Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

(ayo lamp send me your address. tom dot west at gmail dot com)

hey dudes, it's ksh

I need to get back into the habit of reading fiction regularly again, so I've decided to start off by rereading Coetzee's Disgrace. haven't read any Coetzee since high school, I think, but I'm looking forward to revisiting this one

C by Tom McCarthy, anyone?

Also I see from the ILB FAP discussion that Steven Hall comes up in that list, and that was reviewed by Tom McCarthy.

Absolutely. The one book I'm excited by this year. I'm in the crowd that thinks Remainder was a bit special, & this is the proper follow-up, so I've been waiting for it for a bit. Should maybe try to shake a copy from the publishing tree this week.

Never had an impulse to read Steven Hall - he was recommended to me by a couple of people, but I think they were maybe assuming I'd like something a bit meta because I read curious things.

At the mo, enjoying the bloodsport reviews of Craig Raine's novel. Sounds awful, but I might read it in a bookshop. Intrigued by the bile it's generated.

Almost finished and I can confirm that Tinkers is wonderful.

tempted to go pick up the Gary Shteyngart tomorrow in store, which I pretty much never do

^i have it on hold at my library

recently finished 'atmospheric disturbances' which i liked a lot

Just chatted about C to a decently connected publishing person - acc to him, a few ppl are saying it's a masterpiece, easy best novel of the year, etc. But I don't really trust the insider perspective (especially as McC's properly represented and with a big house this time), so I'm ready to be disappointed.

Think I want to read Atmospheric Disturbances.

If man's autocracy, his genius, his powers of generation, have all passed to the machine, and if the pulpy, material base for the refined and abstract thoughts and emotions that we read in books has been revealed to us, then how can we understand poetry or prose as the sublime self-expression of autonomous and elevated individuals? Melville's answer is as implicit as his question: we can't, not any more.

wut

also am generally suspicious of anyone who writes about marinetti with breathy enthusiasm.

Booker longlist 2010:

Peter Carey: Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)
Emma Donoghue: Room (Pan MacMillan - Picador)
Helen Dunmore: The Betrayal (Penguin - Fig Tree)
Damon Galgut: In a Strange Room (Grove Atlantic - Atlantic Books)
Howard Jacobson: The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)
Andrea Levy: The Long Song(Headline Publishing Group - Headline Review)
Tom McCarthy: C (Random House - Jonathan Cape)
David Mitchell: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet(Hodder & Stoughton - Sceptre)
Lisa Moore: February (Random House - Chatto & Windus)
Paul Murray: Skippy Dies (Penguin - Hamish Hamilton)
Rose Tremain: Trespass (Random House - Chatto & Windus)
Christos Tsiolkas: The Slap (Grove Atlantic - Tuskar Rock)
Alan Warner: The Stars in the Bright Sky (Random House - Jonathan Cape)

Thoughts? I've only read one of these (The Slap, fucking brilliant) so I feel unqualified to really comment.

Shit--have read none, though I've bought but not yet opened the Paul Murray.

I've read the Paul Murray. It's enjoyable but it didn't exactly wow me and i'm not sure it really justifies it's length. Kind of surprised to see it on here tbh. Quite refreshing not to see Ian McEwan on there though.

still need to buy & read Solar. so out of the loop u_u

you really dont

is it bad? i've read a bunch of McEwan and the only thing I really wasn't a fan of was Amsterdam

by a bunch I mean, like, four of five

he kinda sucks, i think

Yup

i don't think he sucks at all, but that's not the point. curious to hear max's opinion

oh i was just being flippant. i didnt read it. i dont like him, or what he 'stands for.' he comes across like an asshole in interviews. but i met him once and he was vaguely nice.

oh cool. I think I've seen like one interview with him or something, but that was a long time ago so I don't really remember it. my opinion of him is more or less based on just reading his stuff. we were assigned Atonement in 11th grade or whatever and I read Amsterdam, Cement Garden, and Saturday after that -- all in high school and right after I graduated -- and then I picked up On Chesil Beach when it was released back in 2007. i liked Saturday the best

actually not sure if I even read all of Atonement

you missed a pretty crucial ending, dumbass

a "twist" ending

yeah

youll never know if 'atonement' 'occurs'

hey Que, can you shut the fuck up and leave me alone?

