Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

anyone heading out to pick up Freedom today?

the Franzen frenzy is a little weird to me. I liked The Corrections but that's pretty much his only book that anybody cares about so when did this turn into such a big deal? Is it just because it's been so long since the last one?

that and it's gotten stellar reviews

oh

I get people getting excited about a book that will probably be good, but like the cover of TIME magazine seems kind of unnecessary

I liked The Corrections but that's pretty much his only book that anybody cares about so when did this turn into such a big deal? Is it just because it's been so long since the last one?

all it takes is one of your novels to turn into a modern classic for the hype for the followup to be deafening

joke is on TIME magazine, no one reads books, or magazines

yeah and the article seemed 100% insane, from what i read online

all it takes is one of your novels to turn into a modern classic for the hype for the followup to be deafening

― markers, Tuesday, August 31, 2010 11:42 AM (28 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

and this is how David Mitchell was named People's Sexiest Man of the Year

it seems weird to me too, and it makes me a little sad because i'm expecting it to be a solid book that doesn't justify the hype/backlash.

apparently there's a translation of some bolano short stories coming out today as well?

xp

I wonder how many copies it'll end up selling -- I have no idea how well "blockbuster" literary novels tend to do

quick google suggests his last novel did over a million in hard cover

also one of the ten best sellers of '01, up there with the stephen kings and john grishams, sales-wise. i have no idea how you'd look at the long-tail sales for it, though.

yeah, a million plus is probably a really good & rare number for literary fiction to pull off

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/books/review/Burn-t.html

came out in the late spring but still looks rad

I'd say it's a little more than that, I thought it successfully built up some pathos

Yeah, I agree.

Que, that does look pretty awesome.

(And the reviewer apparently wrote a book on Franzen: "Stephen Burn’s latest book is “Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism.” He teaches at Northern Michigan University.")

Wow. The new James Franco book, a collection of short stories, actually has some big authors giving it really positive blurbs ...

http://www.amazon.com/Palo-Alto-Stories-James-Franco/dp/1439163146/ref=br_lf_m_1000535991_1_24_ttl?ie=UTF8&s=books&pf_rd_p=1272423682&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_t=1401&pf_rd_i=1000535991&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0H2AY4DPEFT658406BN1

I'll be damned if I read it though.

This is a book to be inhaled more than once,

O RLLY

http://mimg.sulekha.com/english/the-pineapple-express/stills/the-pineapple-express05.jpg

I don't see why it's inconceivable that a dude pursing an advanced English degree at Columbia might be a good writer

He could be!

but he's got one helluva agent.

i think i defended his story that esquire published. i dont know if i remember it being amazing but it wasnt embarrassing

that story he had published somewhere (new yorker?) was awful.

xp

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/page-to-screen/article/44284-james-franco-s-palo-alto-our-review.html

ha

I don't see why it's inconceivable that some big name authors would want to blurb this either. Couldn't hurt, and it would probably help them to sell a few more copies of their own books.

But yeah ... maybe he's decent.

(Note to self: if I ever want to easily land a publishing deal, I need to star in at least one superhero movie.)

are you cuet?

(most) blurbs are used as currency by publishing houses fyi

that hamburger will be $5, sir

look, I don't have any money, but I got a blurb from Ian McEwan on my last novel!

its (mostly) like oh X owes me for something so I'll have them blurb this new book

but none of this really matters cuz I doubt blurbs are as important for ebooks (I've never seen a ebook tho)

although I don't know shit about ebooks I hate it when people are like "I have currently read 23% of Moby Dick" because I guess I hate change or something. I don't know. It all seems so unmagical.

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

i was thinking about this too & while i think its a p common comedic trope it does feel like these two are using it in a slightly different way. like ignatius in "confederacy of dunces" is both more obviously grotesque & less seethingly aware of how unattractive he is. or like richard russo often has his character's slack unhandsomness stand in for their general lack of success/alienation from modern capitalism or w/e but its a lot more low-key.

i think i disliked both books in part because of how tedious & theatrical they were about their hero's shortcomings, although it made more sense in "super sad" then w/ milo's myopic whining.

n e way "visit from the goon squad" was p good i thought.

i got about 40 pages into the ask before passing it on to someone else. it's not just that i didn't find anything remotely funny or well written about it (it was sold as both), i actively disliked it.

i thought the ask was really hemmed in by its formal boundaries by the desire to be "funny" and "scathing" & that the dizzy self-conscious idiom he was using made everything really dishonest and terrible

i do think it was well-written though, there were some very clever sentences

maybe the good writing starts where i jumped off but i absolutely agree with your first point from what i read.

Max, some stuff I'm looking forward to:

Philip Roth: Nemesis
The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories: 1000+ pages of 1920s-1940s noir pulp
Antal Szerb: Love in a Bottle -- new translation of short stories from amazing Hungarian writer
Italo Svevo: THe Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl -- novella, from Melville House
Martin McDonagh: A Behanding in Spokane -- new play from 'In Bruges' writer/director
Jen Wang: koko Be Good -- interesting-looking new graphic novel

Max, there's a giant new McSweeneys book coming out. The Instructions by Adam Levin. Don't know if you are aware of it.
I'm gonna wait to check out some reviews before I take on all 1,000 pages of it.

damn cant believe the blurbs that franco's getting... amy hempel? ben marcus??

didn't he go to columbia?

it feels like there's a trend of these like literary novels that humorously treat their heroes as grotesques, like constantly talking about how gross they look and how fat they are and how people don't like them very much

Now I wouldn't say I was gross. I'd say I was fat. I wouldn't want you saying it, though. I'd be very offended, personally, if you were to say it to me. I might have to beat you up ... Fat's funny like that. Fat creeps up on you. How's the waistline, pal? Sister, what's the cellulite score? Ah I must kick it, the fat - the snout, the junk, the trash, all these things that have made me gross.

that franzen bird cover looks better irl (or at least the bird's eye is all hologram-y)

didn't he go to columbia?

yup.

Read a fairly mad article about Franco in one of the papers last week. He's enrolled at four different colleges, does art installations, writes short stories, does General Hospital etc. He's also a teetotaler.

I read a headline about Franzen's new book from USA Today on the office building elevator's ad screen this morning. MY mind's made up.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/jonathan-franzen,44716/

hee:

AVC: When Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Solar, was met with some indifference in America, he suggested that we might have become bored with global warming. In Freedom, a book in part about the environment, a character picks up a copy of McEwan’s novel Atonement and “struggled to interest himself in its descriptions of rooms and plantings…” Are McEwan’s comments and your swipe at Atonement purely coincidence?

JF: I hadn’t read that particular quotation of Ian McEwan’s. But he did say that there were no more major novelists in the United States, except for Philip Roth, now that Updike had died and Mailer had died. That certainly did not go down well with those of us who are still producing the work. But no, that was actually purely objective. I believe the character in question has trouble interesting himself in its descriptions of plantings and architecture. [Laughs.] And I’ve known people who have had that very problem with that book.

odd really as Atonement isn't very much about those things, or it's more noticeably about other things

might as well say, struggled to interest himself in its portrait of the tragic carnival of destruction around Dunkirk!

did anyone read josipovici's book, or glance at it even

reviewed by tom mccarthy in the graun i noticed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/04/gabriel-josipovici-modernism-tom-mccarthy

also, i just read remainder, and huh

what did you think? i didnt enjoy it as much as everyone else it seems