/lit/ - Literature

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt - Aimee Bender
The Last Girlfriend on Earth - Simon Rich (I think)

Both avante garde short story collections. They look kinda interesting, but REALLY short, like, <200 pages short. Oh noes! I probably wouldn't get them for a few months, but I still want opinions on them. Good, bad, or okay?

Whether it be his short stories, novels, etc.

A world where The Broom of the System is better than Infinite Jest.

A world where 2666 is great, and The Savage Detectives is pretty bad.

A world were The Crying of Lot 49 is a very book novel.

A world where Margaret Atwood is worth reading.

I call this Sunhawkworld.

Anything from the mid-20th century onwards. Read Kafka, read a few other things, now I want something new. Also please provide a brief description.

I've read 4 of his works, and still don't understand why people are willing to sacrifice their firstborn child to him. The Trial, Amerika, The Caslte, and The Metamorphosis. That's what I've read. I still don't like him. He's one of my least favourite writers of the Western Canon.

Why do YOU think he's so great?

Let's just say his novellas were short stories, for the sake of argument (although I can only think of The Metamorphosis).

Novels. Short story collections are good because they come in nice bitesized chunks, plus they can have a new theme for each story, rather than just one, but...even so. They don't have the same oompf as novels. Not to mention, the authors seem lazy when they write them.

1. Why did he feel the need to regularly write half page paragraphs, and sometimes write 3 or 4 page paragraphs? This is HORRIBLE.

2. Why does he usually not start a new line for dialogue, a convention that 95% of writers follow? It's another thing that, when combined with the first point, makes his work very hard to read.

Nobody has ever been able to answer these questions, and laughs as if they're stupid (which they certianly aren't). Can someone tell me? I'm starting to warm to him (eventually), but I hate these things about him.