Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

fwiw something ive been thinking its that it can be really hard to see the unheralded gems and worthwhile oddities of yr own time sorta by definition. and yeah part of that is that like the times book review and middlebrow lit mags and stuff are p focused on respectable, 'safe' authors like franzen or egan or even mccarthy who are generally operating w/in well-defined boundaries.

its obv not impossible, but compared to music or film finding weird, good novels just seems more difficult imo and like the whole 'alternate cannon' nyrb 'lost classics' type of thing seems to require a bit of distance and settling of the waters in order to happen? idk

i think you are right and i think that's also something we got into on the y kant shakey mo read thread

the real problem is that yr talking about a clutch of artists who were *already vetted* by the lit establishment before any of us on this thread were reading grownup novels. so when you talk about "places to start" and worrying about "hating them," yr essentially complaining about not wanting to do yr own work. i am sure there were people plowing through the grove and olympia backlists back then because they were turned onto one of the heavy-hitters and had to slog through a bunch of late-modernist/early-postmodernist garbage to find them gems.

― strongohulkingtonsghost, Friday, June 25, 2010

not that i blame anyone for "not wanting to do their own work" because obviously reading an unknown, hard, dense, new novel takes a lot more time/effort than spinning an unknown, hard, dense, new album.

hey which thread is that? it's come up before, & doesn't list when i search 'shakey'. just i am drawn if it's a thread about why someone can't finish a book/has reading issues.

xxp re: 'y kant shakey read'

it's hidden under this p. hilarious deadpan title

new novels and why they suck and whatever

ohhhh wait i got it, new novels & why they suck
xp ha thank you

n/a have you read correction by thomas bernhard I will rec that book until I die read that ok

there is a guy writing for film comment atm agitating for greater reevaluation & investigation of potentially anonymous work in cinema - says a lot of the 'spadework' of canon formation needs to be done because it was sort of hasty & succinct.

I like sad germans mostly

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Friday, June 25, 2010 11:35 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

There is a post on m. john harrison's blog where he says that Literary Fiction is ultimately another genre with the same problems of repetitiveness, formulas, uninspired writing,etc. as any genre, but it gets a pass from most people because it is Literature Therefore Not A Genre. Which is basically what Lamp and some others said upthread.

it's a common lament of genre fiction writers! i'm not sure i trust it

the submerged and necessary counterpart to that argument is that it then follows that saying 'this novel about an academic couple divorcing is short on big ideas' is just as point-missing a criticism as 'this trilogy about the colonisation of jupiter is missing any in depth characterisation e.g. of an academic couple getting a divorce'

I just read this which I enjoyed - it's just an afternoon's reading really, I did sort of lose the thread but that was more my fault than the book's (I read the first half on a flight, then didn't get back to it until two days later and because it's a single continuous narrative that can be read in a sitting it kinda demands that). It is very very much a novel about the mind and a single idea within a single mind being pursued and exposed, and it manages to cover several moods within a short space pretty remarkably.

but you did specify "in English" - I think 60+% of my reading is stuff in translation, English isn't popping as hard as for example Spanish right now imo.

Usually I don't trust it, thomp, but mjh can walk the walk, and I don't think he would fall into the trap of either of those two approaches.

Actually in the current Harper's one of the BK Jonathans- Lethem, of course- ruefully regrets deserting his genre-writing buddies and going mainstream. He misses those guys and their intelligent, informed conversations but realizes you can't go home again and ultimately wishes his sci-fi buddies could be a little less nerdy about being excluded from the big kids's table and his Literary friends could lighten up and learn what a slide rule is for, or something like that.

it must have been so hard for jonathan, getting paid to think about that

I wish Lethem would go back to writing genre stuff

did anyone read his monograph on 'they live!' yet

dammit, had to google to be sure

When I want to find about about new novels not in the NYTBR vein I read the reviews in the back of Review of Contemporary Fiction, the journal from Dalkey Archive.

feels like there hasn't been any literary fiction i've been interested in reading in a loooong time. what have i missed?

its 5 years old now, but i just finished "the gathering" by anne enright and i loved it

what's good

and recent

also, does anyone have a list of shit that's coming out soon?

too easy to find shit without assistance

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_4INBIsBDDXM/S984ThAaySI/AAAAAAAACEg/YOBdjIduqlI/s400/1940s+SHINOLA+Shoe+Polish+vintage+illustration+advertisement.jpg

Actually James Salter has a new book coming out which I am looking forward to, and should fit anyone's definition of Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction although I am afraid that he may be viewed, along my other ILB lost causes, Evan S. Connell and Gilbert Sorrentino, as a minor writer. (Not even going to mention Thomas Berger)

did anyone else read "the flamethrowers" by rachel kushner? best new literary fiction i've read this year

i'm in the middle of reading it with the caveat that instead of reading it i keep reading other, easier books about zombies and magicians and despair instead

you should see if ilx poster 'thomp' has something to say though

my only real problem with it is that i keep reading sentences of it and thinking of writerly people using the word 'scaffolding' and feeling lost

lol i don't have anything to say about it except you asked me if i'd read it. i still haven't

only heard good things about this book

enjoyed the james salter, and have LOVED several of his earlier novels, but this felt oddly like something pulled out of a set of drawers kept locked since 1957

ok, kushner's pretty good

like so much of it seems like it ought to seem piled on way too thick but just kind of works

"I remember a rainbow spectrum of men's wing tips parked in rows, triple-A narrow, the leather dyed snake green, lemon yellow, and unstable shades of vermilion and Ditto-ink blue. All of humanity dresses in uniforms of one sort or another, and these shoes were for pimps."

yeah

ok now i am like 120 pages in my estimation of this has shot up to really really fucking good. something about the parallel of valera's dad's superhighway and the line reno is making in the salt flats for the sake of land art pushes some great pynchonian buttons, though at the same time this manages like conventional empathy and subject-position stuff i don't normally expect to happen in the same book as the other sort of thing

john dogg is a p good artist name

haha 'subject-position stuff'

"A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them."

Enjoying the Kushner a lot, even the bits in New York where not much seems to be happening are infinitely readable on a sentence level.

We'd eaten lotus paste buns on a cold, damp, November day, on which the sun shone and the rain fell simultaneously, the strange, rosy-gold light of this contradiction intensifying the colors around us as we walked, the fruit and vegetables in vendors' bins, green bok choys, smooth sunset-colored mangoes packed into cases, spiny durian fruits in their nets, crushed ice tinged with fish blood.

ha does she mention lotus paste buns again seventy pages later because everything is densely patterned or did she just forget, do u think

sometimes people just eat the same stuff

in fact most times

nah she like makes a thing of it

j you should take a look at this book sometime

waiting for the pb; inconveniently sized hardback

Anyone read David Rakoff's Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish yet? I'm fourth in line for it at the library and hoping to get it before school goes back.

the uk hb of this has the worst jacket and i was putting off reading it for that reason but the boards are actually cool

Got the Rakoff coming in the post