/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.5048013]

Has there been a novel recently that shook up the publishing world in the way that pulp fiction or the matrix did in the nineties for movies?

I'm not talking about popularity alone though. I mean it's about how both those movies were seen as innovative and ground-breaking when they came out, offering something viewers had never seen before (let me qualify that statement with this: this isn't about your personal opinion on that I'm just giving the general consensus)

Just want to know if there's been a novel out relatively recently that's viewed in the same light.

[Anonymous No.5048034]

OP anyone who says Tai Pei is trolling and the last time anyone wrote something worth reading he was denied the nobel prize because of shitporn.

[Anonymous No.5048108]

>>5048013
50 shades of grey

might be a totally shit book, but the fact that erotica went mainstream and viral really took a lot of people by surprise. i work in a bookstore and after it was published several customers bitched about it to me.

[Anonymous No.5048112]

>>5048108
note: it wasnt ground breaking, so i guess it doesnt fit the criteria listed, but it definitely shook up the publishing world for a bit

[Anonymous No.5048120]

>>5048013

Pale Fire has a unique structure but it was written about 40 years ago.

I read The Elementary Particles (Atomised in the UK) by Houellebecq recently and that was written at about 2000. It is genuinely edgy as fuck in a way that would be unacceptable today on tv or in movies.

[Anonymous No.5048126]

Arguably House of Leaves. A lot of people who aren't autistic 4channers really seem to like it and it is pretty well known. It's printed so that the text is as fucked up as the house in the book where there will only be one word on each page for several pages or backwards/upside down/oddly grouped text.

[Anonymous No.5048133]

>>5048126

just finished it. 7/10

[Anonymous No.5049620]

>Pulp Fiction
>innovative

[Anonymous No.5049634]

>both those movies were seen as innovative and ground-breaking when they came out

ouch

[Anonymous No.5049727]

>>5049620
Oh fuck you.

[Anonymous No.5049764]

The Matrix was truly groundbreaking

[Anonymous No.5049793]

Harry Potter

[Anonymous No.5049796]

>>5049727
U would only think it's innovative if you have no familiarity with cinema of the '60s and '70s

[Anonymous No.5049798]

>>5049793
This

[Anonymous No.5049822]

>>5049796
Which most of the general public didn't. It was the perception of this general public that The Matrix and Pulp Fiction shaked.

Stop being a tryhard.

[Anonymous No.5049828]

>>5049822
>>5049822
Then see Harry Potter, Twilight, Fifty Shades, Dan Brown, etc.

[Anonymous No.5049836]

>>5049822
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastiche

[Anonymous No.5049893]

>>5049822
>>5049836

seriously if you actually knew about film you would see that there are sooo many movies that Tarantino copied for basically every movie he has ever made. If you just want the popular opinion then that is ridiculous, because popular opinion is generally not the best opinion. you can't call that guy a tryhard until you actually know as much about cinema (or anything for that matter) as him. It is sort of likely that you don't

[Anonymous No.5049899]

>>5049796
Actually, I am very familiar with film history and theory. I don't think you fully understand the brilliance of the film. There's a lot more to it than the non linear structure. For example the brilliant character and setting development through dialogues cultural references, the symbolism, the unorthodox use of shot types, the subtle artifice, the social commentary.

[Anonymous No.5049904]

>>5049899
dialogic*

[Anonymous No.5049908]

The Hunger Games. Which I think is genuinely a pretty good book, by the way.

[Anonymous No.5049913]

>>5049893
Yeah, that's basically Tarantino's shtick, though. He makes movies about movies. And he does it very well.

[Anonymous No.5049966]

>>5049620
>implying pulp fiction wasn't groundbreaking for mainstream cinema
stay tryhard

[Anonymous No.5049971]

>>5049828
You're wrong. Those were popular but not innovative or influential to the medium in any way.

I'm going to cast my vote for Catch-22. Not only was it hugely popular but it also brought the non-linear plot to the mainstream, which is quite a feat.

