (he’s also a superb writer by any standards imo, whatever you think of the one famous book.)

btw “goodman” is not young goodman brown’s first name; it’s an archaic way to address someone, so basically it’s “young mr. brown.”

"Goodman" or "Goodwoman" was specifically the terms used to address people who weren't upper class.

I get it, like "Goody Sibber" etc. in the Crucible. Sorry for the lazy zing in my post. Doesn't make it a good story tho.

no, but the fact that it's a good story does.

good writing doesn't only look one way...i'd never call Spike Lee a bad director because he has no interest in subtlety.

Ohhhhhhhh xp

sorry, English teacher smugness dies hard.

Somehow we got 107 posts and no mention of Ayn Rand. Shocking!

x-posts

IMO Lord of the Flies is one of the worst possible things you could give to a child to read. Adults, sure, of course. Actually I have no idea if they even give it to kids to read anymore! Think I read it in high school circa 1991

At her worst, Jill Lepore is just Gladwell with better sentences

Lol just recalled that I actually know what I will never bother with.

Authors you will never read

Seems like a slightly different category, though? I will never read Cormac McCarthy, but I believe people who say he’s a “good” writer in some way.

“Will never read” definitely a different category but imo funnier. How often does one find oneself reading something bad? It’s not altogether hard to avoid, I think.

I see what you mean about Lepore, Chuck; I guess that goes in the category of sometimes wrong or glib, but not a bad writer.

Unless it’s your job to deal with reading stuff you might rather not or whatever. Idk. Easier to encounter awful writers in the periodicals.

In any case “will never read” is more amusing to me, doesn’t lead to dubious arguments about what things are “good not bad”

Yeah different category. I ask about ppl's instincts. Its def easy to read good things -- you know what you like -- but can be tricky to put off something because you think it's bad when it could be good...

xpost

I'm just not a fan of the "I'm gonna research this subject for a few months and tell lifelong experts why they're wrong" genre of New Yorker story

Speaking of which John Lanchester obvs

I read Lord of the Flies while I was still in primary school and it opened my mind up to whole new ways of reading and writing. I wouldn't trade the experience for a later, more 'mature' read.

dubious arguments about what things are “good not bad”

― Canon in Deez (silby), Sunday, February 14, 2021 1:20 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

that’s the whole fun of talking about what makes literature “good” though! It’s totally dubious, especially the way I do it, with an orientation toward absolutism, but the arguments are fun and sometimes help you get specific about your aesthetics.

xpost

It opened my mind to a whole new way of feeling clinically gloomy about human existence, probably 2-3 years too early than was strictly necessary

Hmmm, I'll bite. Foucault was an important thinker but I can't stand his turgid prose. Conversely, most of the hate Derrida used to get over his supposed abstruseness makes little sense if you read him in French and are familiar with his frames of reference.

The real answer, though, is that all writers are bad because writing is bad. Speech, presence, logos 4evah.

naming theorists is cheating

Nah, some of them are/were remarkable writers qua writers is what I'm saying.

How often does one find oneself reading something bad?

i guess as the thread starter i’m reflecting how much, despite my best attempts at untethering myself from it, i am still tethered to media, which is so lousy with bad writers it’s like a garden for the purpose of cultivating them. on second thought scratch the “like,” it’s exactly that

but also if any of y’all read some modern literature when you are not baking sourdough or binge-watching yourselves into invertebrate zombified stupors, plenty of shitty writing there, somehow people publish whole books without managing to cultivate anything resembling a style

which reminds me

taffy brodesser-akner

Imo if you are ever tempted to read The Road by Cormac McCarthy you can just read The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban instead.

Slightly tempted to say Jia Tolentino, but I don't think she's bad exactly, just disappointing.

but also if any of y’all read some modern literature when you are not baking sourdough or binge-watching yourselves into invertebrate zombified stupors, plenty of shitty writing there, somehow people publish whole books without managing to cultivate anything resembling a style

i have a slightly unhealthy distaste for Brodesser-Akner...like i should probably unfollow her on Twitter, but i can't bring myself to...

xp lol Lily, Brad haets J1a, I enjoy her, I’m not sure if she’s still canceled because of her parents’ uh legally troubled immigrant job placement business

no one gets canceled in media

when i started reading a lot more contemporary fiction in the past few years, especially the most-buzzed about stuff, i was amazed by how much of it i found bad. lately i find myself following ficton writers on twitter if i like their twitter personas, and then i am often v disappointed with their novels. and then i feel bad because i "like" them so much on twitter.

xp i like Jia, too; i did think the prose style of Trick Mirror was...odd. i think she's real sharp, but that book had some flaws.

I just found Trick Mirror a bit disappointing, though I only made it through a few of the essays and should give the rest of it a try sometime. I just expected more from her than the book delivered; her style is polished and she can be observant and incisive, but I felt her arguments in those particular essays never quite came together or added up to much.

when i started reading a lot more contemporary fiction in the past few years, especially the most-buzzed about stuff, i was amazed by how much of it i found bad

this is kind of the thread where you have to name those names

i can't because their twitter personae are truly delightful!

Sounds like the author's due for another death.

the essays in Trick Mirror i thought were particularly good were the optimization one, the one on heroines in girls' literature, the Virginia one and the marriage one. the ecstasy one was both good and confounding, i think. i have never done ectasy; maybe that's why? reality TV one was bad imo. the other had good qualities and some serious flaws i think

okay, i truly adore Brandon Taylor on twitter, like i wish he were my friend, but i thought Real Life was bad. Kristen Arnett seems like a cool person, and she has good politics, but i thought Mostly Dead Things was bad. (Parul Sehgal liked it, so i am clearly wrong.) neither book is irredeemably bad, but i thought they were mostly bad.

i think they were debut novels for both writers; hopefully they'll get better

also a few years back i tried to read that Fates and Furies book by Lauren Groff, and it is absurdly bad imo. i got so mad at the purple prose i couldn't finish it. apparently her other books are also supposed to be good, but life is too short.

i am generally quite tractable! viz. Nathaniel Hawthorne.

btw Lily Dale, on the chance that you read Tolentino's optimization essay in the form it was separately published in, the version in the book is longer and better. when i read it online i did not understand how Donna Haraway fit into the overall argument, but i think it's...just right in its full form. as in, correct about the thing it is identifying.

since she’s come up here a few times and i feel like i see a positive reference to her new book somewhere pretty much every day...i kinda go back and forth on lauren oyler. i think part of what confuses me about her is that i don’t think her reviews are all that mean? if anything i wish her writing felt a little more focused, it always feels to me like she’s hovering over some point that she doesn’t want to actually spell out. if you go back and read, like, mary mccarthy on salinger or something, oyler never even comes close to that level of tightly focused fury and cool dismissiveness.

Ctrl+f "paulo coelho hallmark card bullshit"

Huh. No one else?

i don't think Oyler's mean exactly, and i agree with you inasmuch as i find her review of Trick Mirror hard to follow. (her pan of Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist is pretty clear and also pretty accurate imo.) it does feel like she distrusts Tolentino as a writer in part because she is pretty (sorry, but that is what it sounded like to me!) which is...something. to the extent that she was critiquing tolentino for critiquing the internet but being a creature of the internet, that seemed like a more valid critique...potentially, but then it was hard to follow!

i get the impression Oyler's novel is bad, and i have been burned by too many just-published buzzy novels to read it just yet. also it just sounds unpleasant to immerse oneself in.

xp

omg a buzzy book i HATED a few years ago was Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire. that book is bad. i don't know if she's a "bad writer" per se but she is a disingenuous one and engages in Muslim minstrelsy imo.

that book is also a testament to how doing something "skillful" with adaptation (it's an adaptation of Antigone, and clever at it at times) doesn't replace sound characterization. or avoiding playing into non Muslim Western stereotypes of Islam, even though you're Pakistani so you obviously know there are more than two types of Muslims.

really didn’t like sally rooney

lol me neither, but i only read Conversations with Friends. also i feel like she is somewhat a victim of the marketing/hype machine--Kazuo Ishiguro recommended that novel in some NYT book review which is why i read it. that's like Jane Austen recommending Ann M. Martin or some shit! why did he do it? she seems smart enough, but it is not a good novel! she could definitely write one someday.

feel like there is a phenomenon where olds (people my age, i mean) look to rooney as some kind of oracle of young people, which is dumb.

the Ishiguro rec is related to a problem where it seems like everyone in the book world is friends, so reviews are...lies.

the Oyler trick mirror hit piece had some bars but didn’t really have an overarching point even though it was structured as if it did, which was confusing

CWF worked as a mass market paperback thing, and I found the sexual fluidity decently presented.

i don't think it was unskillful in structure (Conversations with Friends) but it was morally unserious and the descriptions of physical landscape and stuff were BAD. she said grass smelled "allergic" at some point or something wack like that.

maybe "allergenic"? shit like that drives me crazy.

i was primed to enjoy a trick mirror takedown and it’s almost all unreadable garbage imo. check out her defense of dan savage or her pan of lady bird for more sick unreadable garbage. she’s what we refer to in the industry as a bad take machine

re: oyler

Haven’t ever read this person but with that pedigree I have to assume she’ll be going full terf any day now

oh my posts just reminded me

rachel syme

steve hyden, obv

maybe too obvious, i need more scorching takes for the intended tone of this thread

FUCK homer j/k

lol. i could pretend i think Ishighuro is a bad writer for that purpose, but it would be a lie.

he is an insincere recommender of novels, though. or maybe he likes Conversation with Friends because it makes him feel superior?

So, like, an orgy?

2xp

another bad book in the Muslim minstrelsy vein (there's a market for it!) is the play Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar. his new novel keeps getting praised everywhere, but i refuse to be taken in because that play is poo.

So if this was Patricia Lockwood’s first novel then Priestdaddy was actually non-fiction?

Priestdaddy is a memoir, i believe? i haven't read it but her thing on Updike in the LRB was amazing.

Yeah, but it’s so crazy it seems like it might be fictionalized.

every new American novelist from the past 20 years prob, maybe even 50 years

re: Ishiguro, remains of the day is insanely bad but the unconsoled rules

uh

Remains of the Day is perfect

a writer i’ve never managed to enjoy is murakami but i get the impression i’ve read the wrong stuff

bongo that is an amazingly hot take on ishiguro, props

I read Never Let Me Go, which I thought was trivial at best, and am not really interested in more

lotta people like remains of the day but it just comes off like a bad parody of what being British is to me

You people really need to stop reading literary fiction. It's a bottomless sewer. Try reading nothing but crime fiction for a year instead. Tana French is a fucking amazing writer.

i don't like the Murakami i've read (Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), but i just put him in the "not for me" category. like Cormac McCarthy.

i love tana french; reading literary fiction hasn't gotten in the way of my devouring her novels.

agreed that tana french is amazing, not what thread is for

wild sheeps chase is pretty alright re: Murakami but never liked anything else

whenever i finish a tana french i feel despair at having to wait 2+ years for the next one.

wind up bird chronicle was one of the worst reading experiences i’ve ever had

yet the dude had such a profound influence on wkw i can’t write him off

i have friends who love Murakami; i'm assuming i'm missing something, but yes, i did not enjoy Wind Up Bird Chronicle

I find laszlo krasznahorkai (translations) to be unreadable besides war & war, which is a completely astonishing work, plus all the work he's done for Tarr I guess

(also, unperson if the lit fiction thing was directed at me, i like a lot of it, too! it's just not what the thread's about.)

I don't remember anything from wind up bird chronicle except the description of how to make spaghetti that read like it was from an esl book. I'm guessing a lot of works by venerated authors I don't like have just been poorly translated

Raymond Carver

Ooh a juicy one!

