/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.15128675]

What are the best works of contemporary fiction you've all read?

Pic related: just ordered it, it sounds great.

[Anonymous No.15128714]

Phenomenal.

[Anonymous No.15128736]

>>15128714
>one review on goodreads

[Anonymous No.15128737]

>>15128675
>Ben Lerner
>A Jew from Topeka Kansas
>Commentary on toxic masculinity
have you guys actually looked into this book

[Anonymous No.15128837]

>>15128675
Anything by Lobo Antunes.

But you should stop reading contemp. literature. Look into Taleb's concept of Lindy in order to see why.

It makes no sense to read books written in the last few years, unless the author has been famous for many decades (someone like Antunes, Vargas Llosa, Handke, Enzensberger) or if he is your friend/professor/neighbor. Otherwise you'd be much better off reading some of the hundreds of must-read classics which you haven't read yet.

I myself am probably one of the most well-read posters on this board (though some have read more than me, of course), but when I think about the books I haven't read... For instance, I have read Houellebecq, but I haven't read Froissart, Joinville, Rabelais, Chateaubriand, Celine and so many others! Even though I've been reading 52 books a year, mostly classics, for more than a decade now, the number of *essential* books I haven't read is astounding. I haven't read the Republic in full. I haven't read Augustine's City of God. I haven't even read Herodotus and Tucidides, because I want to learn Greek first.

What about you? Have you read the four great Chinese novels? Have you read the entire Koran? The compete Wordsworth? Landor's Imaginary Conversations? The compete Chaucer? The complete Ariosto (in Italian)? Guido Cavalcanti? Essential Medieval historians such as Froissart and Fernão Lopes? And if you haven't, why read someone like Ben Lerner or Jonathan Franzen or Joshua Cohen or some other self-promoting (likely monolingual) dumb idiot from New York (or who wishes he were from New York) instead of doing your job and reading those classics? Well then.

We should stop reading contemporary literature. This will be good not only for ourselves, but also for the art as a whole, as it removes the incentive for writing mediocre books - if you know that few people will read you, then you'll only write what's truly essential and necessary, instead of vomiting one 500-page book every year like these American imbeciles (Joyce Carol Oates and others) tend to do.

[Anonymous No.15128971]

>>15128737
i actually read it, dummy. OP, i actually really loved it. it's a tiny bit about toxic masculinity but more than anything it's an ode to language. the prose does a great job capturing and describing the feeling of breaking down the barrier between brain and voice while you're on a fuckin groove speaking. the family dynamic, muh toxic masc issues notwithstanding, i remember as being touching and entertaining. whole book's real clever

i'm a pretty big lerner fan, read all his stuff except for 10:04. a common motif that also appears in topeka is his description of anxiety attacks. when something big is going down and you stop and leave your body and the world freezes and you feel like you're looking down at yourself looking up at your own face. genius concept, works for everything. pre-deja vu, anxiety, etc. good book you'll lke it

[Anonymous No.15129061]

>>15128971
>of anxiety attacks. when something big is going down and you stop and leave your body and the world freezes and you feel like you're looking down at yourself looking up at your own face.

Some people should be taking their meds but decide to write books instead. Like Jordan Benzo Peterson. Bunch of worthless drivel.

[Anonymous No.15129123]

>>15128675
It's a wonderful book, beautifully written. The prose is vivid and finely chiseled, without a single superfluous word. The imagery is unique and majestic, of a biblical flavor. The author shows off his wide lexicon and always uses precise terms instead of vague, generic ones. Sometimes he even invents his own. The vegetation is described with the precision of a botanist, and the desert and the mountains with that of a geologist. The descriptions of the landscape are evocative and suggestive without ever being purple. Sometimes they get very close to being poetry. The battles are told in a very crude, matter-of-fact way that fits very well with the atmosphere.

