Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

Refreshing comments on Delmore Schwartz's hand-annotated Finnegan's Wake, a constant and maybe crucial companion from age 17, now downloadable from a link in here---"from swerve of shore" indeed, must finally read FW, also more by this blogger:
http://peterchrisp.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/delmore-schwartzs-wake.html

"A window, not a mirror": Karen Russell on Joy Williams, appropriately enough.The Changeling is being republished, and it's this good, I'm guessing.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-bracing-wisdom-of-joy-williamss-the-changeling

See that Mexican writer Sergio Pitol passed away last week. I've only read 2/3 from his Trilogy of Memory, and this tribute gets to why he is worth a go although nothing I've read about him gets to something more exact.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/16/farewell-sergio-pitol/

Gerald Murnane was given a long profile recently:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/magazine/gerald-murnane-next-nobel-laureate-literature-australia.html

Wow, perfect build, and for once the perfect use of this kind of presentation, thanks.

i enjoyed the new rachel kushner though not as blown away as i was by the flamethrowers. i haven't read much vollman but it reminded me a little of vollman, i guess because san francisco + prostitutes? like vollman meets orange is the new black.

ABN — It Is What It Is
ABN is Z-Ro and his cousin Trae tha Truth, although I guess now they’ve had a falling out? Z-Ro is incredibly underrated and should be way more famous than he is. “Rain” on this album is a killer. It was the soundtrack that played for a whole summer among the lives of some of my interconnected friends, and so it’s weighted with sentiment, nostalgia, and love, even if its message is brutal.

http://nymag.com/strategist/article/rachel-kushner-favorite-things.html

ive never felt more old and washed than getting hip hop recommendations from rachel kushner

I couldn’t get halfway through the flamethrowers. Felt like I’d heard that story before

Anybody here read Dusty Pink?

Read and done and happy:

Chateaubriand - Memoirs
Marina Tsvetaeva - Earthly Signs
Carlo Gadda - Experience of Pain
Sergio Pitol - The Magician of Vienna
Antonio Di Benedetto - Nest in the Bones

---

(Deleted some from the original post from back in Jan as not essential).

NYRB:
Uwe Johnson - Anniversaries
Varlam Shamalov - Kolyma Tales

Penguin:
Dag Solstad - Armand V/T Singer
Svetlana Alexivech - THe Unwomanly Face of War

Other Publishers:
Wolfgang Hilbig -The Tidings of the Trees/The Females
Helen DeWitt - Some Trick
Emily Wilson - The Odyssey
Gerald Murnane - The Plains

― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 21 January 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Adding these as notable new releases. Penguin have been doing good by euro/foreign fiction:

Pavese - The Beautiful Summer
Violette Leduc - The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

(But otherwise maybe Rachel Cusk, as I am bound to see it 2nd hand)

fun read re Murnane, intriguing too---"Is The Next Novel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?":
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/magazine/gerald-murnane-next-nobel-laureate-literature-australia.html

Damn--*Nobel* Laureate, though he is presented here as novel.

Some - to me - quite good and surprising picks in here and, after a quick scroll through, no immediately glaring omissions either, although I'm sure they'll come when I think on it a bit more.

(Of course 18 years is a hilariously short period of time to even think about a canon and even tho it is essentially a click-bait article, it seems like it would be of interest here).

http://www.vulture.com/2018/09/a-premature-attempt-at-the-21st-century-literary-canon.html

I skimmed that earlier today and i was thought to myself that all the things I had heard of seemed so obvious as to be boring choices, and the things I hadn’t heard of made me think I would’ve heard of them if they were all that canonical, and I conclude from these thoughts that I’m a ridiculous person and I should just read some more of these.

I don’t think Never Let Me Go is…good.

That #1 pick is otm though.

I endorse all lists as lists, it’s just nobody would’ve read this if the title were “a list of some recent books we like”

No Wolf in White Van, no The First Bad Man, no The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, no My Year of Rest and Relaxation...

good list, lots there ive meant to read

I’ve only read The Road, Kavalier and Clay and the Potters. Tried to read the Hilton Als but found his prose too cumbersome. The Hate U Give is near the top of my current pile of things to read.

All this proves, I suppose, is that I haven’t read enough contemporary fiction, but Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn and John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester still feel like glaring omissions, to me.

That list is already out of date now that dril has a book out.

There are (at least) about half a dozen items from translated fiction. More if you count items from the last century translated for the first time in this one.

The list is too Anglo and too literary for my tastes.

They include Capital and not Against The Day - well played folks, well played

Including neither would be correct.

A few misses that occurred to me after I posted and books that I really liked from the last 18 years (not sure if they all would arguably qualify for "canonicity" but I'll continue with the idea that this is just a list of v good/"important" books.

I would have included Teju Cole's Open City and Every Day is For the Thief, something by Chris Kraus, Jenny Erpenbeck's Go Went Gone, DeWitt's Lightning Rods, Bolano's By Night in Chile, City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg.

Also people really liked Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and a lot of the reviews I recall referred to it being an Important post-9/11 book as well as A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihra, but I haven't read either.

Agree that it's a very Anglo list and if we accepted new translations, my ballot would look very different. That said, still there's lots here I've also been meaning to read and also a few discoveries that I'm looking forward to further investigating.