How do you know if Carver's any good or not, though? I've never read the de-Gordon-Lishified versions of his stories, have you?

Obvious nominee: Tom Wolfe. Liked him in high school, but his right-wing crankitude became clearer and clearer over time (see also: Joan Didion).

I read Krasznahorkai's Satantango because I loved the film so much, but it didn't give me anything the film hadn't, and the prose was nothing special.

feel like there is a phenomenon where olds (people my age, i mean) look to rooney as some kind of oracle of young people, which is dumb.

― horseshoe, Sunday, 14 February 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Some of the crit around Rooney feels insane for this reason. Almost want to giver her a go.

Krasznahorkai's Seibo There Below is really good though. True he is up and down, but his engagement with an eastern strand is worth giving a go.

thought Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts was interesting but maybe violated a few accepted boundaries. I bought a copy for a friend who is an avid reader and immediately regretted it.

Lord of the Flies was the first adult book I read, I was a middle-schooler, my mother took us to the library every Friday night and I picked it out for some reason. I was really impressed by it and felt like an adult reading it, and think in retrospect it was the book that ultimately hooked me on reading novels

Here's one:

I think Marilynne Robinson isn't very good, people gave me her novels for years, and every time I just couldn't get into them at all, mostly because I think Calvinism is rank bullshit of the highest sort.

It's funny, Dan S, because I think Maggie Nelson is bourgeois liberal idpol nonsense of the highest sort, totally disposable trash

am afraid to read Gilead because I think I will not like it, but Housekeeping was strange and was memorable to me

Raymond Carver

The jump in quality in his posthumous collection Cathedral was so dramatic, given that Gordon Lish was able to do what he wanted, that I subsequently started reading all Lish's other collaborators and discovered one of my fave short story authors, Joy Williams

joy williams rocks

I think Maggie Nelson is bourgeois liberal idpol nonsense of the highest sort, totally disposable trash

― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Sunday, February 14, 2021 5:13 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

she sucks

i should have started this thread with maggie nelson

the polarized views on Nelson i've encountered periodically make me want to read her out of curiosity, but i could make no headway with The Argonauts.

Joy Williams is great, yes! I love teaching the title story from Cathedral. Otherwise, I kind of think one can sum up Carver pretty easily: alcoholic suburbanites in deindustrialized America fight and converse about their troubles. It's a shtick that gets pretty old pretty quickly.

https://www.theonion.com/ask-raymond-carver-1819583880

marilynne robinson's main problem is her similes. housekeeping would have been pretty good without them and even with them it was quite haunting

interesting to me that maggie nelson argonauts is considered bourgeois liberal idpol by radical poets of ilx. maybe that’s why i liked it so much :) i generally find radical humanities ppl to be totally insufferable and incomprehensible but her voice was incredibly compassionate and thoughtful to me. curious to hear about why she sucks

i wasn’t as crazy about bluets

I'm unable to read Hilary Mantel but I suppose she may not be "bad". But I seriously don't get the appeal.

@flopson: *taps the first post*

I think all but the most callow and insecure Murakami stans would concede that it’s justified to believe he is completely bad

no one cares about my joan didion hot take but - i used to be really into her when i was younger, but the more i read over the years (and the more i grew up) the more i realized she didn't really have much to say. she is very good at reporting and observing though, especially as related to anxiety. just that when she is reporting or observing herself, or the fictional world she is constructing in her novels, there isn't anything very interesting there imo, beyond .. generalized anxiety. i guess i think that's bad writing.

there can be good writing that is only about oneself, but that oneself shouldn't be a nervous uptight celeb or it's bad writing, is how i break it down.

i love joan didion and did not take issue with her first mention on this thread and i even think you're kinda otm map, for instance the essay about california's water systems sings more to me than any of her more personal dwellings (maybe bc her feelings about water are more personal for her than her own history, idk it's possible). i love play it as it lays but it is kind of a narrow and uneven book. i love book of common prayer but it's also... kinda lopsided. her best work that i've read remains miami which embodies the strengths you identify, it's keenly observed

i love didion and disagree that writing that is "only about oneself" is bad. also am totally irrational on this topic.

yeah, the california water stuff is something that often stands out in my mind. i should give miami a shot. xp

maybe i also have some "california as a topic" fatigue though, wrt didion.

I recognize that Adam Gopnik is bad but he’s bad in a way I enjoy

gopnik is good on a very narrow range of subjects and mostly terrible on anything else imo

bolaño

:-(

I think Maggie Nelson is bourgeois liberal idpol nonsense of the highest sort, totally disposable trash

― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Sunday, February 14, 2021 5:13 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Also bad opinion.

Bolano has held up really well I reckon. Savage Detectives is not good as are a lot of the posthumously published matter.

I have only heard Gopnik on R4's A Ppint of View, and have not been at all impressed

Like Solnit, Nelson is a bourgeois striver who dismisses radical members of the working class for disagreeing with her shitty class, gender, and racial politics. They both suck.

She writes a lot less than Solnit for a start (Solnit is a fair regular in The Guardian and in wider conversation), wiki tells me Argonauts was her last book (2015) so she is already far less of a 'striver' and I don't get any Solnit type vibes in her writing, which is just The Argonauts, so far.

bolaño

Yay I'm not alone

I love Maggie Nelson, specifically Jane and Bluets, but just like Anne Carson I get why people wouldn't be into her

Bluets isn't bad as a book, though I think Gass did better with "On Being Blue." (I just really hate the Argonauts, tbqh).

I'm not sure I totally agree with fellow poet K4y G4briel, but any interested in Carson might be interested in this take: https://tripwirejournal.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/tw14gabrieloncarson.pdf

A Separate Peace really impressed me as a kid. It was taught in schools at the time. I was just realizing I was gay when I read it and its content to me felt like a beacon

I later had an amazing experience related to it - I got to meet its author John Knowles by chance, happening to sit next to him at the Alta Plaza bar in SF in the 80s. I told him how much it affected me as a child. He was taken aback but I thought it meant a lot to him, it made me feel good to be able to tell him that

it wasn't very good in retrospect but I will always love it

i have nothing specific against donald antrim but dude has written like 500 words per year for 30 years now

let's go buddy

Oh now I do have an opinion, I've railed against Antrim before on here somewhere.

My work emails nobody reads probably average 500 words and I write at least one of those a week.

read Shuggie Bain recently, had a hard time with it, seems like there is a trend for fiction like this that presents so much suffering, is it good?

thought Shuggie's eventual connection with another child like him redeemed it though

i have nothing specific against donald antrim but dude has written like 500 words per year for 30 years now

let's go buddy

yeah we're aware

ok this isn't quite what the thread is searching for, but

thomas friedman

Yeah he’s terrible.

saw him speak instead of going to an Art Brut show in 2006 ~~regret~~

guess I'll be the one to mention Richard Ford

such a monumental asshole that i would never even bother seeing if he had any merit

probably just boomer shit anyway

Nelson is a bourgeois striver who dismisses radical members of the working class for disagreeing with her shitty class, gender, and racial politics.
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Monday, February 15, 2021 7:26 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

what are her politics? did she vote for kamala in the primary or something

I assume Elizabeth Bruenig is a bad writer, assuming she’s actually a writer and not just a poster

Thanks for that Carson link, table, it was also my first time encountering the word "presentist", which I think will be useful in the future

flopson, tbh her politics are left of center from what I can tell, but her casual dismissal of a certain politic ("I'd never responded to comrade") and her negative portrayal and what I'd argue as verbal abuse of her trans partner made me think her politics are shit.

If people are interested in a writer who is thinking about identity formations, the inability of idpol to grasp the nuances of individual experience, etc., they would do better to read Denise Riley.

guess I'll be the one to mention Richard Ford

― swing out sister: live in new donk city (geoffreyess), Tuesday, 16 February 2021 05:17 (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ford's an interesting one. I enjoyed The Sportswriter but found what I think he was trying to convey as a happy ending (SPOILER: bloke takes up with a younger woman and tries to convince himself she's a good replacement for his wife) utterly depressing, which I don't think is what he was going for. If he was going for that response then well played I guess.

I didn't want to spam the thread with an old post but that kind of thing is exactly what I hated from Antrim.

what kind of thing

it should probably go w/o saying anyway that there's a difference btw "writing" and publishing

Middle-aged academics having mid-life crises and being horny for college student waitresses mostly iirc.

no, that's not the story unfortunately

saw him speak instead of going to an Art Brut show in 2006 ~~regret~~

― swing out sister: live in new donk city (geoffreyess), Monday, February 15, 2021 11:14 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I went to an Art Brut show in 2006, it was great, but it would have been even greater if I'd been skipping a Thomas Friedman lecture to go to it

ha, exactly!

i guess it’s a ymmv but i didn’t find nelsons portrayal of her husband negative at all

the world is brut

The paydirt of Argonauts for me was the part about sexuality of mothers/crones and anal penetration, I hadn't previously read anything that addressed it and found it educational/interesting

yes

still want to read 2666. Infinite Jest was interesting but I didn't think it was as cracked up as it was supposed to be

it was memorable though. I guess that matters more than whether or not something is good or bad

2666 is well worth it. The first section is the 'easiest' (or most like traditional literature) which makes it easy to get hooked before it all goes batshit.

I read a little bit of Infinite Jest each Christmas, think I'm up to ~180 pages so might be finished by the time I'm 60. It's a slog, for sure. Weirdly I polished off The Pale King in a couple of weeks and loved it, so I think DFW was definitely improving as a writer and starting to rein in his waffle tendencies.

By Night in Chile and Nazi Literature... serve as solid gateways. Try those.

I posted about it elsewhere, but 2666 rang false to me because it felt like a David Mitchell-style exercise in long-form pastiche, in this case, an homage to Flaubert. The clues are there in the first three chapters (I can't remember specifics, but I seem to remember many explicit Flaubert tips), and then Chapter Four is structured like Bouvard et Pecuchet. I think I need to read it again... I was perhaps too preoccupied with "judging the author's craft" (and skepticism re: posthumous acclaim) rather than letting myself be swept up by it all.

I think I also approached it like that and was a little bit hamstrung in the same way... Having said that I don't think he leveraged its population, scope, etc. for the typical advantages of an "epic"—what finally made it work for me (almost by attrition) is its repetitiveness, which after x pages began to sort of hypnotized me

But yeah there's maybe more to be gained by spending that time reading the two Alfred mentioned + The Third Reich and my favorite by far, Distant Star, that's a near-perfect novel.

That's an interesting take. I'm only mildly familiar with Flaubert so wouldn't have caught those references.

I can't imagine David Mitchell churning out something as harrowing and relentless as The Part About the Crimes. Though I'll admit the opening section has a certain David Nicholls/Nick Hornby-ness to it (which I read as Bolaño subverting his audience's expectations for weirdness by presenting a fairly straightforward love quadrangle), which makes the abrupt turn into all-out horror all the more shocking.

The underrated section of the novel imo is The Part About Fate, featuring one of the all-time best anticlimactic sports sentences.

I don't recall, what is it?

"The fight was short."

(Following an entire chapter revolving around a boxing match with pages and pages of build up and Fate meeting each of the fighters.)

Re your previous post, agreed that it is certainly not your typical epic. In fact he leaves the picaresque section till last in an inversion of the usual structure of multi-part epics.

