new novels and why they suck and whatever

xp to lamp

that would probably be Laszlo Krasznahorkai! Yeah you told me about that book, I wanted to read it but it was really expensive when I was at the book store so I bought carpentier's the chase for like a dollar instead (which is a great book too). I still need to get it from the library.

i am finally reading middlesex and it's pretty good tbh

TOM MCCARTHY - REMAINDER. for pete's sake!

I don't understand Murakami's appeal at all. Friends who stan for her won't read, say, Colm Toibin.

him

she's hot though

argh

i think i used to confuse lydia davis with kathryn davis.

consigned to Dalkey Press afficionados, Oulipo followers, and people who went to Brown.

i loled

should i read the crazed by ha jin? i have a copy in the store. looks kinda good. is he gonna be one of those future genius icons a hundred years from now? people talk about him like he is.

btw the age of wire and string is basically tender buttons but whatever

him

― max, Friday,

ha, yeah -- I was thinking of Mary Gaitskill, cuz her last book is on my table.

@ scott i read waiting bcuz ill read books that win prizes but again i liked it a fair amount but idk if it was genius. i didnt feel like a different person after reading it or w/e

btw the age of wire and string is basically tender buttons but whatever

if this is a ref to the Broadcast album I consider this a sterling endorsement...

I couldn't finish Waiting. I can't fully articulate why its dryness repelled me.

it's a ref to gertrude stein

xpost

btw the age of wire and string is basically tender buttons but whatever

if this is a ref to the Broadcast album I consider this a sterling endorsement...

― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, June 25, 2010 3:28 PM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark

nabisco is gonna make fun of you

lol

"DFW (but I liked the short stories in Girl with Curious Hair more than anything else)"

does not compute.

The only thing of DFW's to which I'd give a second look is the essay collection.

i read them first (when the book got published) and always felt that what he wrote afterward wasn't as interesting? I dunno.

Vollman: I think You Bright and Risen Angels is pretty extraordinary, I read it when I was 20, I think it's really good, but the longer he's been around churning out 1000 page books about increasingly niche subjects the more he reminds me of I dunno, Burroughs or some other marginal person whose reputation is bigger than their talent. I just have a hard time reading anything by him now (note: I used to think Burroughs was the most brilliant writer ever and can't read him at all now).

I love The Atlas. Rainbow Stories is the only other thing by him that I'll ever make plans to look at.

Lolz I did see a few of Vollmann's bks bunched together at a bookstore a few weeks ago and just thought 'no fkn way'. Maybe if RS turns out to be one of the best bks ever I'll give one of those door stoppers a go.

rainbow stories is alright but I seem to remember it not really seeming much like fiction (I mainly only remember the SRL story). 13 stories and 13 epitaphs was pretty good as well, or had good stories in it. I guess it's stuff like "ice shirt" and "fathers and crows" that I'm just never going to deal with.

Ugh -- do I have this right yet?

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
[you = reader] [her = author proxy1] [she = author] [she/she = author proxy1]
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
[teacher = reader proxy] [student/his/he = author proxy2]
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
[wife = author proxy1 or author proxy 3?]
life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

There's some problems though: While the English teacher is structurally occupying the same function as the reader in the first instance, I have a hunch that it's the author. Was she actually an English teacher in China at some point? and she might also be the duck, but that doesn't make sense.

- I won't make fun of that because I too have devoted far more time to Broadcast than Stein
- I'll have to think on an all-caps writer, but I like akm's list a lot
- (also confidential to akm I am reading through a Damon Runyon collection right now and getting excited about all stories where he mentions Pueblo)
- I really like Pelevin too, by the way, especially the 4 by Pelevin volume
- I have not published any fiction and may not be remotely good at writing it, but I've been building a novel for a long time and if I'm very lucky I'll be able to point you toward it in a few years

13 stories and 13 epitaphs was pretty good as well, or had good stories in it. I guess it's stuff like "ice shirt" and "fathers and crows" that I'm just never going to deal with.

^^^yep, totally agree

i can't read vollmann. he makes my eyes glaze over. i like reading about him though. as a case study or what have you. i like the idea of him, i guess.

as far as deprivation and obsession goes, there are still some jack london books i'd like to get to.

also I don't know how intricate we want to get about the Davis story, but the loop I'm talking about is:

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

at which point you might go "huh?" and look over the sentence again, because the question is what she wrote, not read. it seems like an error. but eventually you decide, well, that doesn't make sense, but I guess I'll just keep reading and see if it clarifies itself...

... and then you read the duck bit and you're like oh, and maybe you re-read the beginning and see that her relationship to the story she read is like the student's relationship to the duck his wife ate, and possibly you notice that the syntax is neatly parallel for both, in terms of the question asked and the hesitating for a long time.

also yes, there is an extra layer of the teacher's story being in a book -- and we could say this story is partly about the capacity of stories and writing and books to make other people's experiences practically your own -- but at that point I get simple-minded and don't need to diagram it out or anything

yer blowing my mind man

http://filipspagnoli.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/mc-escher-humanity.jpg

I have to confess that I feel pretty out of the loop on modern fiction in general. I used to write in my early 20's, did writing workshops, and was more on top of things and consequently more bitter and had more insane aspirations and expectations of literature. Now that I'm old, defeated, and play music instead, I feel like most of it has passed me by. I wrote experimental fiction to varying degrees of success (as far as coherence and inherent value is concerned; I had no success getting anything published) and I think I probably gave up a few years too early since McSweeney's and DFW opened the gates for more widespread acceptance of non-traditional narrative structure, blah blah. All that said, my best cowriting friend at the time stuck to it (writing and only now published his first novel, which is about as traditional as you can get (Hummingbirds by Joshua Gaylord). For someone who, at one point, seemed like the second coming of Faulkner to me, it was a pretty big step away from the writing style he was familiar with. It's very good, fwiw.

the one time I went to a Vollman reading he brought a gun.