[Anonymous No.5049983]

>>5049971
Also Slaughterhouse-Five, A Clockwork Orange, The Catcher in the Rye, A Confederacy of Dunces, Lord of the Flies, and everything else I read when I was in high school.

[Anonymous No.5050009]

Infinite Jest I guess

[Anonymous No.5050043]

A Catcher in the Rye did for books what Pulp Fiction did for movies and Paranoid Android did for songs

[Anonymous No.5050046]

>>5049899
>MUH POP REFERENCES
>MUH METRIC SYSTEM AND ASSBURGERS

[Anonymous No.5050079]

>>5049908
I'm not wholeheartedly against genre fiction, or YA fiction, I just think it's boring. However, the Hunger Games was frighteningly pretentious. That story came from some dark place in the author's being. A moderately skilled describer of things fancied herself an author and wrote self-insert fiction about her enacting revenge on her high school bullies.

Also some seriously odd narrative choices. Collins seemed to have a tendency to love writing in huge dramatic devices that are a large source of conflict, and then eschewing them entirely because she couldn't be fucked to allow their consequences to affect the plot.

The second-to-last dead guy, the huge guy who hung out in the field for instance, seemed like a serious threat to victory until he just died suddenly after doing nothing for the entire novel.

[Anonymous No.5050081]

Pulp Fiction and the Matrix are pretty much postmodern movies though - it's arguably the same thing happening to movies that happened to literature in the 60s-80s

[Anonymous No.5050087]

>>5050009
Infinite Jest is certainly good, but in what way is it innovative? (Serious question - it's been a long time since I read it.)

[Anonymous No.5050094]

>>5050081
Postmodern films have also been around since the 60s though, in my opinion

[Anonymous No.5050095]

>>5049893
>there are sooo many movies that Tarantino copied for basically every movie he has ever made.
this isn't an argument against Tarantino though, or at least not one that stands up - Tarantino's movies are cobbled together out of references and jumbled-together styles, as well as pop-culture savvy characters. They're derivative in the same way sampling a song is derivative.

[Anonymous No.5050097]

>>5049983

> recent

[Anonymous No.5050106]

>>5050094
I think OP's talking about it hitting the mainstream though, which was definitely the 90s - stuff like Gus Van Sant, Danny Boyle, Spike Jonze, etc.

[Anonymous No.5050111]

>>5050097
They're all from the late 20th century

[Anonymous No.5050113]

>>5050079
Other examples:
The single most interesting conflict between Peeta and Katniss, where they couldn't entirely trust eachother knowing that only one person could win. This is established through Peeta' secretive seperate training, his unknown motives for helping her in the past, etc.

And then this gets thrown out the goddamn window once Collins decides to have some shitty romance in the no-conflict bubble.

The ending of the games probably pissed me off more than anything else. Where that conflict is re-introduced with newly hightened stakes after K+P have done the kissy and have nearly achieved joint victory. Then BOOM, conflict over. Solution was one paragraph away.

You can't fucking do that. If you want to write a game-changer, it should actually change the game. The plot doesn't have any weight whatsoever when the protagonists have plot armor that hard.

[Anonymous No.5050181]

>>5050095
I am not trying to say that they are bad. He is a talented director and I think his scripts are as good as they can be considering

[Anonymous No.5050192]

>>5050113
>plot armor
That's a really good way to describe that phenomenon.

[Anonymous No.5050207]

>>5050192
Yeah it comes from tvtropes.com. Go there to find more words like it

[Anonymous No.5050210]

>>5050207
>inb4 5 replies to the effect of ">tvtropes >2014"

[Anonymous No.5050372]

>>5050210
I used to like TV tropes until I realized how tumblr it was.

[Anonymous No.5050386]

>>5050372
I used to like tumblr until I realized how TVtropes it was.

[Anonymous No.5050432]

>>5049822
Oh yes, truly the Matrix was innovative and original in cinema.