Netherland was decent but it certainly wasn't great. And this is coming from ILX's biggest cricket fan

Wonder if Remainder would have made that list a few years ago? Seems like McCarthy's fucked it a bit since.
I'd take any Pynchon from this century above most of this list.
Things you'd expect to be there but aren't - Visit from the Goon Squad? (enjoyed this at the time but cannot remember a thing about it). A Little Life for sure.
the fuck capital.

oh yeah of course Remainder should be there! C was terrible though and it sounds like he hasn't recovered. but that doesn't make Remainder less good

I thought C was ok, really good in parts, but Satin Island I could not manage.

(iirc what I read of Satin Island has bits on cargo cults and… maybe Schrödinger's Cat? If not something similar - like the 2 most absolutely played-out ideasy things you could possibly drop into literary fiction. Maybe it was ironic/intentionally crass? idk, didn't finish. Vaguely intended to start an ILB thread on other similar oooh-that's-deep science/philosophy/anth/etc bits that get repeatedly shoved into lit fiction, but haven't been round enough lately.)

you should start that thread!

ILB can always do with more threads from you woof!

Reckon if we did a poll of this on here the lists would somewhat look similar...with more Pynchon and Darnielle and I would be the sole voter for Hilbig or Winkler. Best left alone.

I'll get round to it!

Omissions keep striking me, just in terms of big books ppl talk(ed) about a lot - no Lethem, no David Mitchell. Maybe just vote splitting for them tho'?

I like it as a list though. For all that I can argue, dissent or pick, it feels like something run up by people who've been through the same arguments as me/one over the last 20 years - the territory is understood, the fights are smaller, ie I/one have/has become the mediocre establishment.

We should run a follow-up to Klaata's books of the noughties in a couple of years' time.

Never Let Me Go is a half-arsed book, and what's Franzen doing on any sort of serious list like this?

List needed to meet statutory minimum requirement of authors named Jonathan.

That Albert Murray inclusion is mental, given everything in it is from the 20th Century. Could just as easily include anything else old that has been reprinted in the last 18 years.

Long, interesting profile of Deborah Eisenberg in The NY Times on the occasion of her new collection:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/magazine/deborah-eisenberg-chronicler-of-american-insanity.html

Very appealing, in an unusual way, the deep delving into wayward selves and the world outside, the course of political decline and awareness of, the struggles, avoidance (wonder if she ever writes about the opposite of that avoidance, obsession with politics onscreen). Very thoughtful and deft writing, although he makes a bit much of her age (c'mon, 72).

I don't want to say "relationship goals" but uh…relationship goals

some interesting-looking things shortlisted for the Goldsmith's Fiction Prize this year:

Kudos by Rachel Cusk (Faber)
Murmur by Will Eaves (CB Editions)
In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne (Headline)
The Cemetery in Barnes by Gabriel Josipovici (Carcanet)
Crudo by Olivia Laing (Faber)
The Long Take by Robin Robertson (Picador)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/sep/26/novel-senses-of-new-the-2018-goldsmiths-prize-for-fiction-shortlist

I'm interested in Murmer. I was interested in The Cemetery in Barnes too but I read a preview of it and that put me off slightly.

I want to read Rachel Cusk but every time I pick up Outline I recoil anew at the inexplicable choice of Optima as a body font. Not to like shit on Zapf but it looks all wrong.

actually, more than slightly. it struck me as being quite artificially "refined" in a similar way to the dreaded Ishiguro. xpost

i liked Murmur - a James Morrison recommendation. Just started Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (2016), which 20 pages in is really excellent. Tho i’m aware that the almost algorithmic arbitrary strangeness of the youngest thomas the tank engine board books might seem excellent after forbidden line by paul stanbridge (2016).

in that list great to see dewitt (obv) & maggie nelson. also - cosign woof on satin island, which no matter how much tolerance you may be able to gen up by framing it in intentional cheapness (there’s a little wiggle room for that reading) was crap.

Goon Squad, yes. i know it got mixed reviews from people on here, but i liked it.

and i liked against the day, big messy and fun.

oh and i do want to read cusk after that review in the lrb.

josipovici i really react against in what is possibly an unfair way. i’ve only read everything passes and a bit of goldberg:variations. the first was quite striking in some respects - broken prose incantation (ie kind of looks like a poem on the page but isn’t). but it also seemed pompous - that is to say its manner suggested a high level of importance which was in the end it seemed to me as much if not more tonal than in terms of the subject matter. i wrote a little about it here.

goldberg i couldn’t get on with at all. it seemed supremely and unjustifiably satisfied with its own cleverness. my response if it were a person would be “yes i suppose you are but the problem is i don’t like you very much”. i realise this is not good lit crit and i would like to break down exactly how that response is constituted in the text. but it will do for now.

I like it.

jeez i loved satin island wtf

really hated goon squad though especially the heavily footnoted chapter from the perspective of the bitter journalist who assaults someone. just a bunch of lazily-written short stories arbitrarily bent into each other

i guess i can see how satin island could be a little overweighted with cliché "deep" anthropological ideas but idk the writing was so good, i got pretty caught up in it

wow i hate most of the books on this vulture list lol

the line of beauty yes absolutely but the goldfinch uuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh