Mini-genres you love

I'm wondering what mini-genres (I'm sure there's a better name for them, but I don't know what it is) everybody here is into: the sort of thing that makes you think about reading a book you might not otherwise have noticed because it's a certain kind of book. For me, for example, I'd say:

1. Set/written in the Austro-Hungarian Empire: there's just so much good stuff

2. Hollywood novels: lots of trash here, but lots of great ones too -- there's omething about the friction/car crash between art and commerce that I find endlessly interesting

3. End of the world novels: again, lots of trash, but for some reason I'm always keen to read about the collapse of civilisation/the world

4. Detailed heist novels: I'm not a huge crime reader, and couldn't give much of a fuck about whodunnit-style books, but give me a Parker-style hesit novel, detailing the planning and then the inevitable derailing, and I'm in

5. Big Dumb Object sci-fi: if it's cleverly thought out (http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/big_dumb_objects), these can give you the genuine Sense of Wonder (http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/sense_of_wonder)

in austro-hungary, there is only one section in any bookstore

Scruffy London alcoholic decline.

Dubby pop from the early nineties - 'Dub Be Good To Me', 'Englishman In New York', 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart' etc... Might put a little mixtape together if anyone can suggest more stuff in that vein.

oh shit, thought this was ILM.

there's also alternative-universe Early Modern England fiction, but I usually start these then struggle a bit.

end of the world novels with detailed heists:

http://tmm.chicagodistributioncenter.com/IsbnImages/9780226141794.jpg

"difficult", abstract, metaphysical sci-fi (borges, arno schmidt, lem, witkiewicz)

add karel capek's "war with the newts" in there too

Witkiewicz's Insatiability is great -- guessing that's what you're referring to clouds

"difficult", abstract, metaphysical sci-fi (borges, arno schmidt, lem, witkiewicz)

― clouds, Thursday, 24 April 2014 16:17 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

have u read tom mccarthy's remainder, it's not really part of this type but it's akin to it

the type delimited by claudio magris' danube, inhabitated by very few others (some of sebald, sort of)

i just like reading books with lots of little parts separated by whitespace that are not poems

gen-x lesbian novels

recommend me some good hollywood novels -- literally the only one I can remember reading is Day of the Locust

Play It as It Lays?

Yeah---also, fitzgeralds the last tycoon, Robert stone: children of light, Gavin lambert: the slide area, stove tesich: Karoo, William Boyd: the new confessions, peter Farrell's (no, really): the comedy writer, Carroll graham: queer people, Darcy O'Brien, A Way of Life, Like Any Other, Horace McCoy: I should have stayed home, Richard Hallas: You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up

Clouds and woof, good ones---and Jordan's right, the de la pava was good for me for that reason

I thought of another one--1940s or 1950s London publishing bottom-feeders

now I could get with that - what falls into it? Simon Raven?

Excellent thread!

LOCKED ROOM MYSTERIES: Locked rooms can also include crime-scenes surrounded by unbroken snow, dead-end streets from which it's impossible a miscreant could have escape etc. Solution is usually a disappointment but look at my WIDE EYES at the beginning. John Dickson-Carr is yerman, but all of the golden age crime writers had locked-room mysteries.

MALIGN PASTORAL: The (mainly English) countryside is not in fact a bucolic crypto-Grecian idyll, but filled with a grotesque and chthonic evil. pre-1900 Machen, the Powys brothers, that strand of English supernatural story that remained when the corporeal tentacled side had extended itself over to the Atlantic. Bits of Betjeman, some John Ireland classical, those early Elizabeth Jane Howard ghost stories, and Denton Welch and Jocelyn Brooke glancingly touch on and are part of this. Chesterton isn't a million miles away in some of his fiction and short stories. The grotesque, with its lineage from the relatively benign Vitruvian forms into the more malign European forms, winds its tendrils through these micro-genre as well. (In fact just writing this makes me wonder whether the Roman grotesque was in part a perversion of the Augustan/Virgilian pastoral.

Scruffy London alcoholic decline. definitely.

ALTERNATE REALITY - SS-GB, PKD, The Alteration, that sort of thing (It Happened Here for the non-literary). Fun watching what the best practitioners do. Extra points for not being about the Nazis winning WWII.

FAILED HEISTS definitely.

Post-War English provincialism - William Cooper of course, but also Amis, Taylor, Pym, Larkin

Religiously allegorical SF - Canticle for Liebowitz, Case of Conscience, Behold the Man etc

Great American Giganticism - The Recognitions by Gaddis, USA by Dos Passos, The Making of Americans by Stein

have u read tom mccarthy's remainder, it's not really part of this type but it's akin to it

― Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln (nakhchivan), Thursday, April 24, 2014 11:44 AM (Yesterday)

no, i'll add it to my list!

would give Alfred Hayes' 'My Face For the World to See' a s/o for decent Hollywood novels.

For a while I was really into Academic Quest Novels - most notable examples of these would probably be A.S. Byatt's Possession, Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels (I recently read a terrible terrible novel called Hallucinating Foucault which admittedly also scratched this perverse itch.)

Not even a mini-genre, but more a sprawling sub-genre is the Feminist Dystopian Speculative Fiction - the two most quintessential works would probably be Joanna Russ's The Female Man and Marge Piercy's Woman On The Edge Of Time, but there's a ton of Octavia Butler and Atwood and Le Guin that happily slots in here.

And of course I will never not have a soft spot for Victorian Women's Incarceration Novels especially those with a spooky or supernatural crypto-lesbian subtext.

Essayistic fiction (or passages that have the feel of an essay) - Borges, Proust, Musil, any breaks to talk about literature or film in novels Qiu Miaojin's Notes of a Crocodile, philosophize, The Aesthetics of Resistance

Novels/stories/passages around suicide or complete and utter entrapment with no way out that hints at it - Thomas Bernhard, the erotics of suicide section in GR, Pavese, Mishima, Kafka, Welch's Diaries, Pessoa, Miaojin I suspect also (she killed herself at 26), leading to exuberant misanthropy, the atomization of language (Celine).

Anything around politics of the Soviet Union, from the 20s to WWII - Platonov, Shamalov, Serge, Mandelstam, or the Spanish Civil War (Vallejo's Spain, Take this cup away from me), Joseph Roth covers that angle from the end of empire, as does Krudy's Sindbad (in a v playful manner)

All these three mini-genres touch on one another.