new novels and why they suck and whatever

awesome, thank you!

any suggestions for "historical fantasy that is not about vampires in the '40s"

― plax (ico), Friday, 25 June 2010 18:39 (1 hour ago)

Guy Gavriel Kay does this and is also completely awesome. 'Lions of Al-Rassan' is a historical re-imagining of medieval Spain. 'Sailing to Sarantium' and 'Lord of Emperors' is the Byzantine empire, etc. Excellent stuff.

Ha, I say this with much love, but this is sort of like the Geir Hongro approach, right? "Why would you NOT want to use more chords?"

lol that's a fair point in some ways but I think the difference is where Geir wants to see things confined to a specific ideal, to me the more experimental/non-linear/unconventional approach is preferable because it simply gives the writer a much broader palette to work with - it's more like why NOT use all the tools at your disposal to make the most engrossing work possible? why limit yourself to a fairly restrictive and conventional format? I'll readily acknowledge that it can be very rewarding to work within self-imposed restrictions (well-worn genre conventions for ex.) and this is true across a lot of different media; set up some rules and it's fun to see what you can do with them. But in general my position is that it's more interesting for me when writers are breaking these rules or not adhering to standard narrative conventions and that that results in a wider, more diverse range of authorial voices, because it allows each writer to develop something more unique, something more indelibly their own. Burroughs and Nabokov are worlds apart, for example, even though both took extensive liberties with the novel form.

xp

ooh someone else I've neglected to mention who was also something of a formal dazzler and could do both super-straightforward conventional narratives as well as weirder stuff: Naguib Mahfouz (also not American)

t's more like why NOT use all the tools at your disposal to make the most engrossing work possible?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/410191RD07L._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

And just like with music or anything else, any statement that "everything is like X" is probably refutable with a rich niche of something that is absolutely NOT like X.

and that's really the purpose of this thread, in the end - prove me wrong and point me to things to read! which I am grateful for

xp

Might also want to check out Dalkey Archive Press, they put out tons of "experimental" stuff, some reissues, some not

what do you think of poets who rhyme shakey

yeah I never read House of Leaves, what I heard was that it was a bit of a slog, altho I was curious...

there's a sequel on the way i think

alternately: why dont musicians use every instrument and time signature at their disposal

what do you think of poets who rhyme shakey

gotta be iambic pentameter or nothing

alternately: why dont musicians use every instrument and time signature at their disposal

imho any musician who doesn't do this is an idiot. any musician who tries to cram them all into one song/piece, however, doesn't know anything about composing.

sorry shakey but the ilm parallel here is not geir, it's more like l0u1s jagg3r saying "why would you NOT want to create 20 minute songs that jump genres 50 times?"

great writing on a sentence level trumps crazy narratives imo, and i like narrative experimentalism

xps

Oh, wait, I just looked over the paragraph of exclusions and it's also got Lydia Davis and Sam Lipsyte, both of whom I like, and both of whom I'm guessing were nixed based on being relatively super-popular already.

Here is one of my favorite stories by Lydia Davis, in its entirety.

Happiest Moment
If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English-language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say that the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

(I am obsessed with the neatness of how it loops back through the syntax at the beginning; there's no meaningful reason that should please me so much but I'm totally fixated on the neatness of it)

xpost - I know what you mean, Shakey, but you're kinda broadening the palette by rejecting major parts of the palette, aren't you? Also, just like with music, the existing palette is already part of how things work, part of what readers care about. I feel like if I applied your argument to music, I wouldn't be able to listen to anything but experimental music and noise, and possibly not even that. But guitar-pop and hip-hop and reggae and dance music are all pretty great too, and can be inventive in a billion different ways beyond radical obvious formal changes. There is a plenty of meaningful and interesting stuff going on in literature that's not just about big obvious formal techniques. That's sort of the point. (And I say that as someone who has really shared your love of big formal inventions -- I spent college really into metafiction and OuLiPo and John Barth and Borges. But there are other ways to be just as inventive.)

aww damn, why is the code text not wrapping? the story is this:

If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English-language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say that the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

i just read about some new book where like every page is a facebook profile or some shit, i'm sure it's brilliant

lol

but you're kinda broadening the palette by rejecting major parts of the palette, aren't you? Also, just like with music, the existing palette is already part of how things work, part of what readers care about.

I agree that there's certain things that writers simply cannot and should not get away from - as Dan pointed upthread, people like STORIES and if you don't have an absorbing story underpinning whatever else you're trying to do, then it isn't going to work. Same goes for Jordan's point about the writing at a sentence level. There are basic things people want out of reading, and those shouldn't be discounted because really they're pretty basic to human culture. we like to read about love, about triumph over adversity, about mysteries, etc. and those things shouldn't really be sacrificed. But the vehicle that delivers those things can take any number of forms, the possibilities are near infinite, so its weird/disconcerting/boring to me when so many writers seem to settle for so little.

finally found it! it's called visit from the goon squad:

http://blog.taragana.com/e/2010/06/10/in-a-visit-from-the-goon-squad-novelist-writes-serious-fiction-for-facebook-generation-139574/

“A Visit From the Goon Squad” in its way resembles the kind of social novel that Charles Dickens once cranked out regularly. It features more than a dozen disparate but vivid characters, from a powerful businessman to a Latin American dictator to a group of teenage punk rockers; and the action ranges over five decades and three continents.

But Egan has abandoned the straightforward narrative that marks most socially minded novels in favor of a series of linked stories that jump around in time and space and between a set of characters with sometimes tenuous connections. It calls to mind nothing so much as the fragmentary experience of surfing the Web.