Now, this isn't an easy book to read. It doesn't have that je ne sais quoi that makes you forget you're reading a story. It doesn't flow effortlessly. In fact, in some passages you feel like you're mudding through a swamp. Crucial details are thrown into long sentences devoid of punctuation and full of metaphors and complex analogies. It takes legit effort to picture in your mind what the hell is going on, but it's effort that always pays.

The author also refuses to use internal dialogues and even dialogue tags. He purposefully restricts his own writing arsenal in order to hone to perfection the few tools he does choose to use. He only shows us his characters through their actions and bare words, without any sort of commentary. There's no filter, as if we're witnessing what happens through a camera instead of through a person. The result is a style occasionally difficult to absorb, but certainly a perfect fit for the story he was telling.

Finally, Judge Holden is one of the best characters I've ever come across. But did he really have to rape the Kid in that latrine? That felt so gratuitous.

[Anonymous No.15129134]

>>15128837
>the entire Koran
It's apparent within just a few lines that it's shit from every point of view. Literary, philosophical, legislative, etc.

[hungryman !!5BI0oSV9uvS No.15129152]

Easily Satantango or Melancholy of Resistance.

[Anonymous No.15129154]

>>15129061
>dislike small part of novel
>whole book suck throw it out
shit on jordan peterson in some other thread and come up with something worth saying about lerner

[Anonymous No.15129163]

>>15129154
>dislike

I didn't dislike it. I haven't read it and won't read it. I have no interest for young American authors.

[Anonymous No.15129184]

>>15128675
>>15128971
>>15129154

Go to bed, Ben.

[Anonymous No.15129216]

>>15129163
oh it's you. Why read Houellebecq and not Franzen? atomised is just France's Freedom.

Also, taleb's Lindy is fucking stupid.
>implying any contemporary work of literature hasn't been influenced by a slew of things directly descended from your old classics, likely including the classics, themselves
ah yes better save only the oldest possible examples of literature, the whole family tree following can perish according to my silly law.

plus by taleb's math, shouldn't half the shit you listed have already been guaranteed almost infinite life since they're "aging in reverse"?

if you need to be on a weird high horse about wasting your time on strictly outdated shit then pick a different basis for your argument

[Anonymous No.15129219]

>>15129184
earned that one. am not op. i do like that man's books. and dislike retards

[Anonymous No.15129245]

>>15129216
There's no reason to read Houellebecq. He's mediocre. He's influenced by great authors, but he's mediocre.

>only the oldest possible

No. Only the classics. Reading Shakespeare is more important than reading the epic of Gilgamesh.

>almost infinite life

Not how it works.

>outdated shit

Outdated? Ariosto? Wordsworth?
So you're a redditor. Good to learn. Back to your Ben Lerner, you Zadie Smith, your Joyce Carol Oates, your Sally Rooney, your Rupi Kaur.

Goodbye.

[Anonymous No.15130306]

>>15128675
Coetzee is the best living writer. Period. The true heir to the likes of Homer, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, and Kafka.
Krasznahorkai is pretty good, but fuck what a slog actually reading his books is.
Dag Solstad, the only one besides maybe Bernhard, and John Williams who managed to capture the essence of an intellectual's life in static society of incentive-following agents.

STAY AWAY FROM CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE.
There's literally nothing of worth written by the burgers since Hemingway, except for the aforementioned John Williams.

[Anonymous No.15130323]

>>15129152
I will dig melancholy of resistance out of storage and finish it because of you anon.

[Anonymous No.15130385]

>>15129216

lindy is hard to understand, its ok

[Anonymous No.15130427]

>>15130385
All the concepts invented by Taleb aren't "Lindy" by his own definition, why should I care about his opinion then? This thing is self-contradictory.

[Anonymous No.15130430]

literally every thread on /lit/ besides this one is about muh glassigs, yet a gaggle of insecure midwits have this compulsive urge to barge in here and attempt to dissuade people from reading contemporary lit (not doing a great job, by the way). really makes you think

[Anonymous No.15130436]

>>15130427

taleb has a pretty clear lineage from orthodox christians, platonism, and a bit of nietzsche thrown in. most of the stuff you think that he "invented" is because you don't know anything. he is a new person, it doesn't make him nonlindy

[Anonymous No.15130474]

>>15128837
But... But all my novels are "contemporary"...

