Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

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

I don't quite like those Kushner sentences, something very labored about them. I also don't like that Rakoff title. I don't like anything anymore.

Yuck
http://www.npr.org/2013/08/06/207429956/exclusive-first-read-marisha-pessls-night-film?utm_source=&utm_medium=tumblr&utm_campaign=20130805

A large chandelier showered golden light on the crowd as I surveyed the party in the bronze mirror over the mantel. I was startled to spot someone I barely recognized: myself. Blue button-down, sports jacket, third or fourth drink — I was losing count — leaning against the wall like I was holding it up. I looked like I wasn't at a cocktail party but an airport, waiting for my life to take off.

this is a thread for literary fiction

Just warning people y'all are gonna have this book shoved down your throat next couple months

Her debut was enjoyable, tbf.

Sure--just think that opening paragraf is yuck

'physical description of main character through medium of them seeing themself in a mirror' is such a feeb move tbh

'calamity physics' was sort of garbage, not as good as clear-eyed as curtis sittenfield's 'prep' but more elaborate

nothing enjoyable abt her debut tbf

on the other hand i'm sure she's a lovely person with many positive qualities

"Her name was Jeannie, but no sane man would ever dream of her."
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oof

Whoops, I'm in the wrong thread

can't believe you quoted this section and left the punchline out wf:

"A large chandelier showered golden light on the crowd as I surveyed the party in the bronze mirror over the mantel. I was startled to spot someone I barely recognized: myself. Blue button-down, sports jacket, third or fourth drink — I was losing count — leaning against the wall like I was holding it up. I looked like I wasn't at a cocktail party but an airport, waiting for my life to take off.

Infinitely delayed."

ugh sorry I felt bad enough

David Rakoff's Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish is astounding. I cried maybe four times and laughed out loud too many times to count. Also, more than a bit poignant when I realized, after the fact, that I was reading it on the first year anniversary of his death.

is there a substantive discussion of st aubyn around these parts anywhere, i feel like he's come up ~ a dozen times but never for long, anyway rather tragically i am reading them because they are cheap in fopp

i don't think they're the sort of books that inspire substantive discussion really

there's a paragraph in 'bad news' where patrick, on quaaludes, holds up a pastry and says or thinks "this pastry is 'out of control'", that for a second made me think i was reading taipei again

If you have a Kindle, "The Flamethrowers" is just $2 right now: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B008J4NBHI/ref=nosim/themillions-20

yeah, I just bought it. They had her first book for the same price last month and I really dug it.

almost done with The Flamethrowers, really enjoying it

trying to figure out what kind of real life bar was the inspiration for "Rudy's"

at first it seems like a dive but then there's descriptions of it having red neon art installations and stuff

I can read now guys, thx for the concern tho

trying to figure out what kind of real life bar was the inspiration for "Rudy's"

at first it seems like a dive but then there's descriptions of it having red neon art installations and stuff

funnily enough the very next book I picked up (Patti Smith's "Just Kids") answered my question, it's Max's Kansas City

"We eventually graduated to the back room and sat in a corner under the Dan Flavin fluorescent sculpture, washed in red light ..."

Read this interview:

Filer, who still does shifts on mental health wards, insists the book isn't specifically about schizophrenia, nor the NHS. But he did feel a responsibility to "not propagate myths". Of all mental health diagnoses, schizophrenia is often the most stigmatised. "Broadly speaking," he says, "people hang on to that Jekyll and Hyde, split personality idea, which is not part of the diagnosis. It's not even nominally a part of it. And there's a misrepresentation of violence as well – which is not to say that violence can't be a part of it, but it's overrepresented in the media, especially the tabloids."

Why can't you not "propagate myths" in a work of fiction?

Started Harvest by Jim Crace. The opening does not bode well for me -- really heavy on "voice" and labored "beautiful" prose imo. The narrator does not sound like a person. Opening to a random page:

"Still, there was essential work to finish yesterday, whatever our distractions. If we hoped for sufficient grain to last the year, we'd have to deserve it with some sweat. This summer's yield was not yet good enough. Plenty, here, has wed itself to Leanness. At the lower, shaded limits by the dell and on the more neglected stony slopes our plants have proven miserly." It's fine writing, and yet it's so fucking CRAFTED that I almost can't take it.

trying to figure out what kind of real life bar was the inspiration for "Rudy's"

at first it seems like a dive but then there's descriptions of it having red neon art installations and stuff

― dmr, Thursday, November 21, 2013 12:03 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've never actually been there, but are you sure it's not Rudy's, the famous Hell's Kitchen bar also mentioned by Steely Dan -- ("I saw you at Rudy's, you were very high")?

pynchon/murakami

I'm going to buy 3 popular fiction books with which to engage in a reading practice. it ishard for me not to just ascerrtain a vagueness about the book as a whole, without the ability to explore the ideas. i am a materialist, so that is normal for me

Wasn't Rudy's in New Haven, was it?

i loved the flamethrowers. only disappointments are that the italy stuff turned out to be a much slighter portion (and less action-packed) than i had anticipated, and that there weren't more sex scenes (the hookup with ronnie fontaine got me all het up) i loved all the stories people told, i'm a sucker for that kinda self-mythologizing, conversational anecdote. reminded me of Open City by Teju Cole in the way the narrator is revealed to you more through their own observations than their actions: you never really hear reno speak in a conversation, underlining how shy she is, the feeling of being in the company of people who don't accept you and all the subtle dismissals that she ingeniously but silently decodes. i know you're supposed to think they're jerks but i really liked sandro & ronnie, i felt their ennui relatable and their sense of humour and playfulness admirable

there def was a dive named rudys in new haven, it still sortof exists but moved spaces and is now like a gentrified sit down restaurant/bar

the flame thrower rudy's is closest to max's KC i think

i never really noticed how little reno speaks until i saw it pointed out in a review and i was like, huh

http://nplusonemag.com/world-lite

^ discussed this anywhere here? v much follows from args against university fiction/writing programs that we've seen but crosses it w/a disdain for the direction of politics post -'89.

Interesting to contrast this w/world music, which hardened into a genre years before the cold war ended.

What I really liked the most was that it wouldn't pan a writer for being this or that. Ngugi teaches; Naipul doesn't, they both have good and bad things about them (and whether they become bad or good isn't exactly because they teach or not, or it isn't always clear-cut).

Just loved the run-on discussion of writers. Probably the first article I've read where I felt like picking up a Salman Rushdie book, or Naipul. Some of the writers they talk up as displaying 'internationalist' tendencies sound good, but one or two win prizes: Girish Karnad seems to display both things...and Yan Lianke has been forced underground, it doesn't sound like he moved there for lifestyle reasons.

The only sour note was the disdain for 2666. "Appalling" I suppose that novel is a puzzle that doesn't resolve, a lot of it is there, statically sitting around, but its part of the dashed off judgement that I so like.

Their model is v much hard-left and modernist - but modernism is a complicated set of people and things coming from a left and right ideology as they know v well. Still most of the writers they list sound quite appealing so I'll try and find a few things. The plot of Lianke's Lenin's Kisses is absurdity on the level of Platonov.

It still is about the sentences.

Really into "The Blazing World" by Siri Hustvedt, though only about halfway through. Never read anything by her before. Vaguely similar to "The Flamethrowers" in that it's about a female artist and how she's perceived in the masculine art world but very different tonally, a lot more knotty and varied.

hahaha she seriously called her book that? good on her i guess

She's fantastic. Although it gets on my nerves that all her characters exist in this world where everyone is either a writer or an artist or a creative of some sort. It's a bit smug in large doses.

Until I read that New Yorker profile of Lydia Davis a couple months ago, I had no idea Siri Husvedt had written a novel about Davis's son (w/Paul Auster) and the "Party Monster" murder