The middle section is certainly repetitive, hypnotic and works through attrition. He is such a naturally gifted storyteller and 'whimsy spinner' (or rather finding the 'magical', for want of a better word, in everything) that I felt he was deliberately pushing himself to make something that no one could possibly interpret in that way.

ha xp

in boxing terms he is certainly "working the body" in the part about the crimes, you emerge from that softened up for the rest

this thread is making me more interested in reading Bolaño

I read Black Swan Green by David Mitchell and it didn’t seem like pastiche to me. Then listened to the audiobook of Cloud Atlas, which I can see people going either way on

Nathan J Robinson

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Friday, February 12, 2021 2:33 PM (six months ago) bookmarkflaglink

nailed it

so otm

always bad

Maggie Nelson's new book is being destroyed.

i wrote about maggie nelson's new book https://t.co/sf4AbEvazl

— proud mom top (@andrealongchu) September 7, 2021

I don't know if her book is being destroyed in general but that review is anything but a destruction! I would call it a respectful and thoughtful disagreement.

In turn, I would say Chu is careful and thoughtful and lively and interesting as always, and I disagree with some things she says. Specifically, the idea that is is boring to go back to arguments that have been gone over again and again in certain circles -- I think part of being a pretty popular writer like Nelson is that she is writing for many readers who have NOT gone over those arguments again and again, who have never even heard of them! "How many people are going to pick up a book of essays by Maggie Nelson about theory and art who didn't already know about the Emmett Till painting and the controversy around it" -- actually, I would guess there are a lot!

lol noone care about respectful and thoughtful disagreement, is it thumbs up or is it the gunge tank all i wanna know

I also object to Chu's objection that Nelson presents a lot of views of other thinkers and tells you which ones she likes, and does rather less of creating novel / original theory -- that's what expository writing is and there's nothing wrong with it!

I've read Charlotte Shane in bookforum, which is linked below Chu's take (both released on the same day) and she gave it a bad review.

I'll Chu later.

Chu is a bad thinker, imho. My friend Nora sums it up quite nicely in her review of Chu's last book:

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/ontology-for-edgelords

i have nearly posted chu's name itt several times

no one to root for imo

I mean, I also loathe Maggie Nelson, but that's because I also think she's a lazy thinker.

Who cares about thinking, this thread is about writing

I will fight with your friend Nora re:

(‘I was full of rage then: red, male, viciously intellectual.’ Salingerian sentences like this,

a. That sentence is in no way Salingerian
b. Salinger's sentences are pretty great and it's suspect to use "Salingerian" as an insult to prose style
c. Salinger is a perfect example of a great writer who, if understood as a thinker (which tbf is for sure a way he understood himself), is extremely confused

I will agree with Nora that that non-Salingerian sentence of Chu's is not a good one

Who cares about thinking, this thread is about writing

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Wednesday, September 8, 2021 8:57 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

uh same thing

I don't think it's the same thing. Maggie Nelson's writing puts her lazy thinking on display. Chu's writing puts their lazy thinking on display. Does that work for you?

has the US had any good writers in the past 20 years? 50 years?

no

I don't think it's the same thing

i admit i was being reductive for fun

What's the deal w/ that, was it the internet, the MFA system, novels / stories becoming a dead medium, or just the way things go?

has the US had any good writers in the past 20 years? 50 years?

thousands

but this thread is not about them

Chu's writing puts their lazy thinking on display.

oops sorry if I misgendered Chu, I thought Chu used "she"

That's actually my bad, Chu used to use they/them but now uses she/her; apologies.

The US has had a ton of great writers in the past 50 years.

has the US had any good writers in the past 20 years? 50 years?

...asks the person who doesn't read enough to know the answer

My understanding of ALC is she is bad not good but I don’t know why I just skim on the surface of these things usually

you guys are harsh

IMO Lord of the Flies is one of the worst possible things you could give to a child to read. Adults, sure, of course. Actually I have no idea if they even give it to kids to read anymore! Think I read it in high school circa 1991
― Chuck_Tatum, Sunday, February 14, 2021 

I read Lord of the Flies while I was still in primary school and it opened my mind up to whole new ways of reading and writing. I wouldn't trade the experience for a later, more 'mature' read.
― Ward Fowler, Sunday, February 14, 2021

same for me, don't know exactly how I came upon it but my mother took me to the library a lot and I read it in the 6th grade. it was fascinating and was the novel that made me realize I was ready for adult fiction

skimmed over the references to “chu” and thought for a second they were about arthur chu, lol

lol at "ontology for edgelords"

Nora is a gift, a great writer too

i read the pink Chu essay in N+1 at the time and had a "huh? what?" to the parts of it that weren't autobiographical -- the theory parts. As a reader, it was easier for me to see them as part of the personal narrative than to engage with them as serious philosophy / theory. I am so out of the loop when it comes to this stuff and the trends and conventions of critical theory. I think it's cool that the internet has made it possible for so many people to publish stuff like this ... on the other hand, it's like the internet and music ... because it is easier to publish and to have a "serious" looking website, there is a lot of content and a lot of samey-ness, and a lot of pleasant but uninspiring stuff.

#justoldpplthoughts

*a "huh? what?" response

The critic Lionel Trilling once wrote that conservatives make “irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas”; Oyler makes suggestive motions that seek to resemble arguments.

ruthless

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/03/16/lauren-oyler-no-judgment-review/

Lol. Correct on Dune's message, lol at the smug af writing

https://www.thegamer.com/dunes-paul-atreides-is-not-the-good-guy/

i read this thread title quickly as *post itt when you think you are bad*.

really really bad

This is the discursive level that Oyler remains at for much of the book. Take her defence of autofiction, which spends as much time disparaging the genre’s ‘haters’ who ‘begged [her] not to’ write about it as it does making an actual argument.

big strong men, with tears in their eyes, begging lauren oyler not to write about autofiction

https://artreview.com/things-that-annoy-me-lauren-oyler-no-judgement-review

oyler’s interesting - i read most of fake accounts on a long flight the other day, off the back of the essay on anxiety. extremely fluent, knows their own voice and can jump around like a monkey in the rigging with it. it’s enjoyable to be along for the ride. but i do feel the force of that comment about “suggestive motions that look like arguments.”

i think it’s largely m fine when it’s a breezy “this is how i experienced things” (the more or less “i” of fake accounts) though something about FA that i can’t identify about FA felt slightly off, and becomes less fine in the critical essay imo.

again, the essay on anxiety largely v good. but the bit on antidepressants was… poor. her style allows for the caveat that this is just “how i experience it” but as critical thinking it’s a position that feels like it needs some external reference - studies, another opinion etc. this bit opens up a wedge more generally. why am i reading this? what is its relation to anyone but lauren oyler? how’s the position of privileged view been established?

“skill in execution” is a reasonable answer. can’t make up my mind.

anyway. that’s not why i came here.

CHINE MIÉVILLE.

china ffs.

i read perdido street station a long time ago and thought it was okay but iirc there was *so* much about the city being fetid and rotting and horribly 'organic'

i can’t even remember what i don’t like about him and don’t really care any more, but that post has reminded me of something similar in, well, either kraken or the city and the city and thinking omg this man cannot *describe* things coherently. and also cannot write.

"For the most part, the prose in the book sweats to be chatty, with the result that it often has the slightly plaintive quality of a text message from an older parent intent on using outdated slang."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/03/16/lauren-oyler-no-judgment-review/

ouch!

Had a feeling this thread revive would be about Oyler. I don't like her -- there are lots of other writers in that vein who are miles better, but I presume have worse connections -- but not sure she's well-known enough to deserve such prominent pans.

Mieville though! Unreadable. Sentence for sentence one of the most awful writers I can think of. I'm always befuddled that people can finish his books and -- even -- like and enjoy him.

i've only read (but not finished) un lun dun -- i was interested bcz it's mieville's "children's book", and i wondered where his politics would take it given the specific constraints -- and i absolutely concur re bad sentences

but this reminds me: martin amis belongs in thread (entire body made of tin ear)

Mieville has great ideas and that counts for a lot in the genres he writes, I loved Perdido Street Station.

He recently annoyed me with deployment of a lazy-blurb staple, which I will take to the appropriate thread

Mieville's like the Grateful Dead of SF - whenever you express disappointment to a superfan, they tell you you've read the wrong one.

Can I add an audiobook reader here? I can't stand Simon Vance. He always sounds like an American's idea of an English person, like a sly cartoon lion.

i'm pretty sure it was ilx that tried to get me to read mieville. for some reason i never did but i bought some of the paperbacks. i know maria read a few. they always had the whiff of steampunk dust on them and i think that made me afraid.

with oyler, i don't really remember reading any of her reviews but i read the NYT review of her new book and that led me to her novel online because the nyt review said it was so funny and i kept reading it waiting for the funny but then i gave up. it was a little tedious. at least the first 10+ pages anyway.

there always has to be a new critic you love to hate/hate to love/etc. the bad boy/girl thing. its probably healthy in the end.

I loved Perdido Street Station too though it's The City and The City that has stayed with me. The narrative is unmemorable but I loved the conceptual framework. There's a cracking short story too called "Reports of Certain Events in London", about a group of cartographers in London who are tracking streets that seem to be sentient and move during the night. Good Borgesian fun.

i really liked that Mortal Engines movie so i wouldn't count Mieville out. i know he didn't write that book. i don't even know who did. but if someone has a good enough imagination i can overlook clunky writing in genre fiction. i've been doing it for years!

I still own The City and the City but the other books of his I read — Perdido Street Station, The Scar, Iron Council and Kraken — have not stuck with me. I don't remember them being particularly bad, just...ordinary.

is tommy orange bad? i am reading there there and maybe it sucks? i can't tell.

i bought a ton of those Dostoyevsky Wannabe books during the pandemic (my friend's store down the street had them all) because i liked the design of them and they had funny titles but i notice that i never want to read one. and i think it also because i can't tell if they are good or not. some of the fucked up poetry ones are good in a fucked up way. now they sit on the shelf and make me think of covid.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/aGUAAOSw28VkRCUs/s-l1600.jpg

I always liked Mieville's ideas more than his execution (ditto Jeff VanderMeer), but hearing about his alleged shitty behaviour in his personal life just made me think that I'd be aiding said behaviour in some small way by buying his books or publicly praising him. His books need to be covered by a better writer, although cover versions don't really exist in the literary world unfortunately other than the odd formal experiment. So not likely to happen.

well, you can always steal ideas. the world is built on that.

there are enough ideas in one p.k.d. or ray bradbury book to fuel a ton of novels. they just threw out ideas like they grew on trees. its up to other people to pick them up and use them.

Can I add an audiobook reader here? I can't stand Simon Vance. He always sounds like an American's idea of an English person, like a sly cartoon lion.

Mieville's like the Grateful Dead of SF - whenever you express disappointment to a superfan, they tell you you've read the wrong one.

He has an unpleasant ranting quality to his prose on occasion, it leaves me feeling like I need to take a shower.

i’m feeling almost bad now. i was expecting everyone to say “no your RONG”.

i didn’t like embassytown. obv. it really annoyed me in fact. think it might be the wellspring in that respect.

Reviews of Embassytown were what convinced me to stop reading Mieville entirely.

Re Dostoyevsky Wannabe, they're in many ways a fancy vanity press.

Or were, I guess, as googling them shows their website/domain has lapsed.

Can I add an audiobook reader here? I can't stand Simon Vance. He always sounds like an American's idea of an English person, like a sly cartoon lion.

Roffle, but like James Redd, I don't mind what I've heard of him at all -- and indeed, attended a small but spirited event here in SF some years back now where he and Guy Gavriel Kay, who he's read for, were the presenters. Ended up in a brief chat with him afterwards and he was very personable!

I’ve listened to a bit of Simon Vance in my day. Sometimes I prefer other readers for certain books, granted. But I really liked his Viriconium, to name one, not that another recording exist to compare with, and I read once about how he prepares so he almost never mispronounces a word, although I think I caught him exactly once. Maybe not the only thing to judge a reader on but it’s definitely a plus.

That Rothfeld review of Oyler's book is pretty funny as both of them are kinda competitors in the um, literary essay market. I can take or leave them on a case by case basis.

Oyler is still otm re: Sebald's fiction.

she is not

I thought Perdido Street Station was amazing myself, but I had a very hard time caring about the next book or anything else I ever tried to read by him.

is tommy orange bad? i am reading _there there_ and maybe it sucks? i can't tell.

On another note: I hate Mieville, I have tried every book of his recommended to me and abandoned each. Awful prose, as interesting as counting grains of sand in a desert

she is not

otm although I like that her takedown piece makes a point of praising Drndc. but that kinda tells you her priorities. Drndc goes out of her way to really punch you in the face at least once per book. Sebold absolutely does not.

I liked There There, and see that Tommy Orange has a new book Wandering Stars

Speaking of Mieville and science fiction, what books of speculative fiction would you guys recommend? I'm curious because I would like to recommend something to my book club. I was thinking of Kindred by Octavia Butler

she is not

Just saying, but the first post explicitly says: "no need to explain yourself, thread is for catharsis not debate"

Kindred is good but (obviously) bleak as fuck. Try Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor. It's a sci-fi adventure set in Nigeria — aliens land in the water on the outskirts of Lagos and the whole city goes wild. It's a lot of fun and a quick read.

I like the Fractured Europe quadrilogy, a bit of a mix between Gibson and Le Carre (leaning toward the former).

I meant to read those a few years ago. Thanks for the reminder.

also qntm - There Is No Antimemetics Division

interconnected weird fiction stories, so much better than something built on the structure of a copypasta wiki thing should be

Steven Markley, The Deluge, much talked-about novel from last year, I looked through it in the bookstore and the writing was v v bad

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troop_(book)

One of the worst Amazon recommendations I’ve followed

Chu is a bad thinker, imho. My friend Nora sums it up quite nicely in her review of Chu's last book:

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/ontology-for-edgelords🕸

Lol I forgot i had posted way upthread about disliking something else she wrote as well!

Maybe ALC is the literary equivalent of LCD Soundsystem for me

re: tommy orange & Wonder what you are not liking about it?

i don't want to be a dick b/c a lot of people seem to get a lot from the novel but, for example, a character with fetal alcohol syndrome keeps referring to FAS as "the Drome" and it feels very dorky and MFA-ish, like something a david foster wallace character would do, except embedded in an otherwise very serious (almost po-faced) novel

No titans walk among us anymore, wtf

Perfect thread to see at the top of sna when im trying to find something. who is the modern british writer who has a thread dedicated to his really inane, long winded sentences?

John lanchester

thx bbz

adam, I can see that. I think the issue is that there are literally so few depictions of contemporary indigenous people living in urban environments that some of the more MFA-ish or unlikely stylistic and tonal choices are overlooked. I think that’s fine, personally, but could see how it could irk

I read them all for college, so I feel like I can comfortably say Alice Walker is bad, very bad.

The early stuff is bad but you at least get the sense of what she's refining and working through to get to The Color Purple. Everything after TCP is just irredeemly indulgent.

Obviously she's an important figure for brining FGM to public awareness, but unfortunately her FGM books are also very bad.

reading that sebald thing. the first paragraph, which is, i guess, supposed to be somewhat sebaldian, although she mentions bernhard, is really boring and this is what people who do sebald perhaps don't understand. he wasn't boring. in fact, he was a page-turner for someone who wrote the kind of thing that he wrote.

this made me laugh. "Anytime you encounter a text that involves what the novelist Sam Pink calls “the dreaded tidbit”—“the recently popular thing of doing like, little book reports in the book”—you have Sebald to thank."

duh, you have Google to thank! how someone could not mention that is just silly.

i agree with this though:

"The most beautiful aspects of Sebald’s work have little to do with his enigmatic scene-stealing alter ego and the tricks he plays on anyone searching for autobiography; his great strength lies in the conventional narrative pleasures he offers with sensitivity, texture, and emotion, allowing subtle details to accrue so patiently that the realization, when it comes, feels like memory."

yes, I liked that bit. but the other thing about "little book reports in the book" -- this is a writer who either has not read, or is not calling to mind, a whole ton of last-forty-years Spanish literature. Vila-Matas, Pitol for starters. But also throughout European literature there's an allusive thread that's very appealing to me. feature not bug

"I thought of an essay by Patricia Lockwood about the work of Rachel Cusk, whose writing is so influenced by Sebald that you could swap their sentences without anyone noticing"

no...

Pitol's trilogy was more like a diary of what he was reading while on various diplomatic missions. It's great but I wouldn't say it's quite like Sebald.

I quite liked Sebald in parts but looking back Oyler pins him down on what it's lacking.

i also feel like there are people who think that "autofiction" is some new development in writing. and now its all the rage. its always been a way for someone young to write a novel. forever.

will also add the "little book reports in the book" is a fairly inescapable part of the novel form before 1850

JCLC otm.

"Lockwood writes of Cusk’s similarly despondent aversion to contemporary life: “Why must we live in these places? Why must these be our concerns? Why do I have to know what McDonald’s is?”"

because there is only one way to write a novel. also, ever heard of poetry? poems don't always mention McDonalds either. i'm all for not mentioning McDonalds. we know they are there.

Cusk's three books were a revelation to me. do i want EVERY novel to be just like them? no. of course not. is Lockwood afraid that an entire school of McDonalds-denying drifting nameless narrator autofiction will take over modern life?

when people mention the little book report thing they usually lazily just mention Borges and move on. but never Google! i smell a rat...

i also feel like there are people who think that "autofiction" is some new development in writing. and now its all the rage. its always been a way for someone young to write a novel. forever.

From my observation the ppl who think this are also generally Against It.

I find the label interesting in that it is so blatantly writer's inside baseball - whether something's autofiction or not is entirely irrelevant to the reader but it matters quite a bit to the writer.

Pitol's trilogy was more like a diary of what he was reading while on various diplomatic missions. It's great but I wouldn't say it's quite like Sebald.

mmm, it's an extended meditation about memory imo but ymmv, but Mephisto's Waltz is also deeply allusive, this is a real thing with him & with Vila-Matas, and, you know, Borges, this always-in-dialogue/never-not-in-dialogue thing.

i actually had to stop reading the little book report book by patricia lockwood. no one is talking about this. it got tedious. i stopped reading weather for the same reason. you don't even have to blame sebald for the recent little book report books. i will bet you a million dollars that most new writers are just influenced by department of speculation and not sebald. its way easier to read, funnier, and looks like something that people could rip off. unlike sebald's books. its already 11 years old which makes it ancient history to a gen z writer. sebald would be, like, paleolithic. also, that sad bored young writer who did all the ritalin. him and jenny offill. probably the two most important american writers of the 21st century as far as influence goes. lol.

the lockwood book is only a book report book until halfway through, and even then the book is just twitter

i was reading Rabelais the other day and now i know who to blame for all the damn lists on the internet.

"Afterwards I wiped my tail with a hen, with a cock, with a pullet, with a calf’s skin, with a hare, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an attorney’s bag, with a montero, with a coif, with a falconer’s lure. But, to conclude, I say and maintain, that of all torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers, and wipe-breeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs. And believe me therein upon mine honour, for you will thereby feel in your nockhole a most wonderful pleasure, both in regard of the softness of the said down and of the temporate heat of the goose, which is easily communicated to the bum-gut and the rest of the inwards, in so far as to come even to the regions of the heart and brains. And think not that the felicity of the heroes and demigods in the Elysian fields consisteth either in their asphodel, ambrosia, or nectar, as our old women here used to say; but in this, according to my judgment, that they wipe their tails with the neck of a goose, holding her head betwixt their legs, and such is the opinion of Master John of Scotland, alias Scotus."

now this is some real writing

what all these essays often fail to mention is that the most popular fiction right now looks nothing like sebald, cusk, or any of the autofiction people. its all epic fantasy or near-fantasy or doomsday or history spanning trilogies with colorful characters who do not resemble writers at all. or lurid and operatic crimes committed by beautiful people. in other words, these books look like future netflix shows. or the authors are crossing their fingers anyway. but the bounty of colorful covers on display in the new arrivals section of Barnes & Noble are fantasy in one way or another. and they often avoid mentioning McDonalds. even normal people get sick of McDonalds.

true! but litfic infighting is where the real battle is, the market is so squeezed

or there's a perception it is

Somehow we got 107 posts and no mention of Ayn Rand. Shocking!

Seriously, the bar is Rand. I can't think of another writer who so successfully combined execrable prose with repellent ideas, which, sadly, have gained considerable currency, largely because they appeal to the worst impulses of humans in general and males in particular.

i also feel like there are people who think that "autofiction" is some new development in writing. and now its all the rage. its always been a way for someone young to write a novel. forever.

I think jco's was needling the contemporary form they taks ("wan little husks with space between the paragraphs") rather than auto fiction as a concept

take*

someone should write an essay about how Sebaldian The Walking Dead was. Not a McDonalds to be seen in 10 seasons! or one Home Depot! its almost like a reverie of a memory of the past. in Dresden.

Rand isn't mentioned here often because no one on ILX likes her and this is a challops thread in everything but name

"Seriously, the bar is Rand. I can't think of another writer who so successfully combined execrable prose with repellent ideas, which, sadly, have gained considerable currency, largely because they appeal to the worst impulses of humans in general and males in particular."

which is why i read her in high school and then never spoke of her again!

i made it to college-age with bukowski and henry miller. then dropped them too. at least they were funny.

Maybe her local bookstore hid all the long trad novels that are still being churned out idk

the luminaries and ducks, newburyport staring at me threateningly from the shelf. one of these years

although isn't ducks, newburyport some sort of Autofiction Taken To New Levels shit tbf

actually let's make this the threemonth I finally complete Darkmans, nobody can complain there

Miller was capable of moments of brilliance, anyway, but yeah, an author most of us were able to leave behind in early adulthood.

When I was in grad school in the early 90s, the thing was "reflexive fiction." Is "autofiction" the same thing?

Ducks, Newburyport is Ulysses + Erma Bombeck.

i made it halfway through! i still have it if there is another pandemic.

i actually did a book report on ayn rand in high school and i pronounced her name "ann" and my teacher stopped me mid-sentence and said "isn't it Ine Rand...?" and i said "how the hell do i know the internet hasn't been invented yet!".

The only book of hers I read in HS was Anthem, which was mercifully short. Apart from that, the best thing I can say about it is that it inspired side 1 of 2112.

I had my week in high school of thinking The Fountainhead was the greatest book ever, before someone mercifully talked me out of it.

he most popular fiction right now looks nothing like sebald, cusk, or any of the autofiction people. its all epic fantasy or near-fantasy or doomsday or history spanning trilogies with colorful characters who do not resemble writers at all. or lurid and operatic crimes committed by beautiful people.

whenever I'm out in the general populace and overhear people talking about a novel, 80% of the time when I look it up, it was by Colleen Hoover.

JCO, bless her, went off on a rant about why is everyone writing these kinds of books instead of big proper novels with stories like what I write like.