[Anonymous No.15130488]

>>15130427

you also need to read up on the skallas system and start taking lindybets. if something isn't deep lindy, it could be lindy in becoming. lindy also is not synonymous with 'good'

[Anonymous No.15130613]

>>15129245
lotta people say Wordsworth isn't even any good. i prefer Keats

[Anonymous No.15130851]

>>15128675
Every time I see this cover it trips me out because its font and design is virtually identical to the recent reprints of JG Ballard's books.

[Anonymous No.15130876]

>>15130851
holy shit that's exactly right lmao

[Anonymous No.15131298]

>>15130430
Don't like it? There's R*ddit at the next door, so why don't you go there?

[Anonymous No.15132908]

Bump

[Anonymous No.15133025]

>>15128675
Read On the Hatred of Literature by Jon Baskin over at Point Magazine. Lerner just published a story in THE NEW YORKER where he is seething over it.

[Anonymous No.15133044]

>>15130306
You’re right but also shit taste with Coatzee anon.

[Anonymous No.15133698]

>>15128837
Imagine being alive at the same time as Joyce or Dickens or Goethe and not reading them.

>>15129152
Based. His new, I think final one is also good.

>>15130306
Coetzee is one of many writers, like Handke, who would probably be all time if they had better taste in subject matter.

[Anonymous No.15135036]

>>15131298
>classicuck reasoning
simply epic

[Anonymous No.15135446]

>>15128737
>Commentary on toxic masculinity
Sounds like shit, but it'll make it to woke book clubs.

[Anonymous No.15135453]

>>15128971
Bettet or worse than Atocha station? Muh toxic masculinity is such a turn-off.

[Anonymous No.15135473]

Bump

[Anonymous No.15135504]

>>15129163
Trying too hard to be cool isn't cool. >>15129163

[Anonymous No.15135507]

>>15128837
>We should stop reading contemporary literature. This will be good not only for ourselves, but also for the art as a whole


>everyone stops reading contemporary authors
>demand for contemporary writers evaporates
>the market for modern fiction crashes
>everyone who wanted to write can no longer publish anything
>from 2020 onwards, no new books are published, all aspiring writers kill themselves, and everyone just re-reads the classics from here to eternity

You happy with your new utopia?

[Anonymous No.15135564]

>>15135507
Based

[Anonymous No.15135599]

>>15135507

yes. the people who are not writing bullshit will simply scream into the void until someone hears them. the moneymakers and the dishonest will go do something else

[Anonymous No.15135934]

>>15135507
Yes.

Good writers write regardless of what the market thinks. Kafka and Pessoa were read by few people until very late in their lives. This is why they had other jobs, and if they had been too dumb/lazy to make decent money in other activities this means they would also have been too dumb/lazy to write good books.

Furthermore, the elimination of most authors is a good thing, as they shouldn't be writers in the first place. In the U.S. alone there are between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books published every single year. This is unhealthy and should be stopped.

>>15133698
Joyce? Yes, many/most of his contemporaries did not read him, as he died relatively young. It was completely normal for a well-read person in the 30's to have never read Joyce. Even Woolf didn't finish Ulysses, it seems. So it wasn't necessary to read him. Wait a few more years to see if an author keeps getting praised, then read him.

Dickens? He was very famous, worldwide, a living classic.

Goethe? Had been admired for decades, everyone knew he was the major German author of his day. The equivalent today - though not as good as Goethe- would be someone like Pynchon, Bonnefoy, Vargas Llosa: everyone knows they are already classics whether you like it or not. There's no problem in reading them to see what are the great classics of your day are. They are the big exceptions.

