Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

makes me curious...

also nice to see them mention ILB favorites Brian Moore and Evan Connell.

Q. Who do you consider some other good, neglected writers?
Y. Read the four spendid books by Gina Berriault, if you can find them, and if you want to discover an absolutely first-class talent who has somehow been left almost entirely out of the mainstream. She hasn't quit writing yet, either, and I hope she never will.

And read almost anything by R.V. Cassill, a brilliant and enormously productive man who's been turning out novels and stories for twenty-five years or more, all the while building and sustaining a large influence on other writers as a teacher and critic. Oh, he's always been well-known in what I guess you'd call literary circles, but he had to wait a long, long time before his most recent novel, Doctor Cobb's Game, did bring him some widespread readership at last.

And George Garrett. I haven't read very much of his work, but that's at least partly because there's so very much of it - and he too has remained largely unknown except among other writers. I guess his latest book, like Cassill's, did make something of a public splash at last, but that too was long overdue. And Seymour Epstein - ever heard of him? I have read all of his work to date - five novels and a book of stories, all expertly crafted and immensely readable - yet he too seems to have been largely ignored so far.

But hell, this list could go on and on. This country's loaded with good, badly neglected writers. Fred Chappel. Calvin Kentfield. Herbert Wilner. Helen Hudson. Edward Hoagland. George Cuomo. Arthur J. Roth - those are only a few. My God, if I'd produced as much good work as most of those people, with as little reward, I'd really feel qualified to rant and rail against the Literary Establishment.

i gotta write these down! other than hoagland never read any of them.

one more:

"Another excellent, underrated writer is Thomas Williams..."

http://www.richardyates.org/bib_pshares.html

When did Connell get promoted to ILB favorite? Always felt like it was only a few of us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Berriault

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Williams_%28writer%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lewis_Wallant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Verlin_Cassill

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Garrett_%28poet%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Chappell

http://articles.latimes.com/1987-08-17/news/vw-947_1_open-heart-surgery

http://www.thewessexcollective.com/the_wessexcollective/Hudson.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Michael_Cuomo

http://www.goodreads.com/author/list/75857.Arthur_J_Roth

it was probably just me and you. but that qualifies when there are only like five people on a message board.

some more!

Q. Who among the newer first novelists are you interested in?
Y. I thought Leonard Gardner's Fat City, which came out a couple of years ago, was an excellent first novel, and I was glad to see it win such immediate and general acclaim. Apart from that book, I guess the first novelists I've paid the most attention to are those I've known personally at Iowa over the years. Quite a number of them have been breaking into the field recently, getting their first books published with greater or lesser degrees of success, and I can't say I've liked all of those books. The best of them so far, in my opinion, are those by Andre Dubus, James Crumley, James Whitehead, Mark Dintenfass. Nolan Porterfield, and Theodore Weesner. They're all fine writers - modern writers in the best sense, traditional writers in the best sense. So, by the way, are some five or six other young writers I've known at Iowa who haven't published their first books yet, but who will soon.

though everyone here should know fat cit. and dubus and crumley.

"city"

Dagon [1]is a novel by author Fred Chappell published in 1968. The novel is a psychological thriller with supernatural elements, attempting to tell a Cthulhu Mythos story as a psychologically realistic Southern Gothic novel. It was awarded the Best Foreign Book of the Year prize by the French Academy in 1972.[2]

it was probably just me and you
lovebug starski too!

Fat City was also adapted by John Huston, who always did right by his literary sources (having finally read Moby-Dick, I'm wondering what I would think of the movie's climax, but overall still seems like a good faith effort).
James Whitehead! He and Miller Williams, Lucinda's Dad, were among the founders of the University of Arkansas Fayetteville's writing program, which schooled a number of noted scribblers. Mainly a poet (publications-wise), but also wrote Joiner, a novel about a very freewheeling college student: 60s Mississippi Baroque more than Southern Gothic, was my impression http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/19/arts/james-whitehead-67-author-of-joiner-novel-of-deep-south.html
Fred Chappell was another highly esteemed writing instructor, when I first heard about him in the 80; still need to check him out.
The library shop has several by Ha Jin now. Is he good?

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?s=btb

^some really good titles.

Read Ferrante and Miaojin.