Wan little husks! I registered wanlittlehusks.com as a result, thinking I might start a little press for stupid autofiction with that name.

i was also reading those stephen r. donaldson books at the time in high school. a friend gave me the first one and i actually read it so i kept going. i remember them being lots of long sentences a la ayn rand. so i probably just thought long sentences = genius. i had never read the lord of the rings so i had no idea how much ripping off was being done.

but, weirdly, if someone had asked me who my favorite writers were back then i would have said sinclair lewis and donald e. westlake.

someone gave us that james mcbride book for xmas and after reading that nyt article about him and how it sold ONE MILLION COPIES i might try and read it just to read a million-selling book of recent vintage. why do people like it so much? i r kurious. i haven't read anything of his before but i guess i never thought of him as a ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD kinda writer. though his memoir is everywhere around here.

I have a suspicion but... has anyone read enough of don delilo and dan brown to confirm that they are the same person?

i was also reading those stephen r. donaldson books at the time in high school. a friend gave me the first one and i actually read it so i kept going. i remember them being lots of long sentences a la ayn rand. so i probably just thought long sentences = genius. i had never read the lord of the rings so i had no idea how much ripping off was being done.

Get ready for the next episode of By-the-Bywater, then. (We're not talking Donaldson but we ARE talking Terry Brooks and The Sword of Shannara, in comparison to which Donaldson is pure originality.)

No Dan Brown is a Danielle Steele alias, like Nora Robert’s/JD Robb

xp

I have read a couple of Deborah Harkness's books. I want to like them, but they are just so . . . predictable. She manages to throw in every urban fantasy cliche. And she really cannot write sex scenes.

i will bet you a million dollars that most new writers are just influenced by department of speculation and not sebald

...and maybe also the influence of having to do live readings? Live readings are hard. I feel like this is why so many young writers add shit cutesy jokes in inappropriate places. They work for an audience (or tweets) but fall dead on the page.

i used to stare at the bros. hildebrandt art of sword of shannara. so cool. my library had the record (excerpts) and i listened to it once. or part of it. i think i TRIED to read the first book? i did finally read The Hobbit back then and enjoyed it.

(speaking of which, i probably mentioned this before but my librarian was friends with michael whelan which was cool because i loved fantasy art and he would bring his art in. i loved boris and frazetta. his wife totally looked like a fantasy novel cover model and i had a crush on her.)

I have piles of fantasy paperbacks that I picked up for free or dirt-cheap during post-pandemic times - Raymond Feist, Terry Brooks, Patricia McKillip, Charles De Lint... I'm just not able to muster the passion to start any of them. I read way too much of this stuff in the last few years.

All I really want to read these days is philosophy anyway.

you should read ayn rand then. she wrote philosophy fantasy.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/25/all-things-are-too-small-by-becca-rothfeld-review-essays-in-praise-of-excess

And here it is, Becca Rothfeld has a book out. Doesn't sound a lot better than the Oyler collection.

It's funny that we speak of autofiction but many of the authors mentioned here never mention the most recent US predecessors, who were members of the New Narrative group or their fellow travelers— Acker, Kraus, Bellamy, Killian, Glück, etc. But then again , the latter three are actually good writers, unlike a lot of the autofiction people. Dodie Bellamy is a legit treasure of US letters, and hardly anyone knows who she is.

Patricia McKillip

Forget all the others. Read McKillip if you ready any.

Not read her in a long while, but 22yr old me is stanning for Kathy Acker in that list too, tabes. What Bellamy should I read?

Chinasky, for the real auto-fiction class of Bellamy's, try The Letters of Mina Harker, in which Bellamy revives Bram Stoker's Harker as a resident of 1980's San Francisco, inhabiting the body of someone much like Bellamy herself.

Her essay collections are also stunning: When the Sick Rule the World is tremendous, and her most recent, Bee Reaved, is totally devastating. Here's an excerpt from the final piece in it: https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/we-run-for-our-lives-dodie-bellamy-2021/

I admit I am biased— she was my mentor, and the best teacher I have ever had. But she really is one of a kind. She won a MacArthur Genius grant last year.

ugh, sorry about weird autocorrect misspelt username

Hahaha, it's all good. Obviously, I'll take your recommendations but I just looked up some of her titles and the juxtaposition of 'The Buddhist' and 'Cunt-Ups' was enough to convince me.

'Cunt Norton' is also quite fun

I read Acker's Great Expectations in grad school, and reread it after. I had to conclude that I was not her intended audience.

I admit that I don't like Acker much besides Empire of the Senseless.

The best New Narrative writer, alongside Bellamy, is Robert Glück. Margery Kempe, About Ed, Elements, Denny Smith— it is literally all gold.

i have nostalgic fondness for kathy acker. i think too much is made of her non-literary life and not enough on her sentences which could be really cool and definitely influenced how i think about fiction.

man, i tried to read the topeka school by ben lerner because i kept reading about it and...i couldn't do it. it was like being stuck in a room with an eternal grad student. not my thing. it reminded me of when i tried to read franzen. bleh. but maybe ben lerner is a great poet. i haven't read his poems.

i will make a note of these names though. i don't know bellamy. or mckillip.

Ben Lerner's first book, 'Angle of Yaw,' is known among many poets as 'Angle of Yawn.' Not worth your time, scott.

damn

I mean pic.twitter.com/BW7uGbl1H1

— Adam O'Fallon Price (@AdamOPrice) April 8, 2024

trying not to enjoy myself too much

I want to read the whole thing but it's not on the website...

“the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot”

ouchy

review actually claims she's not even curious enough to be the renata adler of looking at your phone a lot

savage

"she doesn't discuss a single work of literature"

Maybe that's because she doesn't want to. Even though she has written many essays where she demonstrates she can.

No doubt this book is terrible (rather she reviews a book but I'm old) , but it also sounds like she is going for some other things here that some of the reviews are missing.

lit crit without the lit is probably the way to go tbh.

i'm enjoying the book also renata adler sucks lol

no one understands the spirit of this thread

i'll start a 'defend a bad writer' thread for y'all

You'll have to post about Sebald on that one.

you’re just missing what he’s going for

One for the young Berlin expat crowd, no doubt

I also dislike Sebald fwiw

that's the spirit

the fact that customers leave negative Google reviews for her friend Laurel's "successful bagel shop and café attached to an English-language bookstore in Berlin" and thereby "project a particular logic of capitalism onto their relationship with...Laurel that lends the consumer dictatorial power"?

ok, i'm never going to read this book, but it does sound like the stupidest thing ever written, and maybe that's what she was going for? brave

oh i think i went to that place, pretty good bagels imo!

Sometimes, the writing just collapses into gibberish: "I can't remember my mother ever telling me that if I couldn't say anything nice, not to say anything at all, which is the kind of lesson you teach a child in order to shield her from the overwhelmingly complicated truth. Same goes with 'You can't subtract a negative number,' which has always bothered me. Of course you can. Sometimes, you must."

of course you can. sometimes, you must.

Of course, Oyler doesn't want to be a writer of personal essays; she wants to be an erudite critic of the old school. But again and again, she drifts toward personal recriminations and eschews any sustained discussion of literature. In her essay on autofiction, Oyler, who elsewhere identifies her taste as "highbrow," seems to like novels by Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Norman Rush. When it comes to books written before 1990, she's on shakier ground, making some unbelievably clunky arguments premised on Emma Bovary and Humbert Humbert being practitioners of autofiction; in her commentary about the latter, Oyler concludes that writing about intimate secrets "is not nothing, ethically speaking." (OK?)

Oyler claims she is well read, even a "snob," but great swaths of No Judgement rely on the thinnest of online research. "Vulnerability has come to be seen as a first principle of living," Oyler concludes from a single search for the term on the New Yorker's website. Having decided to write about the concept, she shares, "I was hoping for some surprising etymology, specifically involving a relationship to 'vulva,' that would, in its obviousness, lead me to my argument." When a Google search reveals to Oyler that the terms are not related, she undertakes "research"—these are her words—into "historicizing" vulnerability and subsequently discovers that professor-cum-corporate consultant Brené Brown's 2010 TED Talk on the subject is "accepted as the source of the concept's contemporary popularity." Typically, "historicizing" a concept entails finding a "source" more than ten years old; Oyler's argument here is as impressive as "historicizing" contemporary discourse on "threats to democracy" with a Vox explainer from 2016. Even were she not quite to begin with Saint Paul's "strength in weakness," Oyler might at least have discussed Frued's concept of "original helplessness"; instead, she drops the Freud quote that comes up when you Google "Freud vulnerability" but fails to even mention the relevant theory. And rather than asserting, without even this minimal evidence, that Brown was "repackaging" Freud, Oyler might have actually researched any of the pit stops between Vienna and the TED stage. In the '60s, D. W. Winnicott developed his theory of the "vulnerable self," a "true self" around which the people erected the defensive "false self." In the '70s, John Bowlby developed attachment theory, which urged "avoidants" to become as comfortable with vulnerability as "secures" and has since metastasized into an unbelievably widespread pop psychology. In the '80s, transpersonal psychologists like John Wenwood preached that vulnerability was "the essence of human nature and of consciousness" and that "getting in touch with our more basic human tenderness and vulnerability can be a source of real power." In the '90s, Carol Gilligan's "feminist care ethics," with its embrace of vulnerability and interdependence, came to the fore—certainly influencing Brown as she completed her social work PhD. And while Oyler includes one of Sheryl Sandberg's many ridiculous utterances, she seems not to know that Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, and Gayatri Spivak have all recently called for what Spivak termed a "radical acceptance of vulnerability." But Oyler, highbrow shock jock, has no interest in changing her mind: she pitches "vulnerability" as its dumbest possible version, belaboring tumblr argot like "radical softness" rather than engaging potentially challenging arguments. So the only history Oyler is concerned with begins in 2010, with Brown in a jean jacket on that purple-lit stage. How could Oyler have known about that other stuff, anyway? Brown's talk is the only subject discussed under "Emotional" on the Wikipedia page "Vulnerability."

In her essay on Goodreads, Oyler offers a brief account of the history behind rating books out of five stars, all of which is—you guessed it—available on the Wikipedia page for "Star (classification)," which comes up when you Google "history behind rating books out of five stars."

bad thinker, bad writer, bad researcher!!!!

triple threat

she's gotta have stellar editors at the lrb getting her pieces across the finish line

look what I've misaed

ivy did u transcribe that from print lol, I can’t find that online

typed it from a scanned pdf baby!!!!

i’ll find a place to upload it

https://jmp.sh/s/1UMcVFOx5VkBmGtAe3YU

thankig u

tl;dr

Popeye should ditch this chick imo

"Even were she not quite to begin with Saint Paul's "strength in weakness," Oyler might at least have discussed Frued's concept of "original helplessness"; instead, she drops the Freud quote that comes up when you Google "Freud vulnerability" but fails to even mention the relevant theory."

Why bother going back to your undergrad notes when you can't make a living out of this shit?

"Of course, Oyler doesn't want to be a writer of personal essays; she wants to be an erudite critic of the old school. But again and again, she drifts toward personal recriminations and eschews any sustained discussion of literature."

Again, feels like this book is an attempt to be something else.

What's the point in discussing literature when you can look at the number of stars in a Goodreads link?

The correct answer: Updike.

that Goodreads essay sounds really embarrassing. i went to Yale. i like big words. i went to an opera once. *cringe*

i enjoyed that review though! that's the kind of review that i enjoy reading. i read the whole thing. that's how i know. full disclosure: i still sometimes read Cyril Connolly for fun.

(that is my assumption about the opera part. nobody who writes like that goes to the opera all the time. but they may have gone once.)

also that review brings home my point above on here somewhere about all the googling being done these days. if anything brings books down it will be that. surface googling.

Why bother going back to your undergrad notes when you can't make a living out of this shit?

