/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.1134649]

Sup, /lit/. I've recently taken to whoring myself out to various online content mills. Usually, it's about stuff like "navigating without a compass" or "leather reclining chairs", but today I found an actual literary job and decided I would take it. So, here is the description:

Please write an informative and interesting article with the following title: “Authors Out-of-the-Mainstream: Ten literary-fiction novelists of the 21st century whom you may not know, but should.” This article will be serialized on our literary websites. Focus on the author’s style, themes, favorite subjects, geography, personality, philosophy, culture, history, or whatever makes this author interesting now and, hopefully, for posterity.

Does /lit/ have any suggestions on authors who fit the bill?

[Anonymous No.1134650]

[Anonymous No.1134653]

>>1134650

Ah, your breakin' my balls /lit/, really you are.

[Anonymous No.1134655]

>>1134653

Kidding, kidding! But seriously, I couldn't be much help. The most recently published book I read is from, what, 1998? I'm sorry... best to wait for the other c/lit/ori to answer.

[Anonymous No.1134656]

has to be 21st century? Hmm
Michael Chabon?

[Anonymous No.1134660]

>>1134656

He's fairly mainstream (or at least widely read). Not that he isn't good, he's just not what they're looking for.

>>1134655

This is exactly my problem as well. The last contemporary novel I read that qualifies at "literary" was "The Corrections" and Jonathan Franzen is the most successful "literary" writer out there.

C'mon /lit/, you guys are supposed to be the alpha-hipsters on 4chan. Shouldn't this be right up your alley?

[Anonymous No.1134664]

>>1134660

Hate to tell you bro, but part of being a hipster is that you actually don't like innovative, independent art, you just say you do to make yourself look cool. Good luck though.

[Anonymous No.1134665]

>>1134660
tell them it's a stupid assignment. The 21st century is less than a decade young. I'd be surprised if even a single canonical work has been produced in that span of time.


Chances are, most readers haven't read all the 20th century lit they should.

[Anonymous No.1134669]

>>1134665

I don't really give a shit whether it's stupid or not as long as I gets paid (I should get about 20.00 for this).

[Anonymous No.1134673]

>>1134669

Well, dump that and find a better commission. What they're asking is impossible. No author of any remarkable note has come out of the last ten years. You could fake it and pick the least crappy ones out of the ones who have published, but that would be compromising your professional and personal integrity. Dump it, I say, unless someone here comes up with something wonderful and obscure that they should have told us about, but didn't.

[Anonymous No.1135092]

John Wray

[Anonymous No.1135104]

Wait, the twenty fucking FIRST century? Shitting fuck. That's not a big span at all.

If you can include just 'the last fifty years'. Russell Hoban would count. His 'Riddley Walker' is a fucking incredible book that few people have heard of.

[Anonymous No.1135109]

This shit is tough. I don't agree with the other anons who say that nothing of value has been produce in the 21st century, but the good ones are fucking famous. Unless you bullshit your way through it, it's an impossible assignment. There's more than a million books published each year, it's impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff in only a couple of years.

[Anonymous No.1135113]

Pynchon

[Anonymous No.1135140]

The key words here are "literary fiction" and "may not know but should". That means you've been keeping up to date with literary fiction for the past 10 years, and you've noticed that some authors of literary fiction who came to prominence in that basic time period are every-fucking-where----ie Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen---and others are NOT quite so famous. Like, uh, Jonathan Barnes, (to stick with my theme of novelists named Jonathan) British writer, who has written two decent fantasy / Victorian pastiche novels in the past decade, but isn't regarded as "literary" by British standards, even though he is by American postmodernists.

Whereas in terms of British novelists, you can count on everyone in America (and Britain) to know who Zadie Smith is. So she doesn't really fall under the category of "may-not-know literary-fiction".

It's not an impossible task, it's just that most of the stuff that was in the "may-not-know" category I also found to be "wildly overrated" by the critics. Although I'd love to be surprised by something great (which, incidentally, John Wray's "Lowboy" was....and I only read it because James Wood gave it an amazing review....and he's usually bitchy about new fiction and you don't expect him to recommend anything or anybody).

[Anonymous No.1135183]

William T. Vollman, Richard Powers, David Mitchell, Steve Tomasula.