Lerner? He's in another category. Mediocre.
Here's some Lerner I googled:

''By any measure, it was endless
winter. Emulsions with
Then circled the lake like
This is it. This April will be
Inadequate sensitivity to green. I rose
early, erased for an hour
Silk-brush and ax
I'd like to think I'm a different person
latent image fading
around the edges and ears
Overall a tighter face
now.''

Period piece. Written in order to sound like contemporary poets from American universities try to sound, mixing weak, tedious rhythms, contorted combinations of words (emulsions with then/lake like etc.), hermetic meanings having to do with extremely personal experiences, and so on. The few moments in which you can feel some poetry sound like cliches, like stuff a 19th century pasticheur would have written: ''endless winter''; "I'd like to think I'm a different person" etc. The rest is autistic.

Period piece. Won't last. Will be forgotten as soon as the new artistic revolution occurs.

More:

"The bird’s-eye view abstracted from the bird. Cover me, says the soldier on the screen, I’m going in. We have the sense of being convinced, but of what? And by whom? The public is a hypothetical hole, a realm of pure disappearance, from which celestial matter explodes. I believe I can speak for everyone, begins the president, when I say famous last words."

Even worse. Melodramatic, pseudo-thinking trash.

[Anonymous No.15136013]

>>15135934
He's a bad poet but he might be a decent novelist

[Anonymous No.15136103]

>>15136013
True, poetry is much harder.

Anyway, if you wish to read him go on. I don't really want to tell other people what to read.

All I'm saying is that the chances of having a profitable use of your time by reading, say, Plutarch, are higher than if you read some random contemporary novelist. For instance, a few days ago I read one novel by Yan Lianke, very famous Chinese author, Franz Kafka prize winner, and it was somewhat disappointing, not very funny (the ads promised me that it would be funny) and I could have enjoyed my time much more had I reread some Shakespeare play instead.

[Anonymous No.15136119]

>>15135599
>>15135934
>/lit/izens actively encouraging the disintegration of any possibility of "literary fiction" writers getting published, let alone making any money out of their work
I'm gonna guess and say that neither of you have actually been published.

[Anonymous No.15136157]

>>15133025
>On the Hatred of Literature by Jon Baskin
holy shit

[Anonymous No.15136169]

>>15136119
I am 24. I don't wish to be published at 24, as I am neither Keats nor Rimbaud. In fact, I have no particular wish to be published not even after 24.

If my writing is good, it will be published; if it isn't, then I definitely do hope that it's never published. My business is writing; publishing is the publisher's business. Nowadays, with the internet, good publishers and good authors can easily spot other good authors - at least in my country this is so. Therefore, if no one ''spots'' me this means I am not good, in which case I don't deserve to be published.

[Anonymous No.15136300]

[Anonymous No.15136400]

>>15136169
Entirely unrelated to my point. I'm saying if your attitude to contemporary lit were universal, then you would have no chance of getting your writing out there regardless of whether it is good or not.

The absurdity of thinking in such black and white terms about classic and contemporary lit is bafflingly limiting. If all you have is knowledge of works written hundreds of years ago, you won't be able to write anything that will have anything remotely relevant to say. You would come across as merely stifled, anachronistic, and trite. The balanced alternative is to read both. To have an awareness of contemporary trends as much as past ones.

[Anonymous No.15136475]

>>15133025
Just finished reading it.

That guy Baskin was too soft. He seemed to try to pander too much to Lerner's audience. Either that or else he is himself too entrenched inside that sordid world which he describes. For instance:

>the students it had trained were taking up positions in the public intellectual magazines and book reviews, where they now preside over the gradual disappearance of a distinctively literary mode of criticism: a criticism, that is, that attends to matters of form, style and character, that takes aesthetic experience seriously, and that appreciates the emotions inspired by an artwork as fully as, and as constitutive of, its politics

That mode of criticism is the beginning of fraud, of anti-aesthetic analysis, of academic rubbish. The emotions inspired by an artwork should be appreciated *much more* fully than its politics, which is usually but of background importance. Does any serious, genuine, passionate reader of literature really care about the sorrows of Count Ugolino and Pier della Vigna as much as he cares about the politics which motivated said sorrows? Of course not. The politics has gone, its now but a footnote of history, but the human emotions as expressed by Dante's admirable music, conciseness, precision of vision and utter command of the artifices of classical rhetoric and poetic invention, still survive intact, and will survive as long as there are true readers. Millions of Italians and foreigners of nearly all ages and persuasions still feel the power of Dante's words, and are astounded, mystified by it, from Umberto Eco to Jorge Luis Borges and many others.