I may have posted about this here but delmore schwartz has this one or two page story about this dad who's telling this story to his son about a father and son going on a long journey down a road in the middle ages and in the story the two trudge along until all their shit is stolen and they are killed or whatever and at the end of the actual story you find out that the father is beating the kid while the mother is screaming to get in through the closed door. It's done in a couple pages and its hilarious

haha

my favorite new writer is hal sirowitz. i was reading his book of poems to the kids last night and their circular craziness had me in stitches. but he isn't a novelist.

New Sheets

I won't be around forever, Mother said.
One day I'm going to die, so I might
as well nag you a little bit more,
while I have the chance. And when
I'm dead you'll have to rely on someone else
to tell you that it's time to change the sheets,
& I hope for your sake, that it won't
be your wife, because she's going to get
tired of doing it, & she'll start to demand that you
& her sleep on separate beds, which will mean
that pretty soon you'll have to be using separate silverware,
so she won't always have to be the one to wash them.
And before you know it, she'll want you
to live in your own house so you
won't be able to mess up hers, & divorce is more likely
to happen when you aren't living together.

i'm really easy to please, by the way.

Lending Out Books
By Hal Sirowitz

You’re always giving, my therapist said.
You have to learn how to take. Whenever
you meet a woman, the first thing you do
is lend her your books. You think she’ll
have to see you again in order to return them.
But what happens is, she doesn’t have the time
to read them, & she’s afraid if she sees you again
you’ll expect her to talk about them, & will
want to lend her even more. So she
cancels the date. You end up losing
a lot of books. You should borrow hers.

sorry, that's the last one i promise. they're addictive. i'd never heard of him until yesterday. i figured with blurbs by mark leyner and darius james on the back i'd give him a shot.

back to modern fiction!

i wish darius james would write another novel. i love him. (although it was his non-fiction book on film that i was the biggest fan of. he influenced me big time crit-wise.)

Also are who are the good contemporary authors from Asia? I am particularly interested in South and Southeast Asian authors.

― Kiitën (admrl), Saturday, June 26, 2010 3:00 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

I've heard good things about Arundhati Roy but haven't read anything by her. one of my professors taught a Southeast Asian lit course and I could probably e-mail him and ask for the syllabus, if you're interested.

I'm reading "The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao" right now and it's ok.

hah, I recently decided it might be good to take a break from reading ILX and read some novels and I looked at this one because diaz is a pulitzer prize winner & he gave a talk here recently but when I read the first couple of pages I was kind of put off by all the slang. does it get better?

might be good to take a break from reading ILX

heresy

was kind of put off by all the slang. does it get better?

yes it gets much better but then it gets worse again. really, the bits about Oscar aren't great but the sections about the other family members are truly incredible and it's worth reading for those.

As far as South Asian novels go, I loved Vikram Chandra's massive Sacred Games, which I read a couple summers ago. It's doing relatively traditional novel things, I would say. (Disclaimer: I don't really read much fiction at all, so my liking something may not mean a lot.)

I was thinking about picking up the first Joshua Ferris novel. Any good? Second one actually sounds more interesting but I refuse to buy new hardcover fiction.

Also just bought that Stieg Larsson book Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but this thread seems more to be talking about *literary* novels.

shamless plug alert:
i am about to go out, but before i do, i would like to invite you all to read my husband's books. they're marketed as YA but they are not written as YA.
first: THE MONSTER VARIATIONS -- a dark coming of age story (it's out and you can buy it/get it from your local library)
next: (april 2011) ROTTERS -- epic horror novel sort of about graverobbing

they're out on delacorte, which is hardly an indie publisher, but don't hold that against him. if you're willing to read josh ferris, you may also enjoy daniel kraus (that's him <3)

Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things is her Big Novel, and it's just okay. Interesting, but in a kind of schmaltzy, "I'm going to win the Booker" way.

Man, this thread has got me all jazzed and I've added like 6 books to my library holds. Maybe my library does carry new fiction after all! Also just spent an hour reading the Paris Review blog which is packed with interesting recommendations (not all recent, tho).

shamless plug alert:
my plug was intended to be shameless, but i guess it's shamless too. i really am recommending these books because they do not suck.

Oscar Wao is like my first or second-favorite novel of the past few years, I think! I don't know what I can say about being immediately put off by slang (are we talking about the Spanish or the nerd references or just the modern speech?), but I don't think it's a feature that's particular to Diaz -- like a lot of novels, it teaches you its own language as you go along.

sorry, that probably reveals moreso my own deficiencies as a reader - just reread the opening on amazon and yeah, it's the modern speech/nerd references. like, the first two paragraphs do this sort of nice world-building and then it immediately switches into the more casual code of the narrator. and yeah, seeing a footnote about The Silmarillion is kind of jarring especially coming after a footnote about a brutal latin american dictator!