/lit/ - Literature

Going real slow this month, totally fucked up the pace I was moving at. Just been a little complacent and depressed but I think things are gonna get back on track soon

Here we are:

**jan**
The Winter’s Tale
The Emigrants
Elegy
Afghanistan: A Lexicon
Standoff (David Rivard)
Richard II
The Real Inspector Hound
Translation (Brian Friel)
When My Brother Was an Aztec
Henry IV Part One
Illuminations (Walter Benjamin)
Henry IV Part Two
Terra Nova
Homesick for Another Planet
The Widening Spell of the Leaves
Idaho
**feb**
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide
Bluets
McGlue
Portrait of the Alcoholic
Stag’s Leap
Jack Gilbert’s Collected Poems
Henry V
The Prophet (Kahlil Gibran)
Lincoln in the Bardo
Fortune Smiles
Salt.(nayyirah waheed)
Of Gravity and Angels (Jane Hirshfield)
Bone (Yrsa Daley Ward)
Too Loud a Solitude
**march**
Faith Healer
The Dead and the Living
The Argonauts
King Henry VI Part One
From Now On: New and Selected Poems (Clarence Major)
The Gold Cell
The Dollmaker’s Ghost
King Henry VI Part Two
Bringing Down the Shovel
Tracer (Frederick Barthelme)
King Henry VI, Part Three
The Oblivion Seekers
Alan Dugan New and Collected Poems, 1961-1983
Dark Money
Crimes of the Heart
**april**
Satan Says
Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov
Richard III
The Father
The Crucible
One Secret Thing
Beowulf
Bob the Gambler
The White Hotel
The Flick (reread)
A Confederacy of Dunces
Titus Andronicus
Speedboat
**may**
The Comedy of Errors
The Aliens (Annie Baker)
Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days on the War on Drugs
Love Labour’s Lost
Measure for Measure
Cat Town (Sakutaro Hagiwara)
Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks
Look by Solmaz Sharif
Waveland
John (Annie Baker)
The Vermont Plays
A High Wind in Jamaica
Third and Oak: The Laundromat
**june**
Moon Deluxe

Who will carry the torch of literature in the West, after the current banner of great writers dies? Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy, and others, you can think of at least a few, are near to the grave.

We can safely discount Tao Lin and his ilk, those whose trite portraits of millennial ennui, vulgar and self-indungent, owe what meager critical acclaim they've seen to a stilted, gimmickal style, and moreover the unfamiliarity of the establishment, agèd as it is, with the reality of (if you permit) the Millennial Condition.

Other classes of writers whose candidacy can well be discarded out of hand: middlebrow American staples (Franzen, Chabon, etc. - for the banality of their vision); PoMo continuationists, writers of "difficult" doorstoppers (Josh Cohen, Adam Levin, etc - for their puzzling dedication to a vacuous maximalism better abandoned at the turn of the millennium); writers of "socially minded" fiction (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Roxane Gay - for their conflation of political urgency with formal merit); confused postmodernists that call themselves metamodernists; imitators and wheel-turners; fads (Danielewski); and mere revivalists (Knausgaard vis-a-vis Proust).

Who is the next generation of literary greats? And where are they now? And have we it in us? Or is this generation consigned to be an embarrassment of literary history, like the Beats were? I should think the farcical course our history has taken should serve plenty for inspiration and urgency, yet it seems nobody from my crop of men (I am in my twenties) has yet said anything really worth saying at all.