Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

has anyone read/can recommend any of these? http://www.believermag.com/issues/201103/?read=believer_book_award

i remember the reason i read 'remainder' was cuz it won their book of the year award 1 year

― just sayin, Wednesday, 2 March 2011 19:48 (2 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

next by james hynes was the winner fwiw

I'm intrigued by the description of "Next" so I put a hold on it at my library. I live in Austin, so I want to see how he portrays it (although I usually hate (and love to hate) evocations of "Austin-ness").

just came here to bump this

can't even remember the last novel i read -- pathetic

has anything else been getting really hyped recently besides the pale king?

'swamplandia!' got a lot of good press & is i think the big 'must read' that isnt dfw. although i wasnt a huge fan. jean thompson's 'the year we left home' has also been really well reviewed & i think its fantastic. chris adrian's new book is a modern retelling of a midsummer's night dream & its... idk, not 'great' but i kind of loved it? teju cole's 'open city' has a lot of buzz amongst ppl i know/read but im not sure how widely read/acclaimed its been? it got a review in the newyorker. in translation new directions has a couple of interesting contemp titles - jenny erpenbeck's 'visitation' and lászló krasznahorkai's 'animalinside'. i think the latter has some good press the former is just the best thing ive read all year.

can you slow down a bit Lamp, please? I can't even note down the titles quick enough let alone read the damn things. Resistance of Melancholy has been staring reproachfully at me from my desk for the last couple of weeks. Soon it will be time to take it back to the library.

xpost yeah i read karen russell's book of short stories + wasnt really into it. i havent heard of that jean thompson book! i enjoyed 'the childrens hospital' so will be looking for that new chris adrian. 'visitation' still sitting on the shelf.

i got visitation on yr rec, lamp, but i just couldn't get into it - i think i got maybe halfway through and then i bought a bunch of other books and started reading those instead.

sorry :/

i thought it was good, if that helps

haha it's ok - i don't think it's a bad book by any means, it just isn't my kind of book.

Well my library got a hold of Books Burn Badly by Manuel Rivas. It has had some rave reviews (I didn't have to fill out a ILL card for this!) - more importantly, it seems to be the kind of book about a topic that I'm drawn to: namely the hijacking of literature/culture by surrounding political forces in a time and place where abosolutely everything is about to fall apart (see Bolano).

Yes I do have a life, just not a too interesting one OKAY!

About to start.

Ernesto Sabato's The Tunnel is getting a reissue. A novel I have wanted to read for quite a while.

i really dug the excerpt of swamplandia in the new yorker. at least i think it was an excerpt. might have to check that out.

i read shane jones' light boxes today. i think it was the worst thing i have read all year.

been wondering abt that... i remember mr que stanning for it + i added it to my amazon wish list but have never clicked buy

Ernesto Sabato's The Tunnel is getting a reissue. A novel I have wanted to read for quite a while.

I dug this quite a bit.

there was a piece on el pais on him on account of his centenary that made me think of him again. i've never read him, but he wrote very few novels so not exactly hard to get through them. my main problem is getting to spanish language books in britain, but i expect this can be overcame just by paying a price.

also, he sounds grim.

haha for a minute my mind went to the gass novel

sorry i led anyone astray with light boxes. i dug it a lot. i dig this guy, too, he's a new discovery for me:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/books/review/Hoffman-t.html

mr. que have read/heard much about jesse ball's 'the curfew'? im interested in purchasing it but reviews have been mixed & no one i know has read it

yeah, i just read a thing in the new yorker that sealed the deal for me, something about "an inverted skyscarper plunging hundreds of feet underground" sounds pretty rad. there's a cool interview on the millions with the dude, too

not to mention this

http://www.themillions.com/2011/07/most-anticipated-the-great-second-half-2011-book-preview.html

skyscraper, not skyscarper

haha skimming that im reminded of how fantastic (wordplay!) i thought stephen millhauser's 'dangerous laughter' was. its also making me feel bad about how dismissive ive been of contemp writing this year, theres so much stuff i havent bothered to read or even think of reading. i was however vaguely aware there was a new ann patchett novel out

yeah the only real new thing i've read in a while is "The Pale King" and it was really really boring, terrible, awful, sad (not in a good way sad.)

ty for that link que -- i love kate christensen & didnt know she had a new book out!

other than the big names (baker, stephenson maybe, eugenides) im interested in the dana spiotta book

hey mr que sorry to be overly dismissive of the shane jones book

i was sort of on-the-fence about it until we got to february as writer-figure, it was then stuck for me both as generically like something i'd read before and very specifically like i. the people of paper (and i didn't even like that book much) ii. someone trying to 'do' ben marcus ?? which anyway i then started rereading notable american women and i like it way less than i remembered liking it, so either i'm not really in the mood for this stuff or my tastes have shifted away from it, oh well

I like César Aira a lot, though How I Became a Nun was my least favorite of everything I've read by him (which is everything in English translation, or 1% of his overall writing I think).

a year later and i'm still not reading fiction -- is there a literary fiction Book of the Summer? (or Book of 2011?) :-/

i want to get back to reading fiction but it's all non-fiction over here

still haven't read the pale king, although i want to -- i read that interview book twice though

i want to read that tea obreht book too

bump for the not 12:13 am at night crowd :)

mr. que have read/heard much about jesse ball's 'the curfew'? im interested in purchasing it but reviews have been mixed & no one i know has read it

just read this over the weekend, it was just okay, nothing special. read like a long short story. not very memorable, sorry.

that's handy, i was pondering whether to get or not, but i'll save the money

i ended up really liking dana spiotta's 'stone arabia' although i think its the sort of book thats too slight to really sustain scrutiny or mass affection, if that makes any sense

i also really enjoyed denis johnson's 'train dreams' which i think is mb the most lucid and thoughtful book of his ive read, certainly since 'fiskadoro'

Yeah, Train Dreams was really nice. Though I've only read this and Nobody Move, I'm going to have to get me some more of him.

whats up with this baseball book

what about this book

ALL MY FRIENDS ARE SUPERHEROES

is this 'quirky twee fiction' or something?

whats up with this baseball book

― just sayin, Tuesday, 13 September 2011 11:31 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

the harbach, right. yeah i am looking forward to it.

is

The Family Fang

o my bbcode blows. i not q!

Family Fang was pretty standard dysfunctional family contemporary lit. It had its moments though and is a pretty fast read.

i guess it was a little "lighter"/less overwrought than franzen e.g.

anyone read the new amy waldman? or house of holes? curious about both.

'house of holes' is not as bad as 'the anthologist'

kinda curious about the art of fielding since it's getting so much press but also it sounds like fairly middle-of-the-road contemporary lit

ha i liked the anthologist a lot but house of holes sounds gross

kinda curious about the art of fielding since it's getting so much press but also it sounds like fairly middle-of-the-road contemporary lit

i was too until i read an interview or two with the dude, he loves franzen i guess, so i'm a little less enthusiastic now

Who knows, it still could be good. . . but still. I hated the Corrections.

http://www.theawl.com/2011/09/a-conversation-with-chad-harbach-author-of-the-art-of-fielding

What don’t you like that he’s written?
My least favorite of his books is Strong Motion. You can probably point to some parts of Strong Motion that I don’t like, but Freedom and The Corrections are two of my favorite books in recent history.

am reading the amy waldman, only a short way through; so far it's good, there have been points that have seemed pat - from what i gather it's pretty sprawling, and some of the characters so far seem p simply drawn - but i'll only know by finishing it whether that's sorta besides the point.