new novels and why they suck and whatever

just chiming in to say i really liked oscar wao so that nabisco doesnt look like the only weirdo on the thread

i loved the voice too, slang and everything. i dunno if people appreciate how hard it is to create a voice like that--most attempts are just utterly unreadable.

not that my admiration for diaz's technical ability means you have to like it or anything. just saying.

oh i liked it. for 2/3rds of it i was like wtfamazing!!!! it's so joyous and uncynical.

until the end of course

I dunno -- Spanish is my first language and I know lots of Dominicans, and Diaz tried too hard, I think.

oh i liked wao, too, if that wasn't clear from my serious crush on junot diaz.

one of the proudest moments of my life was getting mistaken for Junot Diaz in a bar

this random guy comes up and asks if I'm a writer, and I say ... well, sort of, why? and he's like: I knew it, you were great on the Colbert Report last night

the most amazing part of this is that I had Oscar Wao sitting on the table in front of me, so I could hold up the author photo so we could discuss the resemblance

you could turn that into a lydia davis story

If you ask him what is the proudest moment of his life, he will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be the time he was mistaken for an author.

wow, full circle. next time someone asks me what I'm proud of, I will hesitate for a long time and say it was probably the Colbert Report, and being interviewed on it.

i happened to come across a copy of oscar wao at the used book store today, so i picked it up in honour of this thread.

i just want to chime in and say that one of the big obstacles keeping me from being more attuned to contemporary fiction is the ambiguity and lack of context between streams of output. like, differentiating between the yann martel and khaled hosseinis of the world from their more literary-minded (or just higher quality) cohorts for example. like to bring up a parallel in music, bands tend to exist in relatively easy to identify streams, from bigger ones like stadium rock, indie rock, to nitpickingly minute ones like termbo/kbd punk and epitath/fat wreck/skater punk or atlanta trap rap and new bay slap. once you've identified a certain stream or micro-genre that you're fond of it's relatively easy to cruise through bands with some degree of faith that you'll like them. i'm aware that these streams do exist in lit, but they're really unclear to someone outside peeking in (or walking around a bookstore, for example.) i'd rebut what max was saying about having to do the work of wading through the chaff of new fiction, and just say that it takes me a while to read a book, and in theory i would love to have the luxury to be a critical, discerning reader, but i'd really appreciate some form of engagement with a publication or publishing house that offered that sort of guided tour. obviously i'm not asking for someone to spoonfeed my perfectly according to my tastes, just some help is all

i don't want to sound like i'm rejecting the existence of this either, just that it has never become apparent to me throughout my life as a reader so far. would love to hear how the resident contemporary lit fans figure out what to check

i'd really appreciate some form of engagement with a publication or publishing house that offered that sort of guided tour.
booklist?

Thanks for the blog links. With LRB+NYRB that works more for me in terms of finding the odd half to a dozen new names I could check out on top of what I'm already interested in.

Was reading about Lebanese author Elias Khoury...wiki is pretty useful at just throwing stuff at random, especially in terms of award lists: Looking now at the Best Translated book award

also all of y'all dismissing the seven dreams stuff in favor of vollmann's paens to the beauty of drug-addicted street walkers are way the fuck offbase.

Fair enough strongo I will look at a seven dreams book.

regarding differentiating between diff't types of fiction, if you can find a blog that fits your tastes, then you're halfway there. Like, if you like adventurous sci-fi, then mumpsimus is a goldmine, and if you like translated lit, then likewise for literary saloon.

Also, never hesitate to ask your local librarian for recommendations! Some libraries even have entire desks devoted to "readers' advisory" or "reader services"

and in answering your question, they sometimes consult...BOOKLIST
i mean, that's why the publication (and website) exist: to recommend books

Booklist is, indeed, an extraordinary magazine.

i'm just saying that there are people out there reading books, writing about them, categorizing them, and publishing this information -- there are few places one can look to find as wide a variety of book reviews as booklist has on a regular basis.

unfortunately, it seems that fiction for adults -- more narrowly, literary fiction for adults -- has a pretty small portion of their coverage. such is the market for books, i guess.

Amanda, don't you or DK know Joshua Ferris somehow?

(I believe I read And Then We Came to the End on your recommendation.)

"(or walking around a bookstore, for example.)"

still say this is a good way to find and find out about things. browsing underrated in post-browser world.

Yes, and yes, you did!

agreed about browsing -- n/a to thread re: browsing -- he wrote a good blog post about that once

Yeah, I have to say, when I was in Portland a month ago, I spent hours in Powell's and never would've predicted the books I walked out the door with. (Plus a half-dozen more whose titles I scribbled down so I could remember later.)

I think it is a little harder to really have a broad view and great bearing with books than it is with a lot of other things -- especially music, which is chattered about by more people, and where you can figure out what two dozen different acts sound like in the space of an hour. Having an equally strong sense of "everything" in books would be sort of a lifetime commitment.

But yeah, there's loads of coverage to follow! Even just obvious things like pre-pub magazines (Booklist), the big newspaper reviews (Times book review, Washington Post book world, Guardian books section) ... Believer notices, New Yorker reviews, bookslut.com (especially the blog -- does everyone here remember Jessa Crispin as an ilxor?), sites like HTMLGiant, GalleyCat, LiteraryKicks ... there are really loads of places to read about books. Not that much tougher than finding a bunch of blogs and websites to follow about music, film, politics, or anything else.