Immeditaely interested in Marechal and HildaHilst (reading the latter last week)

An overview of Chris Kraus's novels by Leslie Jamison, pretty apt on Kraus's treatment of gendered reading expectations and the tension between self-exposure and generic play in her writing:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/this-female-consciousness-on-chris-kraus

Has anyone else read John Brandon? He has three novels and a short-story collection from McSweeney's. I've read all of them except his first novel, and they're all pretty great. https://store.mcsweeneys.net/authors/john-brandon

Some books that were issued in 2015, caught my eye but haven't got around to:

Regina Ullmann - Country Road
Mahabhrata - A Modern Re-telling (Carol Satyamurti)
László Krasznahorkai - Seibo There Below
Wolfgang Hilbig - Sleep of the Righteous
Clarice Lispector - The Complete Stories
Silvina Ocampo - Thus Were Their Faces
Claire-Louise Bennett - Pond
Agustin Fernandez Mallo - Nocilla Dream
Bae Suah - Nowhere to be Found
Joanna Walsh - Vertigo
Elfriede Jelinek - Rechnitz and The Merchant's Contracts
Maggie Nelson - Argonauts
Chris Kraus - I Love Dick
Mairtin O Cadhain - The Dirty Dust

Poetry:

The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Bilingual Edition
Arseny Tarkovsky - I Burned at the Forest

What I've seen that will be published in 2016:

Roberto Arlt - The Seven Madmen
Han Kang - Human Acts (Jan)
Alejandra Pizarnik - Extracting the Stone of Madness (Mar)
Pere Gimferrer - Fortuny (Feb)
Elfriede Jelinek - Charges (The Supplicants) (May)
László Krasznahorkai - Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens

Wolfgang Hilbig - Sleep of the Righteous
Clarice Lispector - The Complete Stories
Silvina Ocampo - Thus Were Their Faces
Bae Suah - Nowhere to be Found
Mairtin O Cadhain - The Dirty Dust

-- these are all well worth it; really good, in very different(but mostly depressing) ways

re: Lispector/Ocampo - Depressing? Not a word I've seen to describe them both. The Dirty Dust sounds comedic.

In a surge of language proficiency-related optimism I bought an original-language copy of Cré na Cille (aka The Dirty Dust) when I was in Dublin for Christmas...I can't really say anything for the actual story but it's an enjoyable book to read out loud even when you barely understand half the words...

Irish is reasonably challenging language

It is comedic, but everyone in it is dead

The Sixth Policeman?

Good-ish rev of Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens

somehow i only just found out a new zadie smith is coming this november, anybody read it?

Found and its Awesome, thank you contemporary literature:
László Krasznahorkai - Seibo There Below
Wolfgang Hilbig - Sleep of the Righteous
Maggie Nelson - Argonauts
Pere Gimferrer - Fortuny

Found, HYPE:
Chris Kraus - I Love Dick
Mairtin O Cadhain - The Dirty Dust
Han Kang - Human Acts (Jan)
Silvina Ocampo - Thus Were Their Faces

Would've been in the HYPE column due to poor curation (or lack of) but saved my life that weekend:
Clarice Lispector - The Complete Stories

Must Find, *prays to literature god*:
Agustin Fernandez Mallo - Nocilla Dream
Alejandra Pizarnik - Extracting the Stone of Madness
Claire-Louise Bennett - Pond
Arseny Tarkovsky - I Burned at the Forest

Must Find - new items into 2017 if we are not wiped out by Donald Trump's orange hair:

Gerard Van Reve - Evenings
Antonio Di Benedetto - Zama
U.R. Ananthamurthy - Samskara

Not found, not fussed about now:
The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Bilingual Edition
Regina Ullmann - Country Road
Roberto Arlt - The Seven Madmen
Mahabhrata - A Modern Re-telling (Carol Satyamurti)
Bae Suah - Nowhere to be Found
Joanna Walsh - Vertigo
Elfriede Jelinek - Rechnitz and The Merchant's Contracts
Elfriede Jelinek - Charges (The Supplicants) (May)
László Krasznahorkai - Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens

Two more on must finds:

Agustín Fernández Mallo - Nocilla Experience (the follow-up to Nocilla Dream, above, just released)
João Gilberto Noll - Quiet Creature on the Corner

Thank you so much for posting these! I feel like so much of the coverage of contemporary fiction that comes my way is so heavily Anglo-American that I have little idea about what's recently been translated into English. So many of these sound great!