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, April 9, 2024 7:39 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes why bother writing a good essay when you can write a bad one

ivy, weren't you the one who hated jia tolentino? maybe it was someone else. i remember enjoying a few of her new yorker essays and then she blew up and became kinda polarizing i guess. now i don't hear about her. i don't really want there to be It Girls of crit but i guess people are always going to create that in media land. i mean the lit crit world could always be pretty pissy going back hundreds of years. the stakes don't seem the same now though. seems pettier. or maybe the internet just makes everything seem pettier.

do people still read james wood? he must seem like a fossil to younger people. god help me he's only two years older than me. i thought he was way older. oh god i'm dying...i should really go write a will. i can't say i read him anymore. don't know why. bored of him i guess.

Dave Eggers is fucking awful and is just an annoying person to boot

not a fan of jia's, have definitely brought her up itt before, have always been suspicious bc her cultural pieces would often purport to take something culturally maligned seriously only to be weirdly condescending about it anyway. (i do not have specific examples at this point, despite the existence of this thread i try very hard not to subject myself to writers i don't like.) some of her essays are almost good but there's something that inevitably annoys me about them. one of the reasons i can't stand oyler is that her takedown of jia is so often incomprehensible. i should've been able to enjoy it... but i couldn't!!!! maybe unfair of me but i think if you're gonna criticize a writer, you should be able to outwrite them. (also one thing jia has over oyler is that her reporting and research are rigorous and excellent, i have to give it up)

as for literary It Girls, one of my more unreasonable takes is that i think no one should be popular

I'm not a Tolentino fan either.

as for literary It Girls, one of my more unreasonable takes is that i think no one should be popular

― ivy., Tuesday, 9 April 2024 bookmarkflaglink

That's been pretty clearly the take all along.

"Of course, Oyler doesn't want to be a writer of personal essays; she wants to be an erudite critic of the old school. But again and again, she drifts toward personal recriminations and eschews any sustained discussion of literature."

this seems untrue of oyler. she herself is often an uncharitable and harsh critic, so maybe this it's only fair for her to be the subject of a takedown like this. but i never got the sense that she isn't a close reader.

everything i’ve read by her misreads the subject bc of her own stupid personal shit getting in the way so it seems true to me!!!!

man, i tried to read the topeka school by ben lerner because i kept reading about it and...i couldn't do it. it was like being stuck in a room with an eternal grad student. not my thing. it reminded me of when i tried to read franzen. bleh. but maybe ben lerner is a great poet. i haven't read his poems.

― scott seward, Monday, March 25, 2024 4:33 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

i agree about the topeka school, but his first novel, "leaving the atocha station," is actually incredible. one of the funniest and most honest works to come out of the "autofiction" wave of the 2000s.

treeship get out of this thread

I have always heard Gary Shteyngart is good and maybe his novels, which I've never read, really are, but he is the latest entrant in the "magazine paid me to go on a cruise ship and here's my essay" genre and what he turned in is outstandingly terrible

not a post allowed in the thread maybe but the only good cruiseship essay is going to have to conclude: "i set the timer, dove off the side and happily swam ashore… "

writers really need to leave cruise shups alone. lauren oyler wrote a cruise ship essay (for harpers!) too and it's just like, please, it's been done, wtf are you thinking

i am only halfway through that Oyler review and the writing excerpts from her book are fucking horrible

i keep meaning to look up a donna tartt thread. i can't remember what people have thought of her here. every once in a while i come across a reference to that damn goldfinch and wonder if i should read it or throw it off of a cruise ship. people either worship her or are meh about her i think. she went to school with brix smith. that is one thing in her favor.

Shteyngart wrote a good essay about his penis for the New Yorker.

Donna Tartt is a long way from a bad writer imo. I thought the Goldfinch was way too long and only half-worked, but it wasn't the writing per se that bothered me.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/goop-cruise-gwyneth-paltrow-goop-at-sea/

Maybe it's more "writers you suspect are bad" but I'm always fundamentally uncertain about translated work. How much heavy lifting / surreptitious editing is done by the translator?

But also, which writers have really good editors and really should have a co-writing credit?

Tolentino may have her faults but doesn’t deserve to be associated with Oyler in any way.

editors save writers' ass all the time #adoptaeditortoday

I can understand if a fairly famous writer needed saving when writing for the LRB/some lit mag because you want his name.

With small fish like Oyler I am not sure you'd bother if the pieces she churned out needed saving. I doubt you'd even see many bad reviews of the work.

not a post allowed in the thread maybe but the only good cruiseship essay is going to have to conclude: "i set the timer, dove off the side and happily swam ashore… "

Was there something within the last year where I would have read something by or about Oyler? She seems familiar but I can't quite place what I might have read

For the record, I sensed immediately that Lauren Oyler bragging about knowing the artists in a museum was clearly trolling. Now we have proof pic.twitter.com/9M5YEKBzIP

— cancela lansbury (@gossipbabies) April 9, 2024

always sad when no one gets one's very funny jokes

I figured it out! It was the Goop cruise piece. That was fine.

my literacy in this thread is lacking. apologies to waterface

PHILLIPS-HORST: Well, I guess we have to go. This was an absolute joy.

OYLER: This was great.

Are you related to her

No, just having fun online.

I guess the summary of her book saying "this is just a bunch of writing about stuff that happens online" is both catnip and poison to me. I can read stuff online about stuff online. I can post on a messageboard to joke about other stuff happening online. I don't need offline texts that are subjective self-insert works about stuff online!

I was driving around over lunch to do some errands and pondered something someone had told me about how you really have to go off the grid in some way to find places in the world that lack a basic sameyness that's pervaded modern life, especially in the west. Not to the extent every American suburb is basically the same place, but a more ephemeral level where the local landscape and buildings differ but there's a basic cultural understanding.

I think online is like that now -- there's a metaphysical overlay over the physical world where people are integrating small bits of the physical environment, but in a way that's tiktok- and instagram-ready. Visting the Grand Canyon and thinking "that's a ledge that some tiktoker almost fell off of" or entering one the thousand artisanal hamburger cafes anywhere and feeling like you're in all and none of them. I want to know what's not online. And then hope that it doesn't get borged in.

was her using first page google and wikipedia results for research also trolling

If you, as I do, endeavor for others to read your occasional essays and come away thinking “wow, what a hilarious genius!” then you will appreciate the intimacy on hand.

oh so she writes for the worst writers i know

Beyond the obvious answer of “she’s got a book out”, I’m curious why there are suddenly so many hit pieces about this annoying but otherwise small potatoes journalist. She’s the sort of writer I would normally expect to get mild-to-fawning reviews from friends of friends (or no coverage at all).

The url to the Bookforum review posted by ivy is here. The tweet also asks a pretty good question.

Forgive me for joining the Oyler Discourse®, but the question is surely why better known writers didn’t feel like they could risk criticism of Jia Tolentino, Roxane Gay et al. If these guys were such “easy targets,” why did so few risk taking aim? https://t.co/VE3gnONzNU pic.twitter.com/LqEIXVf38j

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) April 9, 2024

feel similarly to mh, call me vain but I consider myself relatively in the know, I subscribe to or at least semi-regularly read the places her essays have run, and I can’t recall reading anything by her. in reading this bookforum revirew, and seeing listed some of her essay topics, I instinctively recognize decent taste and wonder whether she actually might have something interesting to say… then I see the excerpts

there are many negative reviews of roxane gay's work out there, i remember reading them contemporaneously

oyler has the pr juice afaict

xxp people criticize these others all the time! sometimes even on this very messageboard!

every generation gets the cat person it deserves.

ivy otm, those criticisms exist outside of the hype juice circuit

the thing that kills me is that I have never moved to the supposed cultural melting pools (brooklyn in the early 00s, berlin in.. well, the early 00s to whenever) but get why cultural dispatches come from there and I’ve been somewhat adjacent

I don’t think the cultural hype juice of “I smoke cigarettes and have two significant others and have taken ketamine” is pulling from anything for anyone at this point. That well is dry! I guess maybe some people think it’s nice to read about people being young but it’s giving stagnation

that whole interview for non-xers:

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/literature/lauren-oyler-wishes-youd-fact-check-your-reviews

oh i think people say it plenty...

"There’s this ironic voice that I use sometimes that allows me to say, “Isn’t it funny I went to an Ivy League school?” And I think that’s disarming, because you’re not actually supposed to say that, right?"

Someone should step up and attack a bigger target itt imo

Sadly I cannot help as the only writing I've encountered recently was a Charlotte Mendelsson novel and she's barely bigger than Oyler.

oh come on lol

that interview is something else

always sad when no one gets one's very funny jokes

― mookieproof, Tuesday, April 9, 2024 1:34 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^

sorry but the Elvis B tweet is not good

for reasons that others stated. i started to read that interview, but as far as i can tell, she is just somebody who says snotty dumb shit for attention and to get folks riled up. whatever. but yeah the admission of being a troll is basically my cue to stop paying attention

Bunuelo tweet is half right, don't remember anyone being bitchy about Tolentino, and the Sebald essay was necessary.

Hari Kunzru? I haven’t fully read anything except some of his journalism, but every time I’ve tried picking up one of his novels, the writing just seems desperately unspecial.

see the challenge with writing like oyler's is to talk about it _without_ making fun of how bad it is

that's a difficult thing to do. well, at least, i've just conspicuously failed to do it, despite my best intentions

Lionel Shriver has another goddamn book out. (gift link)

As a novelist, Lionel Shriver has made her strongest impressions selecting some hot issue of the day — school shootings, the American health care system, the ballooning of the U.S. national debt — and working it into a well-paced drama about its effects on one family. When this formula works, as it did best with “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2003), the result can be riveting and also very popular. The intimacy of domestic politics moderates Shriver’s polemical side, which, when given free rein — as during an infamous 2016 speech she gave on cultural appropriation while wearing a sombrero — usually turns out to be smug, crude and obtuse.

In Shriver’s tiresome new novel, “Mania,” the balance is off. “Mania” is the story of Pearson Converse, an untenured academic who lives with her tree-surgeon partner and three children in a Pennsylvania college town. Most of the novel takes place during an alternate version of the 2010s, when a social-justice fad has been ignited by a best-selling book titled “The Calumny of I.Q.: Why Discrimination Against ‘Dumb People’ Is the Last Great Civil Rights Fight.”

god damn that sounds dire

"inventing a person to be mad at: the novel"

I mean I can understand her being worried about discrimination against dumb people.

Although ...

It goes on and on. Cars blow up because they’re built by idiots.

Actually true if you own a Tesla

Did no one tell her they made a whole movie about this already?

"Pearson’s partner, Wade, is forced to hire an assistant who knows nothing about arboriculture and drops a branch on him."

haha, would read. i actually think she can be funny and has written books that i have enjoyed. she's madcap. i know about the whole sombrero thing with her. writers can be dunces. they are famous for it. that's why they all get married 10 times because nobody can stand living with them for more than a year or two. though i think she actually has been with the same person forever.
also, yeah, idiocracy. but, also, it doesn't sound like that much of a stretch from reality.

she is terrible in interviews too. and i have read really terrible essays she has written. but i STILL think she has written some good stuff. like, good writing. would still take her over ben lerner or jonathan franzen.

but i'm not gonna die on her hill. feel free to rant about her.

she kinda reminds me of one of those comedic writers from the 50s or 60s. maybe british. would come out with a book every year or two. probably a penguin paperback. daffy. there used to be a bunch of those guys. they were usually guys. she's a throwback. speaking of which, i was totally going to start a david lodge book tonight.

i still read peter devries books though. and cyril connolly apparently. jesus, i need to get a life. i swear i am not going fox-hunting tomorrow.