[Anonymous No.5050513]

>>5050432
>The Matrix is not original because some anime had a chick with a gun, code on a computer screen, and exploding watermelons

Yea... no

[Anonymous No.5050533]

>>5050386
I used to like 4chan until I realized that the 4chan userbase started subscribing to website tribalism and automatically associates anything it doesn't like with the tumblr/reddit strawmen.

[Anonymous No.5050558]

>>5050513

uh earth to you bruh the wachowskis fucking ripped off lots of ghost in the shell and called it 'homage'

[Anonymous No.5050576]

>>5050432
Yes, because the masses of America watched Ghost in the Shell.

[Anonymous No.5050578]

>>5050533
4chan is a very bad website and a suitable straw man in its own right.

[Anonymous No.5050613]

>>5048126
Didn't do anything Borges didn't do better.

[Anonymous No.5050627]

>>5049764
the matrix did that without sucking.
I'm a massive Cronenberg fan but that movie is balls.

[Anonymous No.5050654]

Gravity's Rainbow.

There. It's said.

[Anonymous No.5050665]

>>5050613
Not really. Borges is pleb shit though. He takes it next level.

[Anonymous No.5050691]

literature moves slower than film but has more staying per

>>5050665
haha no, he just took everything that was subtle in Borges and spelled it out for you so plebs like you would think it was deep and original

[Anonymous No.5051268]

>>5050613
so that's actually a good analogy for pulp fiction and the matrix, which aren't actually ground breaking at all, but just use things that have been done before in a more easy to understand popular way

[Anonymous No.5051290]

>>5050654
That's not recent but I just read the Chapter wear Slothrop and Schnopf take down Marvy with a custard pie and so fat this is the best book I have ever read.

[Anonymous No.5051320]

>>5048034
elaborate

[The cats No.5051329]

>>5051320
If you mean the shitporn I was talking about this book facetiously>>5051290
If you mean Tai Pei it's remarkably mediocre

[Anonymous No.5051334]

>>5050432
Dude, anime is fucking garbage

[Anonymous No.5051340]

>>5051329
I was talking about the author who got jizzed out of a trophy

[The cats No.5051350]

>>5051340
Yeah it's Thomas Pynchon for writing Family Guy: The Porno: The Book: In WWII

[Anonymous No.5051353]

>>5051350
So...he got denied a Nobel Prize...for writing....shit....how was he denied it ...if he wrote shit? Or was shitporn not an insult?

[The cats No.5051360]

>>5051350
This should be the passage that offended the judge

It's a part of her routine she can enjoy, at least. Though she has never read any classic British pornography, she does feel herself, sure as a fish, well in the local mainstream. Six on the buttocks, six more across the nipples. Whack where's that Gourd Surprise now? Eh? She likes the way the blood leaps to cross last night's welts. Often it's all she can do to keep from moaning herself at each of his grunts of pain, two voices in a dissonance which would be much less accidental than it sounded… Some nights she's gagged him with a ceremonial sash, bound him with a gold-tasseled fourragere or his own Sam Browne. But tonight he lies humped on the floor at her feet, his withered ass elevated for the cane, bound by nothing but his need for pain, for something real, something pure. They have taken him so far from his simple nerves. They have stuffed paper illusions and military euphemisms between him and this truth, this rare decency, this moment at her scrupulous feet… no it's not guilt here, not so much as amazement-that he could have listened to so many years of ministers, scientists, doctors each with his specialized lies to tell, when she was here all the time, sure in her ownership of his failing body, his true body: undisguised by uniform, uncluttered by drugs to keep from him her communiques of vertigo, nausea and pain… Above all, pain. The clearest poetry, the endearment of greatest worth…

He struggles to his knees to kiss the instrument. She stands over him now, legs astride, pelvis cocked forward, fur cape held apart on her hips. He dares to gaze up at her cunt, that fearful vortex. Her pubic hair has been dyed black for the occasion. He sighs, and lets escape a small shameful groan.