you follow me into every fucking thread, and at this point it's more or less harassment

hey, just saying. Atonement has a twist ending and if you didn't read the whole thing, you missed something crucial.

i'm not fucking kidding about the harassment, dude. i never did anything to you as far as I remember, but you make it a point to make my posting experience here way less enjoyable everyday. i understand you don't like me, and i don't care about that or if you actually still think i'm a sock, but you need to just leave me alone

**SPOILER ALERT**

Part four

The fourth section, titled "London 1999", is written from Briony's perspective. She is a successful novelist at the age of 77 and dying of vascular dementia.

It is revealed that Briony is the author of the preceding sections of the novel. Although Cecilia and Robbie are reunited in Briony's novel, they were not in reality. Robbie Turner died of septicemia caused by his injury on the beaches of Dunkirk and Cecilia was killed by the bomb that destroyed the gas and water mains above Balham Underground station. The truth is that Cecilia and Robbie never saw each other again after their half-hour meeting. Although the detail concerning Lola's marriage to Paul Marshall is true, Briony never visited Cecilia to make amends.

Briony explains why she decided to change real events and unite Cecilia and Robbie in her novel, although it was not her intention in her many previous drafts. She did not see what purpose it would serve if she told the readers the pitiless truth. She reasons that they could not draw any sense of hope or satisfaction from it. But above all, she wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia their happiness by being together. Since they could not have the time together they so much longed for in reality, Briony wanted to give it to them at least in her novel.

sorry i called you a dumbass dude. i hardly post anymore, so i don't know what you mean about following you into threads. but i will leave this one, ok?

it's ok. there are a million times where you've showed up and attacked me for what I thought was pretty innocuous stuff -- all I'm asking you to do is to back off it

anyway, is anyone else planning on reading Super Sad True Love Story? I actually dropped by Barnes and Noble earlier to pick up a copy, which I haven't done in a while for new fiction, and I just started reading the very, very beginning earlier

everybody's stoked about the upcoming translation of Zettels Traum right?

Markers, in an attempt to be helpful, I think if you liked 'Saturday' or 'The Innocent' of McEwan's, you'll like 'Solar'.

I'll quote myself from one of the 2010 reading threads:

I really enjoyed Solar, though everyone else round here seems to hate McEwan. It's pretty amusing, though it involves at least 2 unlikely coincidences. Really it's like a C21 version of Victorian lit: "big issue' theme, lots of coincidences, larger than life characters, and some lovely prose

thanks, James! much appreciated. I do still think I'd like to read it sometime

anyway, is anyone else planning on reading Super Sad True Love Story?

i have it but havent started it yet. i also got 'goon squad' & the new david mitchell novel. however its p hot so i really only want to read abt sorcerers atm

also i think atonement is really good or least 'interesting' despite my many problems w/ mcewan

also also thomp sent you an emailllll

Josipovici has a book to sell.

Never really like the 'not as good as it was before' narratives, even if

"prep school boys showing off"

and

"The irony which at first made one smile, the precision of language which was at first so satisfying, the cynicism which at first was used only to puncture pretension, in the end come to seem like a terrible constriction, a fear of opening oneself up to the world"

have me giving a hesitant nod of acquiescence.

Also the analysis of 'hollowness' v 'genuine exploration' is too vague and the implied idea that the best books have some sort of spiritual centre makes me suspicious. And anyway I really didn't get on with his Goldberg: Variations (tho didn't mind Everything Passes), so am not automatically predisposed to his viewpoint. I guess if I want to find out more I'll have to read the book. Still seems like a pretty boring thing to go on about, so I think I'll end up standing this one out, thanks.

Tree-shakedown success! C just turned at work. Hmmmm. Appears to have present-tense narration, don't usually approve of that (exception: The Driver's Seat).