I've been meaning to read Krasznahorkai for the longest time and didn't know about the new Elfriede Jelinek books, either.

so many people i've never read that she mentions. she's my bff for this though:

"And I hate every single last one of those Beats, both in poetry and prose."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/books/review/zadie-smith-by-the-book.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbooks&action=click&contentCollection=books®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront

also my bff for mentioning dibs in search of self.

never read zadie either though...

we read Dibs in 5th grade, shit had the whole class bawling :'(

lots of readinglistfodder in that Zadie Smith piece, thx for posting

She's great.

Too bad she can't get anything worthwhile out of *some* Beat writing: finally read On The Road a few years ago, and found it often beautiful---the chapters about experiencing live music especially---and the hang-ups are apparent, acknowledged, never get in the way: we just get a sometimes refracted, sometimes hairline fractured vision of his visions, along with more down-to-earth (and more frequent) social observations. Was also moved by the early diary excerpts published in the New Yorker a while back---much posthumous publication, incl. biographers, and memoirs by female survivors of those scenes---and some of Ginsberg's stuff is good too, like Kaddish, the long poem about his mother, a reading companion for one of my first and best acid trips (at his best when most narrative, especially as a performer, which also may be true of Burroughs; the Kerouac box is pretty cool too).

"Writing novels can make you very stupid — just writing about something that doesn’t exist for three or four years."

Ha

Just crashing through "Grief Is The Thing With Feathers" by Max Porter, which (by the look of the praise slathered all over the cover and the first few pages of the book) was a contempo-lit-craze last year that I missed completely. More than halfway through after less than half an hour's reading on the bus this morning, it seems very good- that's despite being one of the Spectator's Books of the Year 2015.

I have a feeling it's best enjoyed slowly and piecemeal but it's a library book so that's right out.

Have wondered about that, wasn't sure if it was just a cash-in on the Hughes/Plath sensation, like that awful Emma Tennant novel

I have blithely missed the Hughes-Plath sensation I'm afraid (hadn't heard of any relevant Tennant novel!) so that didn't occur to me. I think it's good, it might be very good. To make my mind up I'd probably have to have another go at it (this would be a low-stakes investment since it's a comfortable one-sitting read). I'll see about doing that before it goes back to the library.

My concern is that (for a book about grief) there's not enough unhingedness (particularly in the character of the crow)and it feels a bit pat; but the whole point *might* be that the book is about containing the unhinged, about someone just about keeping it together. It might be that the occasional feeling of patness is a very finely judged I'm-not-going-there.

It's surely worth a read.

(One of the main characters in the book is a Hughes researcher; the book says clearly that he's on the Hughes "side" but doesn't go into the fight. One of the things I definitely do like about the book is how good it is on people taking the art they already like and using it to get through difficult times.)

Ok, that does sound like my thing, actually

this is good

Christian Lorentzen on "Obama-lit"

http://www.vulture.com/2017/01/considering-the-novel-in-the-age-of-obama.html

Colson Whitehead on George Saunders' new first novel, which I badly want to read

Has anyone read Joshua Cohen? I'm kind of curious about his Book of Numbers - there's a bit of buzz starting around his new book Moving Kings (which I'm not as interested in, but was just favourably reviewed by James Wood in the NY'er) which reminded me of it.

I'd thought about picking it up when it came out a few years ago but never followed through on it. Any thoughts on him? A lot of the reviews/blurbs seem to place him in a Pynchon/Delillo/DFW lineage but I'm also quite wary about those comparisons given the relative abuse of them over the past few years.

the new yorker review of moving kings was not particularly favorable - he liked cohen's use of language but thought it was kind of a mess otherwise

xp questionable as to if the wood review was favorable, he does call it an unsuccessful novel iirc

yea I read book of numbers, think I posted abt it on the y novels suck now or w/e thread

its dense, id recommend it

i just checked it out as an e-book from the library, i'll report back if i remember

I haven't read any of his books but this review he did of The Instructions was kinda petty: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/books/review/JCohen-t.html

On the other hand, I have friends who basically agree with his assessment (I really enjoyed it though). Can't say if he's protesting too much about the Wallace influence.