World Literature Today is another publication I'd suggest for keeping track of what's being written. Obviously the emphasis is on clustering things in terms of nationality and ethnicity, but it also necessarily gets into movements and schools and other sub-groups. (For instance there was a recent profile of mostly very literary Catalan detective fiction.)

for people who don't go to I Love Books that often - or ever - and don't know about it, ilxor James Morrison's book cover blog/site is rilly rilly cool and well worth reading. if you like covers and design talk and all that:

http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/

plus, its another good place to find out about cool new books.

plus, there are the rolling whatareyoureading threads on ilb. for new book tips. i always learn stuff on there.

yeah i really wish more ilxors would post on the rolling what-are-you-reading thread - how bout moving those threads to ILE? there are only a handful of ppl who post regularly and i find i don't really share similar tastes with them at all.

well there is nothing stopping anyone from starting an ile what are you reading thread. you know?

er, as far as I'm aware no one posts on the rolling reading thread to have their tastes reflected back at them.

Also: there are a few posters that have actually come through ILX from ILB. xp

i am reading treasure of the sierra madre. but that's not a new novel

look, it wasn't an insult or anything. i would just like to see more people post, and get more recommendations in literary areas that i am interested in.

that's fine. but ilx often helps those who help themselves. start a thread on the kind of thing you are interested in. here or on ilb.

okay, i don't know about "often", but its worth a shot.

Sure. To add to what Scott said there was a rolling reading thread on ILE back in the day when ILX only had two boards.

and some people got a little mad at me for starting ilb for that reason. that it would mean less book threads on ile. i don't think that happened though. and, yeah, ilb is slow. but some people like slow.

All the threads I have posted on ilb would have gone on ile instead. But when people do a search as long they put in 'all boards' its not a problem if you want to try and find and add on a discussion of a book that someone might have posted about in the past.

guys I keep opening the thread about new novels and why they suck or whatever but it's a whole lot of posts about what board the thread belongs on

req. a diff. thread for this meta discussion

I am shocked and dismayed that an ILX thread would stray off-topic.

anyone ever read anything by Lissa McLaughlin? i got a copy of her short story collection Troubled By His Complexion at the store and it looks really good. and weird. put out by tiny Burning Deck of Providence RI. so, probably kinda hard to come by. plus, it came out in 1988 and has probably been out of print since then. see, random. i like random. i like having never heard of someone and then a book just falls into my hands.

Also: there are a few posters that have actually come through ILX from ILB.

That's me! Not that I am such a prolific ilxor but ILB was my introduction to the place. And remains one of the best spots for online book discussion that I've come across.

in a world where there is site new answers, does it really matter if a thread's on ilb or ile? (i guess sometimes i might not post to 'what are you reading' because i feel like my tastes in reading material might be pedestrian compared to highfalutin' ilb'ers, but that's about me and not ilb so w/e)

i have this loose plan to read more post-2000 books this year, so this thread is a delight for all its new places to find out about things to read! but already it feels like too many - now i have read a chunk of different book blogs the amount of fantastic choice available to me has become dizzyingly wide again.

I was reading some Barthelme short stories recently, and started thinking sadly that no-one else could make the experiments he makes, because it would be obvious that Barthelme had done it already, they'd just be biting his style. That any original way of doing non-traditional narrative would be... good for only one use, as it were. Does that make sense?

(as a child i was afraid of what would happen when all the available combinations of notes were exhausted and the world ran out of tunes.)

(or at least the idea haunted me. i don't know that i was worried about its social consequences or anything. anyway: maybe my worry about non-traditional narrative techniques is just that same idee fixe)

i like having never heard of someone and then a book just falls into my hands.

For me this is "Shamp of the City-Solo," by Jaimy Gordon. Unlike anything else I have seen. I am mostly moved by "traditional" narrative I guess but "Shamp" and the B Marcus book are two "experimental" works that I think anyone who cares about prose must bow to.

Here's a little:

Beyond us the Sump rolled mosquito-flecked in its trench. Behind lay a long stretch of acid pine barren, creased with superhighway, pocked with gas station. Lest they fall upon it, swarms of raindrops clung tremulously to the air.

This is an effing great "lest." Not an easy word to deploy gracefully.

But this is not new, obv., it is 1974 (though I think JG is still at it.)

motorman by david ohle is sort of on the same tip. ben marcus wrote the intro for 2004 edition. came out originally in '72 though

I was reading some Barthelme short stories recently, and started thinking sadly that no-one else could make the experiments he makes, because it would be obvious that Barthelme had done it already, they'd just be biting his style. That any original way of doing non-traditional narrative would be... good for only one use, as it were. Does that make sense?

It does, except if you're good, you can make it work. E.G. I think you would naturally say the same about Ben Marcus, but then Matthew Derby comes along and writes a terrific book which on the one hand is plainly in the wake of Marcus but is really its own thing, not just a pale copy. As for Barthelme himself, I think a TINGE of him at least seeps into tons of people -- e.g. is there Gary Lutz without Barthelme? Is there Miranda July without Barthelme? (ok, I like Miranda July, maybe you don't.) D F Wallace's "Brief Interviews w/ Hideous Men" is in the Q-and-A format that I associate with Barthelme (though I don't know for sure he invented it.) Just saying, NOBODY is such a thorough experimenter that they work through all possible consequences of the experiment!

(Wallace is an interesting case, actually -- his prose style is VERY hard to take things from without imitating it outright. Not sure if I can think of someone who's doing it. But he's so widely read that surely there are examples.)

no one is sui generis anyways. hard to imagine barthelme without james thurber, his predecessor as house absurdist at the new yorker, and earlier slapstic black humorists like nathaneal west and i guess mark twain. hell some of lucian's dialogues from waaaay back in the day read like barthelme set pieces

What's proprietary about what Barthelme does in terms of experiments? I'll grant you there's a sensibility that would be worth appropriating if you wanted to get published in the same spheres as Barthelme, but if anything, I get the sense that being less playful would take you farther.
Outside of nesting footnotes, DFW strikes me as a very neutral writer -- what signature moves does he do that someone wanting to tackle similar material ought to avoid in order to draw comparisons?