>Literature, after all, is precisely that which is not bounded by “inflexible laws.” This does not mean it escapes those laws entirely, whether the laws of nature or the lawlike relations that govern our political and social lives.

Nonsense. Literature is, at least externally (though not internally), bounded by the laws of nature (what isn't?), but it's not bounded by the laws of our political lives, neither externally - as in what the author is allowed to do - nor internally - as in what it is allowed to show. If you believe that it is, then you plant the seed of Lerner's hysterical argument.
A good poem is a good poem regardless of its morality, just like some hymns written by Islamic terrorists can be good music. What determines the quality of a poem or a novel are purely literary considerations of style, as well as philosophical considerations about the value of its content, which doesn't need to be moral.
Morality is too relative, and our contemporary American libero-protestant morality is too new and unique to be considered resilient enough to be used as a foundation for aesthetic judgement.

[Anonymous No.15136524]

>>15129216
>oh it's you. Why read Houellebecq and not Franzen? atomised is just France's Freedom.
Do burgers really...?

[Anonymous No.15136529]

>>15130613
Wordsworth is great.
Nigger.

[Anonymous No.15136544]

>>15136400
Your post is has some confusions and distortions.

The confusions:

>then you would have no chance of getting your writing out there regardless of whether it is good or not

There would still be idiots willing to read new books published by completely unknown authors. The sort of people who buy books based on how pretty the girl on the cover is, and so on.
Furthermore, there would still be good authors being spotted by other good authors, usually by showing them some of their stuff and asking for their opinion, which is usually how good writers become known, anyway. Thus, Pound started getting known after becoming Yeats's secretary (as Yeats was already internationally famous), and Eliot, Frost and others started getting known after receiving positive opinions from Pound.

This contemporary ''send your manuscript to a random publisher'' mode of initiation is new and also very sterile, because then you become subjected to what the publishers want. Back in the day authors used to ''rise'' by means of getting themselves into some group of already well-known writers.

Therefore, you are confused about how authors rise to fame. Your view is limited to how it happens nowadays (publishing industry), instead of how it has tended to happen in the past.

The distortion:

>If all you have is knowledge of works written hundreds of years ago

That is not what I am saying. If you read my post, you see it clearly. I have mentioned quite a few contemporary writers who are worth reading, and the heuristics by which one can choose to read them.
But it makes no sense to keep reading lots and lots of them. You will waste too much time.

>To have an awareness of contemporary trends as much as past ones.

If half of your reads are some 30 y.o. Manhattan boys who write for the New Yorker, and half are classics, then you will be more ignorant than necessary (we are all ignorant, but one should strive against it as much our limited means make possible). You won't be well-read enough, because one third of the books you read will be irrelevant in 30 years, and it will look like time wasted.

[Anonymous No.15136651]

>>15128675

[Anonymous No.15136657]

>>15129184
This. Not buying.

[Anonymous No.15137944]

>>15128675
Knausgaard's My Struggle.

[Anonymous No.15137982]

>>15136300
The Dark Road is the superior magical realism novel about the one child policy.

[Anonymous No.15138007]

>>15133025
I was trying to remember where I read someone shitting on Topeka. Do you have a link to the reeee response by Lerner?

[Anonymous No.15138059]

>>15138007
Google 'The Media' by Ben Lerner

[Anonymous No.15138111]

>>15138059
Yes I found it. Hilarious how much he missed the point.