what are 'hipster' books?

a. the circle that radiates from Dave Eggers/McSweeney's
b. writing that seems awfully impressed with its own cleverness
c. the novel as Seinfeld episode: perhaps funny and well-crafted but with no moral center or purpose
d. Rick Moody

ahhhhhh....that site is like a collection all those people i've met in the past who were too snobby to talk to me

Boy, do I sound embittered today... but... eh?

Bookbloggers often sound selfconsciously hip. "Bookslut", for example, and "Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind". Um, how sluttish or idiosyncratic can you be if you read that many books.

I believe that at the moment it's hip to like Kafka. When I've tried to argue against him, the response from Kafkaettes has pretty much been that there must be something wrong with me. It's someone akin to the jeering that ensues when it emerges that there's always a Bananarama track buried somewhere in my dance mixes.

Terms used to define hipster books: underground, experimental, meta. Of course the product is really none of these, as they are not underground nor experimental, and perhaps pseudo-meta but only because they use lots of footnotes.

Other books/writers included on the reading list: Mark Danielewski, Will Self, et al.

I suppose it's the rise of 'youth culture' as defined by not-clever-by-half white male writers who produce 'biting' commentaries.

(Although I rather liked Generation X.)

Other hipster writers: Martin Amis (thanks to London Fields), Dennis Cooper, Bret Easton Ellis.

"That's not writing, that's typing!" - Truman Capote on On The Road

There have been alot of good, even great writers listed here - why would you call "Everything is Illuminated" shit based on who reads it then dismiss him as a "one hit wonder"? Well he has only written one book so far but I doubt it will be his only succesful one - and even if it is then so what? Its still a good and interesting book.

My one problem with alot of the people who read some of these books is that they have generally only read about 10 books yet they still try to force them on you.

Well he's a different type of hipster, one who wears a suit and bathes. And he could actually write.

I thought the purpose was to identify what books/authors are labeled 'hipster' reading material and perhaps why. Who said anything about slagging?

Well he's a different type of hipster, one who wears a suit and bathes. And he could actually write.

alot of this is slagging.

I think 'hipster books' is a pretty silly label, mind.

And Burroughs is just unreadable.

He just chose not to write like that for much of his life.

Anyway, I'd say that I agree with Tico in that a lot of this stuff goes together and a certain group will be drawn in, but that doesn't mean the work is without merit. At least not all of it.

Am I a bad person for buying my mother an Eggers book and White Teeth for Christmas? I got them for her based on excerpts I'd read, but now I'm thinking that I may be accidentally training her to be a hipster.

For the eager, the post-bookish, the future-but-not-current MFAs: it's generally Eggers &c., anybody mentioned on Baum's Eggernomicon, the fetching Zadie Smith, the overbright+neurotic D.F. Wallace, the well-connected Safran Foer or Eggers, with any of whom one may want to identify one's life. Perfect metrosexual accoutrements, in general. This says nothing about the books themselves, which, obviously, differ in quality quite independently of their desirability among the current jetset.

There's, natch, also the cyborg/trans-humanist/metasexual agenda, starting with Gaiman and Dick and Stephenson and Ballard, moving on from there.

For the young, in general, you've got the business above, maybe, with some Beats thrown in-- the same sensibility, aged, leads one to authenticity-charged authors, Frey mayhaps, who decided to offer his vision of the real against the coy feints and stabs of the Fence/3rd Bed/McSweeney's generation.

But no one really calls something a "hipster book" unless they're meaning to slag, I wouldn't think. Even if I like a book, the H.Q. (hipster quotient) is going to be a social if not a private ill associated with the book, ie, I enjoy much of Foster Wallace's fiction but am unlikely to talk about him much unless I know which ear's bent, just because there's too much baggage trundled into the room with his name. And who wants to just put more garbage into the air, hm?

The hipster mess, with the lit hipsters and the whole cult of resentment surrounding them, the incestuousness, the connection-envy: it all seems inevitable, and non-new. But it's easy enough just to make like Mailer and crash Isherwood's breakfast table, isn't it? Isn't it?

M.

Hipster lit=what hipsters read

That's different from anything to do with Isherwood: perhaps his broad 'set' was a kind of 1930s hipster circle (Auden, Lehmanns Rosamund and John, Henry Green, Cyril Connolly) but somehow I think not; rather that literary society back then, in England, was almost exclusively upper-middle class and that these ppl may well have known each other even if they'd never written a word.

It's different now, so we don't have groups like that. I quite like groups, but only because I like comparing takes on things, as well as feuds, etc (ie Green vs Waugh, or Connolly vs Orwell).

As a general rule I try to stay away from anything that is suffering from over the top hype because it usually means the emperor has no clothes. A little hype is okay -- otherwise how would you know it's out there?

bulgakov's "the master and margarita"

i swear to god, for 2 or 3 weeks early in the year every fucking indie scenester kid that came in the store i worked at wanted a copy.