I read Lauren Oyler's novel (Fake Accounts) a couple of years ago bc I guess I am always interested in fiction about the internet and what it's like to live in an internet-mediated world ... but I found it kind of annoying tbh. I didn't know about her Gay/Tolentino/etc. hit pieces before reading the recent Bookforum review.

It's funny because Gay is bad, and Oyler is also bad. And Shriver's a nasty racist piece of shit.

Finding an Internet novel "kinda annoying tbh" sounds exactly how it ought to feel.

Oh! I Always Get Those Two Mixed Up! - Lauren Oyler / Patricia Lockwood

oh okay i goggled and i didn't think james would call her a npos just for the sombrero thing and now i see her eric clapton essay. yeah that is not something you want on your author's bio. okay i take it all back. she sucks. the books i read weren't terrible though. can't remember which ones they were.

more annoying than the buzz-y internet novel or even the AI mayhem novel are all these middling middle american mfa workshop writers doing their climate apocalypse novel with an eye toward Netflix money. there are so friggin' many of them and they are all middling. actual science fiction writers just need to sit there and wait for it to pass but by the time it passes there will be an actual climate apocalypse and it will be too late!
full disclosure: i am pitching the idea of a novel about an mfa workshop writer pitching their climate disaster novel at the Sundance film festival when an earthquake hits. and an eclipse. and a tsunami. in Utah.

lol

Do all the Johnny-come-lately SF writers claim they're not really writing SF, as their books are about human relationships and science fiction is all purple space monsters travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots? Or is that just the British lit types? Anyway their SF is largely terrible other than Kazuo Ishiguro who does take the genre seriously.

Nah that's not the vibe, remember these ppl are aiming for netflix, not the Booker prize.

I recognise scott's description a lot from my comics discussion group - quite often we'll discuss something that feels very slight and rote and those more in the comics biz will say "yeah this is probably just proof of concept for this person to try to get a streaming adaptation going". Depressing.

I've noticed that every new Netflix show does appear to be apocalypse-oriented (not that I use Netflix) - it's awfully tiresome isn't it

Doris Lessing was unapologetic about writing sci-fi, and was damn good at it, too

shriver's book sounds so... routine. i'm starting to feel like there is a meaningful distinction to be made between being a "bad writer" and a "bad thinker"... regardless of the "acid wit" or whatever of her writing, shriver is certainly a _bad thinker_. which is also, in my mind at least, distinct from being strictly _stupid_. i feel like there are so many different ways of being a bad writer.

in fact, not only is shriver a bad thinker, but she's not even a _creatively_ bad thinker. someone like dave sim reaches obviously ludicrous conclusions but does them in such an interesting way that i can't help but be fascinated. against my better judgement, i absolutely want to know more about his bizarre thought process and how he's reached the conclusions he's reached. the beliefs shriver expresses are evil, but they're also, well... banal. i don't know that i'd call the beliefs of someone like dave sim (or, say, janice raymond) banal.

shriver's variety of bad thinking... to me it kind of seems like _lazy thinking_, the way that certain writing is lazy writing.

like with so many of these novels, my question is less "who writes this shit" as "who publishes it". harper? harper published this? were they contractually obligated to? what the actual fuck? i feel it's important for me to ask this question without assuming an answer.

Finding herself hemmed in in the International Literature Survey course she teaches, Pearson decides, much as Shriver herself did, to introduce an incendiary object into the lecture room. She switches out Dostoyevsky's "Crime And Punishment" for a later novel of his, you know, the one called "The Idiot." Predictably, in this anti-brain-shame era, when the fool has been edited out of Shakespeare's plays and fictional eggheads like Sherlock Holmes and Victor Frankenstein have been banished from the curriculum, Pearson must apologize to her class or be fired.

This is giving Ayn Rand vibes.

Even that name, Pearson Converse.

why are we discussing shriver, she's been a known menace/joke/bad writer for decades, fish in a barrel stuff

i just opened up my kindle to do some reading and it reminded me of the ads for terrible books on the lock screen. people pay amazon presumably, so that i see these ads for awful self-published books on my lock screen. the obviousness of the grift is apparent from the self-evidently poor quality of the books. the book i'm seeing an ad for right now is called "Glory of The Pack: A Joe The Werewolf Novel". the author doesn't matter. i'm not sure whether he drew the cover himself or commissioned someone else to do it. in any event it's bad art. a 3.5 star rating from 20 reviews as of 3/21/24. the blurb:

A murdered werewolf. Packs from another state. Can Joe put the pieces of these puzzles together before tragedy hits Iowa werewolves?

it's cheating, right? it's cheating to say this writer is a bad writer, which is why i don't say his name. it's like dunking on jim theis. jim theis wrote _The Eye of Argon_ when he was 14 and published it in a fanzine that had, like, two dozen readers, and it went viral, and he was so embarrassed by the critical reaction to his work that he never wrote another work in his life. there's still a tradition at nerd conventions today of trying to read the eye of argon aloud without bursting into laughter. it is indeed risibly terrible. i do wonder sometimes if theis could have become a good writer. i guess it doesn't matter.

who's the audience for this? the author. (it would actually be really fucking funny if the reason it's set in iowa is because the author is attending the iowa writers' workshop. i don't have any reason to believe that, though.) a terrible title, terrible art, a terrible blurb... all _unexceptionally_ terrible. it's senseless to me that harper publishes shriver but doesn't publish, like, this guy.

pardon me if i'm stating the fucking obvious as if it's novel... well, people figure out the obvious every day.

"but she's not even a _creatively_ bad thinker."

i would have to disagree. the novels i read were creative! and did have a lot of thought put into them? not saying her views were my views but she has an imagination. and knowledge. and she can write compelling sentences. she is an actual writer. but she has shitty opinions irl despite having lived all over the world! that's what surprises me the most about people who end up spouting horrible isolationist shit who have actually seen the world. shouldn't they know better? she has lived in Africa! wiki says she lives in Portugal now.

but whatever. it happens to so many people as they get older. its a weird phenomena. look at alice walker.

but i do have to say her novels are often elaborate constructions plot-wise. they are not your standard middle of the road lit fic or whatever. they're weird!

there's still a tradition at nerd conventions today of trying to read the eye of argon aloud without bursting into laughter.

I play the same game but with random copies of The Da Vinci Code I might encounter in holiday homes / charity shops / litter bins. And that sold 80 million copies! So what do I know.

all these middling middle american mfa workshop writers doing their climate apocalypse novel with an eye toward Netflix money

This is one of these by the way

Steven Markley, The Deluge, much talked-about novel from last year, I looked through it in the bookstore and the writing was v v bad

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, March 24, 2024 10:10 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

i read two earlier ones. maybe they just devolve from there. i don't know. i have an SF-ish one here somewhere that i didn't read. it looked too long/didn't want to read. The Mandibles.

"why are we discussing shriver"

thread title...

"who's the audience for this?"

people who read We Need To Talk About Kevin probably. that book sold a ton. don't know if there have been diminishing returns since then. but a lot of people who read her probably have no idea about her racist britain essay. i didn't!

oh shit i'm sorry i thought you were talking about shriver when you asked "who's the audience for this?" i scanned too quickly.

“The world is run by idiots because of cancel culture” is just inane quite apart from the terrible politics of the writer

i would have to disagree. the novels i read were creative! and did have a lot of thought put into them? not saying her views were my views but she has an imagination. and knowledge. and she can write compelling sentences. she is an actual writer. but she has shitty opinions irl despite having lived all over the world! that's what surprises me the most about people who end up spouting horrible isolationist shit who have actually seen the world. shouldn't they know better? she has lived in Africa! wiki says she lives in Portugal now.

― scott seward

ah i feel like i didn't explain it well, like i'm not disputing any of the stuff you say above... i'm not agreeing with it either, i haven't read her books and am not likely to at this point lol. being intellectually curious, being able to learn and discover things, being able to use that knowledge to reach conclusions that _aren't_ shitty, to me that's what i would call being a good thinker, and i'd say that's something different from being a good writer.

Only time I want to read the name “Lionel Shriver” is in an obituary column.

she's a grotesquely bigoted one-shit wonder, if everything is so woke why is she still being published, reviewed and frequently given a platform by the bbc despite none of her terrible books selling in significant numbers since Kevin...

I don't know if she's still indulged by the bbc but it seemed she was popping up everywhere about 5 years ago on QT and multiple R4 shows etc

And proving to be a boring dimwit in all of them.

i'm remembering the book i read now and it was actually a long book about how horrible health care is and there were lots of polemics and rants but what i also remember is that the main character throughout the book wanted to retire to Africa! what most impressed me about the book was that NONE of the characters were sympathetic in any way. that always kinda impresses me for some reason in normal novels. it was a little like reading a book by a particularly well-read stand-up comedian.

"being able to learn and discover things, being able to use that knowledge to reach conclusions that _aren't_ shitty, to me that's what i would call being a good thinker, and i'd say that's something different from being a good writer."

i totally get this and i agree. and that was well said. having said that, and i am not including lionel shriver here, there are a lot of kinda crappy people who write really insightful books about the human condition. i don't know how they do it other than that they are human and we can be kinda crappy. myself included. like, you can have great ideas and be wonderfully creative and STILL do the crappy awful wrong thing. or say the crappy awful wrong thing. or reach crappy awful wrong conclusions despite knowing better. i do it all the time.

wait. is david lodge horrible? i should google him. was he in the national front or something?

and meanwhile i just finished a joanna trollope book last night! i think she used to go out with Skrewdriver in the 80s. i mildly enjoyed her book. it had a good wish-fulfillment ending. the rector got it in the end!

david lodge still alive by the way in case you didn't know. 89 years young. joanna trollope a frisky 80. her husband, the poor man's ian curtis, ian curteis, died in 2021.

always love people who decide they don't like wokeness and cancel culture so they not speak out against that but also simultaneously abandon every belief they previously held.

I wrote a fairly misogynist article for the school newspaper in high school claiming men were oppressed in high school when I was a privileged idiot, and my friend's girlfriend wrote a scathing email tearing me down which was well-deserved. was pretty much a feminist as long as I knew her.

abandoned it all and became a creepy Trumper in the blink of an eye for...reasons I still don't understand.

i'm remembering the book i read now and it was actually a long book about how horrible health care is and there were lots of polemics and rants but what i also remember is that the main character throughout the book wanted to retire to Africa! what most impressed me about the book was that NONE of the characters were sympathetic in any way. that always kinda impresses me for some reason in normal novels. it was a little like reading a book by a particularly well-read stand-up comedian.

i've had cerebus on the mind a lot lately, i think, my point of reference keeps being dave sim. anyway that's something that strikes me about cerebus, _none_ of the characters are in any way remotely sympathetic, including the literal author self-insert. like here's a guy who's a self-described "masculinist" and i look at his stuff and... i genuinely think i hold masculinity, men, and maleness in higher regard than sim does. the cynical part of me wants to say that awful people have a particular skill at writing books in which all the characters are horrible, but like that flattens things too much. it's a certain _perspective_, i think. someone isn't, i don't think, an awful person, in most cases. someone merely hates themselves, and acts in such a way as to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

i totally get this and i agree. and that was well said. having said that, and i am not including lionel shriver here, there are a lot of kinda crappy people who write really insightful books about the human condition. i don't know how they do it other than that they are human and we can be kinda crappy. myself included. like, you can have great ideas and be wonderfully creative and STILL do the crappy awful wrong thing. or say the crappy awful wrong thing. or reach crappy awful wrong conclusions despite knowing better. i do it all the time.

for me, crappy isn't something one _is_, it's something one _does_. i defecate, but i'm not a piece of shit. i have reached _so many_ crappy awful wrong conclusions, done and said so many crappy awful wrong things. that's kind of the importance of the idea of being a "bad thinker" as being something like a "bad writer". it's not, like, you're born "smart" or you're not. i'm _smart_, i have a _high IQ_ (which... this isn't even _controversial_... is a culturally biased and kinda racist social construct and a poor measure of "intelligence" by any standard), but this doesn't mean i can't also be a _bad thinker_.

one of the things i like about ilx is that the critical environment here has inspired me to become a better thinker. i still reach crappy awful wrong conclusions sometimes... i don't expect that i'll ever stop reaching crappy awful wrong conclusions. just like one can be a "good writer" and still write, even publish, some godawful crap, one can be a "good thinker" and still come up with some terrible conclusions. "good criticism" for me is the sort that inspires people to write and think better. i mean i guess that's just constructive criticism. i'm literally just advocating for constructive criticism.

i'd be interested in knowing more about what people you _do_ think are crappy and write really insightful books about the human condition. without knowing more about who exactly you're thinking about i don't totally understand what you mean by that.

the rector got it in the end!