"Ah… yes, I know." She laughs. "Poor mortal Brigadier, I know. It is my last mystery," stroking with fingernails her labia, "you cannot ask a woman to reveal her last mystery, now, can you?"

"Please…"

"No. Not tonight. Kneel here and take what I give you."

Despite himself-already a reflex-he glances quickly over at the bottles on the table, the plates, soiled with juices of meat, Hollandaise, bits of gristle and bone… Her shadow covers his face and upper torso, her leather boots creak softly as thigh and abdominal muscles move, and then in a rush she begins to piss. He opens his mouth to catch the stream, choking, trying to keep swallowing, feeling warm urine dribble out the corners of his mouth and down his neck and shoulders, submerged in the hissing storm. When she's done he licks the last few drops from his lips. More cling, golden clear, to the glossy hairs of her quim. Her face, looming between her bare breasts, is smooth as steel.

[The cats No.5051361]

She turns. "Hold up my fur." He obeys. "Be careful. Don't touch my skin." Earlier in this game she was nervous, constipated, wondering if this was anything like male impotence. But thoughtful Pointsman, anticipating this, has been sending laxative pills with her meals. Now her intestines whine softly, and she feels shit begin to slide down and out. He kneels with his arms up holding the rich cape. A dark turd appears out the crevice, out of the absolute darkness between her white buttocks. He spreads his knees, awkwardly, until he can feel the leather of her boots. He leans forward to surround the hot turd with his lips, sucking on it tenderly, licking along its lower side… he is thinking, he's sorry, he can't help it, thinking of a Negro's penis, yes he knows it abrogates part of the conditions set, but it will not be denied, the image of a brute African who will make him behave… The stink of shit floods his nose, gathering him, surrounding. It is the smell of Passchendaele, of the Salient. Mixed with the mud, and the putrefaction of corpses, it was the sovereign smell of their first meeting, and her emblem. The turd slides into his mouth, down to his gullet. He gags, but bravely clamps his teeth shut. Bread that would only have floated in porcelain waters somewhere, unseen, untasted-risen now and baked in the bitter intestinal Oven to bread we know, bread that's light as domestic comfort, secret as death in bed… Spasms in his

throat continue. The pain is terrible. With his tongue he mashes shit against the roof of his mouth and begins to chew, thickly now, the only sound in the room…

There are two more turds, smaller ones, and when he has eaten these, residual shit to lick out of her anus. He prays that she'll let him drop the cape over himself, to be allowed, in the silk-lined darkness, to stay a while longer with his submissive tongue straining upward into her asshole. But she moves away. The fur evaporates from his hands. She orders him to masturbate for her. She has watched Captain Blicero with Gottfried, and has learned the proper style.

The Brigadier comes quickly. The rich smell of semen fills the room like smoke.

"Now go." He wants to cry. But he has pleaded before, offered her-absurdly-his life. Tears well and slide from his eyes. He can't look into hers. "You have shit all over your mouth now. Perhaps I'll take a photograph of you like that. In case you ever get tired of me."

"No. No, I'm only tired of that," jerking his head back out of D Wing to encompass the rest of "The White Visitation." "So bloody tired…"

"Get dressed. Remember to wipe your mouth off. I'll send for you when I want you again."

[Anonymous No.5051837]

>>5050046
Shut the fuck up cunt.

[Anonymous No.5051846]

Bret Easton Ellis' early books were quite controversial when they were first released.

[Anonymous No.5051853]

>>5049899
>THEY DONT CALL IT A QUARTER POUNDER WITH CHEESE
bravo quentin beautiful social commentary

[Anonymous No.5051855]

>>5049971
>You're wrong. Those were popular but not innovative or influential to the medium in any way.
Yes like Pulp Fiction

you can't argue both ways m8 either we count "new to the general public" or we dont

[Anonymous No.5051890]

>>5051846
Look at that poor nigger on the wall
Look at him
Look at that poor nigger on the wall
Fuck him
Fuck the nigger on the wall
Black man is debil