Top shelf, right side, left to right:

obscured
Emerick, Here There and Everywhere
A. Burroughs, Running With Scissors
two unknowns
Georg Groddeck, Exploring the Unconscious
Freud, Dora
Hallowell and Ratey, Driven to Distraction
Wheelwright, The Presocratics
unknown
Bettelheim, Freud and Man's Soul
Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
" The Complete Short Stories
" A Farewell To Arms
" The Old Man and The Sea

Next shelf down, right side, left to right

Masters, Spoon River Anthology
Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
Vranckx(!), 150 Best Loft Ideas
Goodman, 75 Short Masterpieces
O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Cohen, Beautiful Losers (this one is appropriate)
Coelho, The Alchemist
Burroughs, unknown title
Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night
Camus, The Stranger
Camus, The Plague
Kafka, Metamorphosis
Kafka, The Trial
unknown

Just to the left of her pelvis is Lord of the Flies

god, tumblr prn is just ... the worst

Ugh. Misread the guy's name and thought it was gonna be nabisco's site.

looool

got tired of looking at skinny blond chicks with boring tattoos, didn't get that far

http://i.imgur.com/lP1xT.jpg

Haha. Is that for real? Probably not. Reminds of when Momus made up all these fake foreign language book covers of his imaginary books, although I can't remember how to find them and I think he has published a book for real since then.

http://imomus.com/lifeofmilk.html
(Note grammatical error in the German title)

ya s'real

sub[kultura]

A Russian translation of this I'm guessing, not a book about today's "stilyagis".

http://i652.photobucket.com/albums/uu241/dnvnoo/small_figures.jpg

that's more 'nerd with vague occasional hipster leanings'

do you mean the dude whose collection that is, or the authors of the books in that collection?

presence of tony tanner also makes me want to say 'english undergraduate'

my list itt is still the definitive one, nice try tho urban outfitters

Is pulp crime fiction hipster lit?

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-osMFxN_b1qg/Tq0eOP01SiI/AAAAAAAADX0/l0qrThGIyVY/s400/Parker+Black+Ice+US+and+UK.jpg

no

that's more 'nerd with vague occasional hipster leanings'

basically i guess

march 1997 issue of disney adventures definitely tilts towards nerd

i really must get around to reading the tunnel

looks like the right sort of Crash, but hipster should have Dick in 70s Panther not 90s Vintage surely.

I don't know what Panther is but there is some 70s Dick on another shelf

You can just barely make out 70s editions of The Adolescence of P-1 and Barth's "The End of the Road" on the second shelf there

btw this is a shelf in my old room at my parent's house that's been untouched since around 2002. wow, 10 years, that seems impossible.

in 02 these wouldve been a lot closer to h1pster books i think

MIRANDA JULY

lydia davis

where does Jonathan Safran Foer fit into this band scheme

― corey, Sunday, August 28, 2011 1:38 PM (2 years ago)

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/05/chipotle-cups-will-now-have-stories-by-jonathan-safran-foer-toni-morrison-and-other-authors

The truth is, that’s not really why I did this. I mean, I wouldn’t have done it if it was for another company like a McDonald’s, but what interested me is 800,000 Americans of extremely diverse backgrounds having access to good writing. A lot of those people don’t have access to libraries, or bookstores.

What an elite prick

"People who have access to a Chipolte but not a library or a bookstore"

Can only imagine how bad the Saunders story will be

Will probs feature a talking burrito

que?

Foer didn’t know what to expect, but Ells went all in. Starting Thursday, VF Daily can exclusively reveal, bags and cups in Chipotle’s stores will be adorned with original text by Foer, Malcolm Gladwell, Toni Morrison, George Saunders, and Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael Lewis. Foer says ,” Chipotle refrained from meddling in the editorial process for the duration of the initiative, which the burrito chain has branded Cultivating Thought. “I selected the writers, and insofar as there was any editing, I did it,” Foer said. “I tried to put together a somewhat eclectic group, in terms of styles. I wanted some that were essayistic, some fiction, some things that were funny, and somewhat thought provoking.”

http://imgur.com/vRLeaHD.jpg nsfw

If anyone could pull off a good short story on a chipotle cup, it's george saunders. no idea what the fuck waterface is talking about.

i think it sounds like a bad idea thats what im talking about

the whole idea yes, but IDG what you're talking about wrt saunders

these are all oprah winfrey writers, what do you expect. promoting people hurting themselves for bags of cash is sorta the deal.

yeah saunders is the most promising name here, in context. (also out.) all the ones printed in that vf piece suck as far as i can tell.

wait no sorry i didn't see gladwell's name. gladwell is perfect for this obv.

Saunders is not an Oprah writer

but Oprah is a Saunders character

that neuromancer cover is hilarious

https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/los-angeles-review-cups

chipotle cup reviews

Jonathan Safran Foer, “Two-Minute Personality Test”: A series of would-be thoughtprovoking questions that instead provoke total exasperation. They are all terrible, but I found the last one most particularly and powerfully irritating: “You know it’s a ‘murder of crows’ and a ‘wake of buzzards’ but it’s a what of ravens, again? What is it about death that you’re afraid of? How does it make you feel to know that it’s an ‘unkindness of ravens’?”

Foer’s casual presumption and smug moral certainty drove me up a tree in record time. While it is completely unsurprising to learn that he is not a fan of the greatest British crime novelist of the last several decades, Ruth Rendell, surely Foer might at least have heard of the (excellent) mystery, An Unkindness of Ravens. Also no, I did not know it was a “wake of buzzards.” Entirely grating, from stem to stern.

Thoughts Cultivated? No.

jonathan safran foer is such a piece of shit

I don't really think of his books as hipster books, more like mainline young democratic NPR-listener books, although I get that those are the same things to some people.

A writer I think of as a hipster writer, perhaps unfairly, is John Fante -- he just seems like someone people want to be seen reading and I unreasonably don't believe that his books can actually be any good based on who has recommended him to me.

i overheard a non-hipster woman recommending john fante to her father in a used bookstore the other day

John Fante is actually very good, BUT I suspect you have to first read him when you're young

lots of people came to him via bukowski/black sparrow. thus the cool dude cred or whatever.

I never really liked Bukowski, but when I was a struggling young writer with no money, Fante's books about struggling young writers with no money definitely worked for me