― scott seward

is that a double-entendre?

There are a few of the MFA middlebrow apocalypse books that are fine, but most are, indeed, utter shit. I liked ‘On Such a Full Sea,’ by Chang-Rae Lee, quite a bit.

Was Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel as stupid as it appeared?

catching up here, but it's very funny that shriver managed to recreate Harrison Bergeron from first principles

turns out the writer of that bookforum review is a known peter thiel associate. i love new york media lol

hmm, she mentions thiel in another review here:

So the reader who skims the foreword and expects a journalistic crack at the bizarre financial reality of the downtown scene—or even an insider tell-all—might be frustrated. Though Stagg does mention “Dimes Square” once (queuing up a throwaway line about how the menu is Californian), she doesn’t mention, say, the theory that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel is funding it. Nor does she mention, say, crypto money downtown, or sponsorship, or PR, or appraisal.

https://www.bookforum.com/print/3002/fiction-meets-pr-in-these-dispatches-about-fashion-and-suburban-blight-25268

"i'd be interested in knowing more about what people you _do_ think are crappy and write really insightful books about the human condition"

with current writers i really don't know a lot about what they are like in real life. i don't read a lot of author interviews. but in the past there were certainly plenty. people you probably wouldn't want to spend a lot of time around who had noxious political views. i think Celine was insightful. that's one example. there are way too many more. but there is also probably a difference between people who were considered shits who were horrible to their families and people who were out and out anti-semitic or racist. sometimes you are lucky and you get both. people will always read Willy Wonka! i think roald dahl could be totally insightful.

i just opened up my kindle to do some reading and it reminded me of the ads for terrible books on the lock screen. people pay amazon presumably, so that i see these ads for awful self-published books on my lock screen. the obviousness of the grift is apparent from the self-evidently poor quality of the books. the book i'm seeing an ad for right now is called "Glory of The Pack: A Joe The Werewolf Novel". the author doesn't matter. i'm not sure whether he drew the cover himself or commissioned someone else to do it. in any event it's bad art. a 3.5 star rating from 20 reviews as of 3/21/24.

finally ponied up the money to go ad-free when i strongly suspected one of the advertised books to be a.i.-"written" and it turned out it was

ok, I actually read the nytimes review of that Shriver book and I wasn't off in my "world of Harrison Bergeron" guess? good god how cooked is your brain if you're writing this stuff

at least I had this sentence:

Mensa is “the kind of cerebral-supremacist organization” deemed “the greatest threat to American civic order” by no less than the F.B.I.

ok this I can get behind

We Don't Need to Talk About Shriver

turns out the writer of that bookforum review is a known peter thiel associate. i love new york media lol

― ivy., Wednesday, 10 April 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Terrible ppl can still write good things. Don't stop believing.

I forget which writers I think are bad I have posted itt previously and I don’t wish to check, so here’s a fresh list

HP Lovecraft (dreck drecky dreck)
Jennifer Egan (Visit from the Goon Squad is stupid)
Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go is stupid)

visit from the goon squad is so bad. i’ve heard egan can be good but have never investigated bc of goon squad, which was so bad

I will give her another chance in my next life

Lol, same

why did people like that book so much though??? i still have a copy somewhere thinking i would eventually get to it based on hype. i was thinking i would bring copies i have of There There and Trust Exercise to the store. i don't think i'll ever read them. holding on to my copy of Such A Fun Age for the moment though. i am not immune to the hype machine. though i do buy them as remainders for cheap.

every time i try to read Lovecraft i start to drift off to sleep. but even Poe is tough for me. it takes them so long to say something. just spit it out, count chocula.

Ishiguro has written good stuff but Never Let Me Go is very stupid.

I like Egan. Goon Squad falls apart badly at the end, but the first half is fun. "Manhattan Beach" is an excellent historical-adventure-romance-kitchen-sink holiday read.

"Spit it out, Count Chocula" = my experience of Turn of the Screw.

The only people I knew discussing Egan are at this message board.

My mother gave me a copy of goon squad, forgot it, then gave me another copy that was signed by Egan to me personally. i never read either copy, and both saw a little free library on a moving day a while back

The only ppl I know discussing writers are at this msg board

Somebody posted a paragraph of Ocean Vuong on Twitter and it was really goopy and terrible but maybe he's good and wrote one bad paragraph, or maybe the paragraph works as part of the novel? But I then I looked at his goodreads page of popular quotes and they're all like that.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4456871.Ocean_Vuong

I liked Vuong's bildungsroman several years ago. I don't care much if at all for his poetry.

Lovecraft does absolutely nothing for me, either. Silly, tedious stuff. Maybe most horror isn’t for me, though. I think Stephen King’s short stories are generally moronic

Re: Ishiguro. He never surpassed the quality of his first two published novels, Pale View of the Hills and An Artist of the Floating World. When We Were Orphans is an overwritten mess that forgets what its plot is

I put down the last novel after about 70 pages.

I'd add The Remains of the Day as essential.

There's something so attenuated about Ishiguro the last 20 years. It's as if Stevens the butler were writing them.

Lovecraft can be amazing. "The Colour Out of Space" is genuinely creepy, imo.

Lovecraft hate bizarre

I guess maybe I appreciate him more for his (sorry mark s) INFLUENCE

Oy those Vuong quotes:

Vuong is a bad writer, nothing anyone says will convince me otherwise. When students say their favorite poet is Vuong, I cringe (inside) as much as when students say their favorite writer is Mary Oliver or fucking Rupi Kaur.

It's like the mainstream white literary world discovered that queer Asians with complex family backstories exist, and tokenized the first person who presented this identity toward them via his awful prose and abysmal poetry.

Mary Oliver! Every goddamn Barnes & Noble poetry section stocks at least two copies of each of her volumes. Corporate America decided whom they'll promote, I guess.

Lovecraft hate bizarre

― brimstead

summarize lovecraft in three words

I doubt corporate America is very invested in poetry. B&N puts out Mary Oliver volumes bc they sell, and they sell bc she writes in a plainspoken way that resonates with people who don't read much poetry. Same with Billy Collins.

It's like the mainstream white literary world discovered that queer Asians with complex family backstories exist, and tokenized the first person who presented this identity toward them via his awful prose and abysmal poetry.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Thursday, April 11, 2024 10:53 AM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

RIP anthony veasna so

I doubt corporate America is very invested in poetry. B&N puts out Mary Oliver volumes bc they sell, and they sell bc she writes in a plainspoken way that resonates with people who don't read much poetry. Same with Billy Collins.

― jaymc,

Of course.

in the spirit of good faith research I read the first few sections of oyler’s goop cruise article. I don’t mind her style, but I kept waiting to learn something, to be challenged in the slightest…

i don't hate Lovecraft. its more like i keep the paperbacks around and whenever i think i'm going to dig in i end up going uhhhhhhhhh....and i last like five pages. i have that problem with a lot of early horror/weird/supernatural people. clark ashton smith, etc. i don't even get far with someone like wilkie collins. maybe i am missing the spooky gene. i liked stephen king when i was a kid. LOVED some of his books. clive barker. but i don't ever want to read them now.
i do like the idea of the ineffable unnameable ultimate horror or whatever. i'm fine with it in movies. i thought mandy was awesome. i loved hellraiser years ago. i am all for the spooky forest horror all the rage now. that kind of thing is made for the movies. i really liked The Mist recently! i had somehow never seen it. that ending is so awesome.
i did enjoy that area x trilogy as noted in the thread i started on ILB.

Mountains of Madness is a classic, the rest of it is have little use for.

Ishiguro drives me nuts. He’s compelling enough for me to read several of his novels, and more often than not I end up wondering if I’m missing something brilliant he’s doing, because the novels end up seeming empty and stupid? I thought the sketchiness of Never Let Me Go worked to its advantage in a way, it at least worked on an emotional level even if it made no sense if you thought about it, but The Buried Giant is just…nothing, as far as I can tell? And then he won the Nobel! When We Were Orphans has a pretty great premise and decides to use the most annoying style of unreliable narrator to explore it.

i could only get through 50 or so pages of lauren groff's Matrix. for a book supposed to be set in a convent way back in time none of the scenes really rendered or stuck with me--a lot of them were summary, and it was written in the present tense if I'm not mistaken. really bad writing and then i read a profile of her in the NYT for her new one that came out last year and she claims with a straight face that she reads over 300 books a year

Groff's Florida was a whole lot of okay. So much of this so-called local writing reads like it got workshopped to death.

not talking about Groff but sometimes i think those workshop-y short story collections that seem to multipy like rabbits by people with REALLY killer author photos and MFA creds are the new status symbol for rich folks. they are all kinda okay and these people have learned how to write but they all blend together until i'm not sure which quirky white person is which anymore. in general, i am all for lots of women and non-binary and trans writers on the shelves at local bookstores. and lots more people of color showing up on the shelves. it is really a good time for different voices. and this abundance of fiction by asian writers that just never existed in my world before! it's amazing. writers from all over being translated. i think trust fund kids should make that their priority in life. becoming excellent literary translators. there is ZERO money in doing it so it would be perfect for them. they can figure out a way to make it sexy. "oh yes i'm working on some vintage Korean horror right now..." they would love that in Brooklyn.

Lovecraft is a classic idea man - some good stories but better broad concepts that a handful of writers have improved.

I love short story collections and tend to impulse buy them, but my god some of the shit come out of these MFA program writers is just unbearable. So much stupid, deadpan magical realism with no plot structure

I like how Kazuo Ishiguro had the gall to criticize Harold Pinter’s unproduced Remains of the Day script. I still wish we lived in a world where Mike Nichols directed that version with John Cleese in the lead

. i think trust fund kids should make that their priority in life. becoming excellent literary translators. there is ZERO money in doing it so it would be perfect for them.

Unfortunately learning a second language is probably too much like real work.

Trust money kids speak their own language.

What literary translations could do with is a second translator to turn the text into something approximating readable prose (although I guess this aspect has improved in recent decades). Perfect for technically proficient yet talentless writers, i.e. 95% of everyone with a creative writing qualification.

You want to know who a shitty author is? Tom Hanks.

Actors who actually did write great novels:

David Thewlis

Tom Tyron

Takeshi Kitano

Carrie Fisher!

That’s right! I can think of a few filmmakers who wrote good novels, like Bryan Forbes

Ethan Hawke

j/k

Actually, Hawke got very strong reviews for his last book. I have not read any of them

And he just directed (and co-wrote) a film about Flannery O'Connor that looks like it might actually be good!

I would chill with Ethan Hawke over beers to discuss Flannery O'Connor.

I wouldn't read a book by Hawke in the style of Flannery O'Connor.

i’ve only read remains of the day but it’s excellent