I just read a short story of his in Harper's and was absolutely blown away. I'm curious to know if anyone here has any personal recommendations of his, he's got so much published I don't know where to start.
Currently working on a research project on (former)criminals attempting to re-integrate into society, and I'm looking for something to read to get inspiration on the subject.
I love lurking around her Twitter account, so I'm thinking about trying one or two of her novels - but she's written well over 20 (I think?) Any experts know where I should start?
I'd be interested to hear about books or works of art people on this sub have read or experienced which while *not* being ostensibly about the internet nevertheless seem to provide a set of formal conceits suitable for writing about the internet.
For example I'd cite three authors, all of whom predate the internet, who utilise formal innovations which shape perception/cognition in a way that to me seems 'internetic' (not trying to coin that as some cool term, just being lazy with my syntax).
Nicholas Mosley in Impossible Objects
- different registers and multiple extended metaphors cross the pretty mundane first-person narrative in a very structural, rhythmic way, making it feel like someone walking through a collapsing and reassembling multiverse without commenting on it as being odd. Feels apt for multimedia mundanity we all live in rn -- phones, screens, adverts, tvs, billboards, memes, etc. etc.
Claude Simon, Conducting Bodies
- use of mise en abyme, a sense of everything somehow being reproduced in everything else, endless repeatability, and narrative proceeding via an associative and sometimes paranomasic logic, reminiscent of side-scrolling, of memes which can morph into new memes via vague associations. Simon's style is also heavily imagistic and focused on bodies in space. Visuality is foregrounded today, for obvious reasons; and bodil experience is increasingly becoming an object of interest to the extent it also seems to be getting deprioritised, at least for the office worker population who are also terminally online in their 'leisure' hours.
Antonio Lobo Antunes, Fado Alexandrino
-use of multiple POVs which bleed into one another, plus multiple times within each character's lives existing at the same time. A polyphonic novel of richly metaphorical voices where everything seems to be happening at once.
I'd say on the level of prose John Trefry's fusion of forensic scientific analysis of perception and movement, combined with stream of consciousness prose, feels very apt for an age in which we can pause, zoom in, search up details about, annotate, and repeat the tiniest gestures and motions.
Anyone got anything similar?
I'd also cite Disco Elysium and Peter Greenaway's Tulse Luper Suitcases as two works which are for me formalistically 'internet-like' without necessarily being 'about' the internet.
Other works: Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey; Genoa, Paul Metcalf; Micrographia, Robert Hooke
EDIT: I'm looking for Formal Techniques. For techniques and formal devices which are internet-like, rather than works whose subject matter anticipates the internet.
I guess either with characters who are the same, or that focuses on this in some way, etc.
which feels rather fitting. i’m not giving it back. i’m also reading my brilliant friend currently.
Recently I have become really interested by the aesthetics of ballet, the struggles involved to achieve a performance that is both strong and delicate, and the ties it had to prostitution in its history. So if you have any recommendations on some books, both recent and old, they'd be very welcome! I tried other book subs but they seem more interested in contemporary romantic stuff
Have only read her MYORAR but the synopsis for this one sounds really fun, a little like Poetry by Lee-Chang Dong the elderly protagonist sounds interesting. Would anyone recommend it or recommend something else by her over it ?
I was listening to the Bookworm episode with W.G. Sebald, and he said that he generally preferred to (with contemporary fiction) read books by scientists, because: “scientists very frequently write better than novelists”.
Specifically, he was talking about entomology and the study of nature- have you come across scientific writing or writers you would describe as great?
Very curious. Thank you.
I’d like to first acknowledge that these books are very much genre and I wouldn’t put them even as slipstream literature, they really are just crime books. Hardboiled noir in contemporary LA with clear homage to Raymond Chandler and especially James Ellroy.
Everybody Knows is from a couple of years ago and follows Mae, who is a ‘black bag publicist’, and Chris who is essentially a Hollywood fixer. The reason I recommend these books here is because it takes on a lot of recent real life topics with one of the main antagonists being a version of Nickelodeon’s Dan Schneider and all those who helped protect him.
