Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

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

Fun take down of Freedom from the Atlantic, by the infamous B.R. Meyers. Kind of stupid, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Jonathan Franzen’s juvenile prose creates a world in which nothing important can happen.

http://i55.tinypic.com/13yh2tg.jpg

I wonder why they let that dickhead review Freedom in the first place--doesn't seem like his cup of tea.

Elif Batuman on MFAs in the LRB. this one's blowing up the tumblrs.

thx thomp, will read

I just read Mr Peanut (Adam Ross) and am really struggling to decide what I thought of it. Anyone else read it?

just read Skippy Dies, it was entertaining but not sure why it was a booker prize nominee exactly.

I've got C here to read once I read everything else I have to read.

that Elif Batuman article in the LRB is pretty awesome. i don't agree with everything she says but i mostly love the way she says it.

i did like remainder a great deal, by the way. and laughed maybe more than i'd expected to, at stuff like the cappucinos in the airport. but: i'd read that very long zadie smith article on remainder and netherland and so reading the former was a little like following an argument you've already had summarized to you: you appreciate the lucidity and depth of it, but it's not going to come as a surprise.

a lot of the stuff in that batuman article is kind of fallacious, i think, the stuff that's like:

i. the guy in the book says workshop fiction is x, y, and z; also it invented a, b, and c
ii. actually a, b, and c were already around; also x, y, and z are shitty things to be
iii. therefore workshop fiction is awful

which only works if you accept proposition i.

that said it's a good piece. i guess. ehh.

i for some reason had missed the hype over remainder so i came at it without having heard about how good it was or anything and was pretty "blown away"

i realized later that i had read mccarthys book on tintin (which i thought was quite good, especially for a pop-lit-crit book of that kind!) a few years earlier. it made sense--the same um critical concerns show up in each book

man I was getting all excited about the microscripts and so I read the Tanners to sort of get my bearings about this dude and that is just not what I wanna be reading. there are moments of real humor and nicely sketched scenes but the book is basically people making long speeches about opinions they'll no longer hold as soon as they're done expressing them...for 350 pages.

sounds like old ilx

admit that you edited that down from "sounds like aerosmith on the rolling politics thread"

thomp, she's doesn't say x y & z are shitty things to be just that there are many other things to be, i think. i read it quickly so i missed bits and couldn't get my head round other bits but i was impressed by it.

I do like Walser, so I'm still tempted by Microscripts. I just hope it's not one of those books where the story of how the book came to be is more interesting than the book itself.

it's just stories.

Read the Elif piece a couple of days ago: skimming through it again isn't it saying that workshop fiction apes 'a b & c', that were already around, but it has sorta codified them in a way (by dehistoricising and adding ethnicity and guilt, for example) as to place fiction in a vacuum of sorts?

I guess I agree that good writing as in nice sentences, etc. doesn't translate into good books or fiction. Which is quite basic, to me. One hopes Elif is an SF and pulpy noir fan like the rest of us.

read mccarthy's C and eh I don't know. I thought this dude was supposed to be all "postmodern" but this seemed like your basic "dude saunters through various representative historical situations" (I don't really know how to express this but where the time period is exhibited by the main character experimenting with radio, fighting in WWII, going to a seance, being in Egypt as the country gains its independence and the British Empire collapses) novel. I feel like I was missing something big.

Also I haven't read Remainder but everyone says it's funny, and there was like almost no trace of humor in C at all. It was interesting enough that I finished it but overall it left me cold.