/lit/ - Literature

Yeah, I read a decent amount of contemporary literary fiction. I don't tend to talk about it because I doubt any thread I make over those authors would get any posts.

i'm always vaguely disappointed by contemporary lit and there are so many classics yet to read

>>2216520
What contemporary lit have you been reading? I get you about the classics though. There's just too much out there to read.

The world has expanded beyond that, it's swole with too many authors and too much being published for the combined readership /lit/ in all of their pretentiousness to have read enough of it to have a decent conversation about something that isn't a mainstay or something serving their masochistic need to troll the very community they belong to.

>>2216511
Same here.

At best, most c/lit/s seem disinterested in contemporary fiction, and at worst some of them seem to look down on it.

I do. I'm reading the book in the picture at the moment. I mentioned this in a thread once and received nothing but

>hurr durrr chabon is sub par tier

so I don't really try and talk about it here any more

>>2216532
It probably doesn't help that there are so many English majors here. Oddly enough, creative writing majors tend to know much more about recent literary trends that English majors. Also, they tend to understand that tiers are silly.

>>2216522
Maybe I read shit contemp lit, but in the last two years I've read stuff from Junot Diaz, Franzen, Shteyngart, Emma Donoghue, Jennifer Egan, Aravind Adiga, and a few others. What is the definition of contemp lit anyway? Current non-genre fiction?

>>2216538
Literary is sort of a genre in itself, but sometimes it can exist in hybrid forms. Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon and Nobody Move by Denis Johnson are both hybrid literary novels (and Await Your Reply is one of the best American novels in the last five years).

Contemporary literary fiction is generally about realistic life, it is written with a restrained style (sort of like Hemingway, but with more description), and it has as much of a focus on how the story is told as it does on the story itself. Keep in mind that it is much more concrete than the classics are, and ideas like overt theme have been replaced by subtle subtext and strong imagery.

There are so many good contemporary writers that it's hard to know where to start. Dan Chaon and Denis Johnson would probably be better than the writers you listed.

>>2216551
Do you know much about non-American contemporary literature?

i like contemporary lit that at least tries to be funny because fuck it man humor does not age well

this man is my God
he isn't pretentious, which is enough to make him a literary God to me.

And I wish he would stop writing sub-par movie scripts and go back to writing intriguing fiction

What I've read of Cesar Aira so far has been pretty boss. So, yes.

Who are the best contemporary poets? Preferably English language, but any is fine

>>2216853
I know Anne Carson is pretty up there.

>>2216854
Yeah, she's famous enough that I already know about her. Anyone more obscure? or just anyone in general. Anyone you happened upon in some literary magazine and liked their work, or whatever. I'm open to anything

>>2216853
Bei Dao, Seamus Heaney, Tomas Transtromer, Czeslaw Milosz, and Shuntaro Tanikawa are some of the best you may not have read yet.

>>2216859
I know all of those from general knowledge, awards they've won and because you mention them from time to time, but thanks anyway. I'm mainly thinking of younger poets, like under 60 at most. I want a better knowledge of what's going on in the literary world right now.

>>2216856
Since you're open to anything, I recommend Liliana Ursu's stuff. She's a contemporary Romanian poet who I think is at least somewhat obscure.

>>2216870
"You" meaning /lit/?

>>2216871
Thanks for the recommendation. I'll just assume you didn't steal the name from Wikipedia or whatever and have in fact read her work.

>>2216875
Pretty sure it's the same guy who frequently brings up those poets and authors, but it doesn't matter. S/he still has a good variety in his/her literary taste, and I can appreciate that.

>>2216870
Luljeta Lleshanaku, a contemporary Albanian poet, seems to be pretty revered, but I can't personally vouch for her. She's won a lot of awards and seems to get consistently good ratings though.

Also this might be something to check out if you don't know it already: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0811216519/

>>2216897
Hah, nah, I didn't steal her name off Wikipedia. I found her through the Writings from an Unbound Europe series, which might also be something you could look through. It's contemporary literature from the former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, and includes a good deal of poetry in its line-up.

>>2216907
>>2216898
I'll definitely take these into consideration. Thanks.

>contemporary literary fiction
It's called Sci-fi / fantasy and it's the best (and worst) literature being written.

Oh you mean faggoty artsy bullshit? Just go hit yourself in the head with a bag of hammers for the same effect.

>>2216911
It seems morning has arrived. Shouldn't you be getting ready for school?

>>2216922
No i thought I'd much rather be reading a moving tale about a woman's journey of self discovery as she cares for a lost swan, set in a moving backdrop of rainy Paris. Maybe with horses, too. Shit. Horses are fucking deep, mang.

>>2216911
I don't completely agree with this guy, but how about so-called speculative fiction such as Mieville. Can that be considered "contemporary lit"?

>>2217012
>Mieville

Meieville is just writing a literal description of the slums he grew up in and dressing them up in sci-fi clothing.

>>2217027
Okay, but that doesn't answer the question about whether or not he is "contemporary lit". The classification is not particularly important to me, I just am curious as to the OP's (and those of a similar mind) opinion.

Also, do you think your statement is true of all of his work or just Bas-Lag?

I thought The City and the City gave a pretty good feel of Eastern Europe

>>2216911
You're totally misunderstanding me. Setting a book in rainy Paris would almost automatically get a story dismissed as cliche. But you've now shown that you've never actually read any contemp. lit. fiction and therefore are just bitching about it for no reason.

Basically, contemp. lit. is the stuff you study in MFA fiction writing programs. Very few literary writers get bestseller status, so most of them have to teach to make ends meet. But they're fantastic writers. Seriously, read Await Your Reply by Chaon, or maybe Already Dead by Johnson, you'll see it's not artsy bullshit.

>>2217204
so would you consider Mieville contemporary lit?

>>2217264
He's obviously contemporary, but he's a fantasy writer, not a literary writer. That's not to say fantasy isn't as good as literary writing, it's just different. Like I said before, sometimes it's best just to look at literary fiction as its own genre.

>>2217614
But what about literary fantasy? What then? Huh? Why isn't he literary fantasy?

>>2217621
He might be literary fantasy, I don't know. But his fans are mostly fantasy fans. He falls much better into that genre than the literary genre.

>>2217632
>>2217632
do you realize hoe stupid that sounds?

yfw you realize ALL novels are literature. Just because they have supernatural or sci-fi elements doesn't mean they aren't real books too.

China Mieville would be on the same new paperbacks table as Jonathan Franzen at any bookstore. Also I do not think real life people who read fixate on dividing the entire written tradition into Serious Literature and Shit About Elves the way insecure 17-year-olds on /lit/ do.

>>2218336
Now you're just babbling like a baboon. What a ridiculous notion; fantasy will never be literature.

>>2218804
>>2218336
When will you fucking understand this? I was perfectly clear: saying something is not in the literary genre does NOT mean that I'm saying that it's any less good, serious, or worthwhile than literary books. In contemporary terms, "literary" is a fucking genre, not a designation of whether a book is literature or not. Seriously, /lit/ needs to at least get a rudimentary understanding of how fiction has worked in the last three fucking decades.