A Violent Masterpiece was released a month ago, although it was positioned as a loose sequel I’d say it’s more of a direct sequel with lots of continuity and the same antagonists kinda with new protagonists. There’s an Epstein element, a John Landis and son element, an Armie Hammer element, and one of the protagonists is a nightcrawler twitch streamer essentially and somehow this was written without being corny.
Anyways, if you like crime / noir stuff I don’t think many are doing it at this level in contemporary settings so I highly recommend.
See: https://www.reddit.com/r/RSbookclub/comments/1tg726k/commonwealth_short_story_prize_awards_aigenerated for context and the various followup threads:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RSbookclub/comments/1thab8t/pretty_sure_another_commonwealth_short_story/
We've been deleting related posts because I think some people are tired/saddened by it but it's obviously an important and alarming issue so we're migrating discussion of it here for now.
Wondering why Granta's response to the AI scandal was so weirdly glib and careless, as if they didn't need to worry about mass unsubscribes from readers? The statement's author, Swedish packaging heiress Sigrid Rausing, owns the magazine and makes unilateral decisions on how it is run. Since Granta is her personal plaything, she doesn't have any stake in the dignity of literary culture. Conceding that AI was used would be a blow to her ego and she seemingly doesn't have any incentive to care about whether AI was actually used
- Heart the Lover by Lily King
- The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
- Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash
I first noticed it with Jeanette McCurdy's new fiction book, which I flicked through due to a bit of online controversy prior to release. Each chapter was 1-2 pages, which I attributed to her lack of stamina and talent.
Then I noticed it in The Coin, which is litfic, but again I assumed it was due to the author's lack of skill, despite her being a competent prose writer.
Now I'm reading 'You are the Führer's unrequited lover'* by Jean-Noël Orengo, which is about Albert Speer, and again, the chapters are all 2-3 pages long. The longest ones look like maybe 5-6 pages????
I know everyone's attention span is shot, but short chapters are actually really unpleasant to read. They disrupt the flow of narrative horribly. That's why it seems like a lack of proficiency on the part of the author; it gives the impression that they don't have an understanding of pacing. But now I'm worried it's publishers demanding 'easily-digestible' stories. Are all contemporary books going to get even worse, not only due to widespread decline in talent but also because publishers assume no one wants to read more than 1 page at a time?
*Penguin international writers book, styled to look like a fitzcarraldo/NYRB book, i.e. litfic, i.e. middlebrow
Where characters deliver extended, erudite monologues on history. Like the Naphta sections of The Magic Mountain where he will suddenly launch into an extended monologue on medieval politics, papal authority, and Church history. I find that kind of passionate.
Yes, we need a megathread for this topic because it is blowing up. However, I find that this article succinctly explains why Olga Tokarczuk is wrong to try and minimize the effect AI has had on her work.
i don’t care if tokarczuk really used it to write or not. i want unrelenting witch-hunts and persecutions whenever one of these hacks makes the slightest indication that they might have thought about buying Claude Pro.
our art cannot be optimized away. if we don’t keep purity-testing writers and artists, then our descendants will not know what art is. down with all the lit mags, their editors, their contests, and with the LLMs that win those contests
This 2012 New Yorker piece feels even more relevant today:
> What’s new about the current acknowledgments page is that it’s unsolicited—it appears like an online pop-up ad, benefiting no one but the author and his comrades. This is surely why these afterwords are often so garrulously narcissistic and strewn with clichés. The most radical experimentalist adheres to the most mindless acknowledgments-page formula; the most stinging social critic suddenly becomes Sally Field winning an Oscar. > > Acknowledgments typically open with a statement to the effect that, although writing is lonely work, the author could never have completed his book without help and support. “This is my fourteenth novel and I am as dependent as ever on the wisdom of others,” begins one, and another, plucked at random from a Barnes & Noble new-arrival shelf: “The creation of this book has removed any notion I may have had of it being a solo endeavor.”
Like the title, looking for books about bugs, insects, but with a literary bent? Does that exist?
Thanks guys!!!