I mean I'm not interested in innovation for the sake of innovation (either in music or in writing), it needs to be in the service of some larger, more fundamental goal or there's no potential for any kind of real emotional engagement

xp

I haven't read it but isn't that girl with dragon tattoo series that has a bajillion holds on it pretty outre?

nah they're pretty straight crime thrillers with a few twists and quirks ... lead character is "different" but I wouldn't call it outre

I liked Dragon Tattoo but Book 2 was the one I was talking about upthread as being disappointing to me (Girl Who Played w/ Fire)

shakey otm

liked Tree of Smoke but I'm a huge Denis Johnson fan and would recommend almost any of his other books over that one. it's pretty damn long and the Denis Johnson-y moments were too few and far between for it to be really great.

this is the only new book i want to read right now:

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kzpq62Dqat1qz87jlo1_500.jpg

there's plenty of great literature that doesn't have much on the "story" level, for what it's worth

Shakey, when you put it in those abstract terms, it's pretty difficult to disagree with. The question is what looks like innovation to you. Your sense of invention or innovation is going to be different depending on your level of attention, and what you're paying attention to. For instance, I'm guessing there are things you find brilliant and inventive in music that someone who pays zero attention to music would have no real ability to recognize or understand.

The kind of invention you're talking about is a really noticeable one -- it's huge surface technical stuff. I don't say that to be snobby. I'm just telling you that there are a billion other avenues of invention, so you might feel like a writer is "settling" when they're actually doing amazing things with prose or perspective or meaning or style. Like the great stuff about that Lydia Davis story I posted isn't just the big formal fact that it's super-short.

The use of time signatures as an analogy strikes me as pretty telling, actually, because isn't the lit equivalent of time signatures a bunch of stuff about pacing and prose that is wildly different from writer to writer, or even across a single work by one writer? Writers are using all the time signatures! It just asks you to notice a little.

Anyway though I really do wonder if you'd enjoy that one David Markson book, possibly others.

i don't get how she wrote that story, unless she cooked the duck

wait that's a joke right? I was on the verge of explaining the story like a dumbass

fwiw I think that Lydia Davis bit is great - compact, very slyly done, but also sweet and human

Lipsyte's star has been very slowly rising one reader at a time for ages - seems like everybody who gets asked "what's interesting & good that people don't hear as much about?" mentions Lipsyte - I think a Big Moment is his for the taking if he feels like it

also he's not a novelist but this thread seems like the kinda thread where somebody ought to point out that Gary Lutz is maybe some kind of a genius

he's on that "20 emerging" list I linked, one of the few on the list proper that I've read any of

re: the duck story, You'd probably have to explain the story to me -- the way I read it it seemed like the author was responding to a "what is your favorite story that you wrote" survey, so she wrote one there on the spot because she really liked the idea of a domestic bond over vicarious duck-eating -- that's her special place in her head she goes to when she's feeling low or whatever, and she never had an opportunity to verbalize that idea until the story prompt came along.

i think it was like the guys favourite thing that happened to him was something that happpened to someone else, the story she wrote was written by someone else

like at first your confused and then the internal logic takes hold of the whole

key is that "favorite story she has written" can be unpacked a few different ways

Lipsyte's star has been very slowly rising one reader at a time for ages - seems like everybody who gets asked "what's interesting & good that people don't hear as much about?" mentions Lipsyte - I think a Big Moment is his for the taking if he feels like it

― get your bucket of free wings (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Friday, June 25, 2010 5:19 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think its his big moment right now!

the ask is totally worth picking up fwiw

lydia davis also has a very very nice-looking hardcover of her collected stories AVAILABLE NOW that i really want to get but its thirty bones and i own most of the stories in other collections

I guess, for me the things that are "critically acclaimed" always seem so safe, where do people read about new books that are stranger or at least not Yann Martel-ey

But what about _The Age of Wire and String_, which appeared in the third post of the thread and was never mentioned again? This was hugely critically acclaimed, right? And I will fight any man woman or child who denies that it's great, or that it's strange. Certainly Derby's "Super Flat Times" wouldn't exist without it (though SFT is certainly not a clone of AWS, it's a different thing, with more SF in its upbringing.)

which Davis collection should I start with?

Also, "The Ask" sadly not as good as "Home Land," a little too much fussiness at the verbal level at the expense of THE TIMELESS VERITIES OF CHARACTER AND PLOT (and i am in general way more on the side of verbal fussiness against timeless verities than most readers)

re: "read in a book" I thought maybe that was a distancing device? Like if she purportedly wrote it herself, it wouldn't really "exist"

by the way this really does remind me of those ilm lets-conver-a-rockist threads in that way where theres these two sorta-competing impulses--one being to list things that "prove" that the rockists conclusions about pop music are wrong, and the other being to attack the assumptions the rockist has about "good" music are wrong.

I don't think anyone's doing such a good job of the latter tbh.

have you ever won an argument with geir

no one wins an argument with geir because he doesn't actually engage with anybody. but plenty of people have proven him wrong, repeatedly.

I just don't see anyone on this thread stanning for that much conventional/mainstream narrative novels and/or forcefully arguing that Joyce, Nabokov, Cortazar et al are crap

I mean that would be a pretty ballsy argument to make, if someone's gonna go there let's see it...

i dont think thats the equivalent? i think convential/mainstream narrative novels are as good as and often better than highly "experimental" or "adventurous" novels

i also think that were relying really hard on a distinction that hasnt been very clearly delineated...

i dont think new novels suck i like a lot of them but also i like genre fiction