Josipovici... yeah, I've also noticed that Julian Barnes isn't as good as Kafka. Fair point, would not disagree. But for the rest of it.. it's all a bit muddled, especially what he has to say about newspaper opinion and awards etc. And I feel like we've been here before in various threads, but the heyday of Modernism he looks back to... it's never quite been like that in England, especially. I mean that's the era of Maugham and Priestley and AJ Cronin and Rogue Herries - it's always a bit disheartening to survey the body of literary production - just had a browse of the Short Title Catalogue for the 1st year of Tristram Shandy (1759) & there's a lot of tedious-sounding tosh there (ok, plus Johnson & Sarah Fielding. And I am very tempted to call up a copy of The uncommon adventures oF Miss Kitty F****r.)

But I'm sure knows this & just wants a bit of fuss.

Guess Josipovici feels he has to do this because especially McEwan is a big deal over here, btu one out of 10 people probably feel like he does. That article is taken from comments quoted from books and an interview, and the book itself I'm sure will sound a bit more together. But yeah it sounds quite tired.

The problem is his version of Modernism that he is playing off against this stuff. Or that I distrust the narrative, sure Joyce and Beckett were friends and collaborated; and Joyce helped Svevo and Broch but besides that it always assumed that, I dunno Joyce and Proust were looking at what each other were writing, or that there were common goals between the authors instead of those two pursuing their own goals.

Also has that flippant English have no art or music here, unlike the continent, and while my reading probably reflects some of this there are always notable exceptions you discover, and then you discover enough of them to think they are not exceptions anymore.

Funnily enough I suspect McCarthy of harbouring a lot of those corny old Euro-mod attitudes himself, which is one of the reasons I haven't got round to reading him yet.

Did manage to finish Lipsyte's The Ask on holiday last week - like everything I've read by him it starts off crackling and sparking, and then just seems to fizzle out. Also finished Catherine O'Flynn's The News Where You Are which I really wanted to like but again just meandered to dullness. I think she might be better off writing kids' novels?

That's true, but I think he does lean a bit later than or off to one side of high Euro-mod - Blanchot seemed to be key for Remainder, it's a bit of Futurism this one, comfortable with Theory & he seems to keep up with developments in French fiction. But yeah, it's still the 'i are serious book' tradition - v josipivici friendly, in fact.

Shame about O'Flynn. As I think I said at the Fap, she comes across as thoughtful & funny, and I was all for Midlands local telly star as protagonist.

I think O'Flynn is a lot sharper than her books in a funny way. Like Ian Sansom with his Mobile Library series, she seems to be going out of her way to write books for people who don't read much. Which is a laudable enough ambition, but you get the sense that both are needlessly hobbling themselves.

I really liked the way she talked about Birmingham as a city that wants reinvent itself & grab the future, but keeps changing its mind about what the future should be, so there are fragments & ghosts of old schemes all over the place. Seemed a simple, smart and affectionate way to look at a city.

anyone heard of michael syjuco's illustrado? sounds so much like my kind of thing i am a little afraid. here is a thing i read about it on tumblr

http://booksinthekitchen.tumblr.com/post/916201564/miguel-syjuco-ilustrado

The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers

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

Which of these Filmmakers are Most Overrated?

True, but on the other hand, I feel it would be difficult for a Philip Roth or John Updike to rise to the top these days. The "selfish misogynistic asshole describes his sexual/romantic life" genre does seem fairly done and dusted.

Growing up in the 80s, the whole phenomenon of quality paperbacks (Vintage Contemporaries, Vintage International, Penguin American, and so on) really gave a sense of quality and excitement to new books, the "rock star" energy mentioned above. And for sure there was Richard Ford and Barry Hannah, but there was Lorrie Moore and Ellen Gilchrist and so on as well.

Who else among us remembers the promotional blitzkrieg that launched The World According to Garp?

Sounds relevant.

MY BOOK IS OUT TODAYY ✨✨I loved writing this book and I hope you can feel that - it’s a project from my heart + hope it’s a valuable contribution to the conversation around housing, how it impacts every part of how we live and how we must make home a right for everyone ✨✨✨ pic.twitter.com/y21hBa8MdH

— kieranyates (@kieran_yates) April 27, 2023

Did you belong to QPB, Eazy? Quality Paperback Bookclub, for those of yall who missed it: trade pbs, quite a good variety, like omnibus editions of olde American authors coming back around (Dawn Powell!), also ones from other countries, fiction and nonfiction. A fair amount of erotica, believe it or not.
So I finished (read straight through, then back through some of)Mr. Palomar. I should read back through some more of the smooth, friendly, inexorable, guided tours, sunny lectures, really, of the perceptions and thought processes of Mr. P., a seemingly afternoon, middle-aged gentleman, trained to think in terms of prototypes and models, the rightness of principles, however much he actually knows or knows that he knows or believes about them---but now he wants to see things as they are, because that's what increasingly seems right.
He's a seeker of the everyday (cue" "At home he's a tourist"), getting down to basics in a spaced out way that can disappear into tiny details---my own mind blinks and misses some, I admit, but in short chapters that bump into invisible walls of the much valued world: "the surface of things," into and from which he means to peer, balancing on the window sill, but being seen, as also embraced, can be tricky: he walks past a topless sunbather several times, determined to thereby express just the right, rightest, most enlightened state of mind, until finally (you can guess the rest).
At the zoo, he gets too wrapped up in the implications of the apes---until his little daughter (he seems to be a late-life Dad), tired of the damn apes, pulls him toward the penguins, aieee-it's okay though, he needed some kind of change.
Which can be agreeable, like when he and his wife choose, or at least he does, to watch a gecko on the terrace window over TV: they or he can see the translucent gecko belly welcoming another bug, and even a butterfly.
The ugly nasty usual pigeon clouds over Rome get bumrushed by sparrows in late autumn---Mr. P. can find no adequate account for their behavior---forming, at one point, a wheeling word balloon of sparrows, the vessel of a vast fast message, comment of sparrows, so complex, but perhaps it can be read by someone or something (sparrows?)
But there's also an accruing sense, eventually spelled out in passing, of the limits, limited value and rightness of conjecture, of what he once took to be "supreme intellectual exercise," of words themselves yadda yadda I notice that the original Italian edition of this is copyright 1983, two years before the author died, and seems like he had some sense of that, falling further into place, in the comedy of thought, under the sun and moon and stars.

Sorry! Starlings, not sparrows!

Better late than never, I guess: 20 years after winning the Nobel and 29 years after its publication, the translation of Elfriede Jelinek's magnum opus Die Kinder der Toten is forthcoming at @YaleBooks ! pic.twitter.com/wQRogDXR5x

— Karl (@underreadgerman) September 12, 2023

I have been emailing YUP about this book since 2005-ish and developed rapport with people as they came & went from the job. I read an extract of this in a US publication, a scene with a bus crash; it was kind of classic Jelinek, hopeless and violent....I'm a fan, I"m excited for this

Is that extract online?

no, it was in a paper journal, a very small affair. I have it around here someplace but I am pretty disorganized, books in stacks all over the house & also at the office which is half an hour away (I suspect it's out there) -- the journal is/was called Dimension 2 and the editor was a good correspondent and I see from our correspondence that I promised to send him some stuff and I probably didn't, I'll remedy that today (six years late). It's in vol. 5 no. 3 -- I believe it's the prologue, I had originally heard it was the prologue & the epilogue but I don't recall the latter.

oh wait I did find a part of it online: here. still if you have space on your shelves it's so cool to get some obscure journal that just happens to have an excerpt from a book that won the Nobel but that most English readers can't be bothered about, fun book adventures imo

Excellent, hope it's not too tough to source in the UK.

Thank you, J Crawford, for the link. Shall read that soon.

Two more for the year:

- Jose Donoso. There is an incomplete version available in English:
https://www.ndbooks.com/book/the-obscene-bird-of-night/

- Maria Gabriella Llansol in June: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/175403640-a-thousand-thoughts-in-flight

Cool!

At this time of so much—too much—death, I wrote about the unheeded politics of Elias Canetti‘s powerful posthumous text, The Book Against Death (translated by Peter Filkins & published by @NewDirections in English), for @thebafflermag: https://t.co/qQUudJG8bJ

— Sanders Isaac Bernstein (@Return2Sanders) August 13, 2024

Also have a copy of Children of the Dead so will be getting round to it in a couple of weeks

Looking good for Latin AM reissues:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/08/16/on-asturiass-men-of-maize/

https://www.nyrb.com/products/bomarzo

i thought this was pretty crazy. from a Granta article i read yesterday:

"The editor-in-chief of an independent publishing house recently told me that she believes there are about 20,000 serious and consistent readers of literary fiction in America and publishing any novel of quality is a matter of getting that book to them by any means necessary."

https://granta.com/literature-without-literature

it didn't seem like that many people!

Agreed. Seems low.

the number is more likely several times that.

As a very rough proxy, the number of English degrees awarded per year seems to be about 50,000 (though falling every year)

https://datausa.io/profile/cip/english

Ha, there are plenty of English degree graduates who only read what they’re assigned and fuck all else.

maybe they meant people who are always buying new books. plenty of people probably only buy a handful of new lit fic books a year. some zeitgeisty ones. some bestsellers a la kingsolver.

Edwin Frank, the editor of New York Review Books, had that number at 50,000 around 2012, maybe it's gone down?

I interned at a large(r) indie publisher in 2012 (mostly nfic, but still) and the "big" authors usually had print runs b/w 10-20,000, rarely exceeding that. I'd imagine Fiction to generally have larger audiences but unfortunately prob not that much more.

That said, there are a lot of assumptions/presuppositions though w/ "serious", "consistent" and "literary" that gets you to that 20K number quoted above. I'd guess something like Rachel Kushner's new book out next week I'd guess a print run around b/w 35-50,000. Of course many people who read this stuff will get it via library, audiobook, ebook, borrow, etc.

https://ryanlanz.com/2024/01/31/who-else-wants-to-know-how-many-copies-novels-actually-sell/

also, this stuff pops up when i google:

"According to Electric Literature, novels published by traditional publishers typically sell between 2,000 and 40,000 copies, while novels published by independent small presses typically sell between 500 and 10,000 copies."

"In general, a book that sells more than 5,000 copies is considered successful in the publishing industry. For first-time authors, selling a few thousand copies may be considered a success, while well-established authors may need to sell hundreds of thousands of copies to be considered successful."

"One figure that often crops up is that the average traditionally published title can expect to sell 3,000 copies in its lifetime."

https://jerichowriters.com/average-book-sales-figures/

What about different kinds of nonfiction? Maybe I should say sold as nonfiction, though we all love a good story, however real it's supposed to be (thinking of the older people I know who say they read only self-help, biography, memoir, history [as in WWII etc]).

The publishing industry hates me with a passion. I read an average of a book a week, but I read at least 50 public library books or books I've bought used for every new book I buy.

If you’re in a lot of countries that aren’t the US, writers still get paid if you borrow books from a library.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right#:~:text=A%20public%20lending%20right%20(PLR,as%20books%2C%20music%20and%20artwork.

Google tells me there are 43000 bookshops in the US alone. I imagine a significant portion of them sell a selection of contemporary lit, and that they sell at least a couple for each new title. Online bookshops probably count for a few as well. I can also confirm that other countries import contemporary American lit, we even translate it, but I'm sure that's not serious and consistent.
Hell, on Goodreads new titles get tens of thousands of reviews, and that can only be a fraction of the readership.

Anyway, I'm sure it's possible to check how many prints your average new contemporary book gets.

A bestseller in Denmark supposedly sells 15,000 copies or more - these U.S. figures sound very low