Contemporary Veeky Forums

This is a book listing forum.

I liked him in the 2000s. Are The Circle and the other A-rab ones as bad as people say?

John Darnielle is up and coming.

Reading this right now, basically Borges in Iraq after 2008. Just finished Austerlitz, I enjoyed that as well.

>Will Self

DISCARDED

D O G B O Y S

If Theroux is generally unrecognized how can I ever have any hope to be. I don't understand how that can happen

cmon m8 Umbrella is great piece of work; havent read any other book of his though

oh, combination of bad factors I guess... (for a lot of people Theroux seems to be a total prick etc) I don't get the hatred towards the Laura Warholic; for me it's something like The anatomy of melancholy by Burton, just in the form of novel and about hatred and love and so.

I read the first story. I think it may be a bit lost in translation because the twsit ending was very cheap

>no i kill u lmaooooo

Alain Damasio wrote La Horde du Contrevent. It's a book like no other.

There's only so many times I can discuss the same authors over and over again.

K N A U S G Å R D D E S U S E N P A I

No, the last four books are terrible.

watch your mouth or i'll shit out three more

Go to bed, Ole Robert.

I'll be happy if they're as good as the first two.

Krasznahorkai

Is H is for Hawk any good?

Also, though i post this to death, PIC RELATED IS RAD.

>mental illness
>animal torture
>violence
>sexual violence
>multiple perspectives of the one event in different tense
>Kafka-esque premise
>is written by a young Asian (double your SJW points)
>is a short read
>this cover is gorgeous

...

The brief wondrous life of Oscar Waco is positively my favorite book written within the last ten years.

>Talking about Melville and Dostoevsky gets boring.
Does it really though

...

Why doesn't Veeky Forums talk about this? I haven't read it yet but it seems made for Veeky Forums.

Book was not very good imo. The translation prose is rigid to say the least and didnt really give the reasons for her madness very convincingly.

Visit from the Goon Squad
Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao
All of McCarthy (obviously)
Poetry of Patricia Lockwood
Poetry of Terrence Hayes
Citizen by Claudia Rankine
The first two volumes of My Struggle
Shoplifting from American Apparel
Freedom
Purity
Vampires in the Lemon Grove
All of Wallace (obviously)
Leaving the Atocha Station
Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Eating Animals
Poetry of Alice Notley
All of George Saunders (especially his New Yorker stuff)
Poetry of Kevin Young
Essays of Zadie Smith
Fiction of Bolano
Fiction of Annie Proulx
Stories by Munro
Fiction of Coatzee
The occassional Richard Russi
The occassional Jane Smiley
The occassional essays by Gladwell
All of Anthony Doerr
The occassional Dave Eggars
Anne Beattie's New Yorker stuff
Tobias Wolff's New Yorker stuff
Essays of Wells Tower
Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

I am not saying these are the greatest. I am not saying they contribute anything to the canon. I am saying they are pleasant, memorable, and, at least, helped pass the time.

>Purity
>Remotely salvageable

The Vegetarian

I didn't find this interesting at all. It had one decent idea about cultural theory and spread it over a whole novel where nothing interesting really happened.

And I really loved Remainder.

Why would anyone waste their time reading anything modern? When was the last actual good work of literature? Gravity's Rainbow? Blood Meridian?

Nothing has pushed the medium further sense then.

Prove me wrong. Spoiler alert, you cannot. I am objectively right.

>Mason & Dixon
famalamadingdong

What does Veeky Forums think of Murakami? I think he's great but I suspect you all think he's pleb

I like his stuff but it tends to be the same fucking book over and over. Kafka on the Shore is great tho.

Ferrante. I spent years ignoring it cause the covers make it look like typical post menopausal beach trash lit, but she's on par with Knausgaard.

do you think the kid ended up in the grill of a truck

the kid ended up inside a grill in the back of a truck ;)

He's pleb and recycles the same trash with every novel but he's still an enjoyable read sometimes and he does have an original style.

Underground is a fantastic oral and narrative history and his best work bar none.

Every novel starring a young loner precocious protagonist is awful.

What about the ones starring a depressed, middle-aged Murakami stand-in that inevitably has a semi-romantic relationship with an underage girl?

Loved this.

I thought 1Q84 was pretty fun to read.

Dominican here.

Diaz is a hack.

>rigid prose
Apparently she worked alongside the author in translation and thats how it is.

>convincing reason for madness
What.

Even at a basic level it began as a rebellion against her family and husband that spiralled out of control.

>Mason & Dixon
Bah. Pynchon by numbers.

I'm with this user. I like my authors dead. The fact that their work survived them suggests a certain quality.

The modern publishing industry is so overridden with hype, posturing and shilling that it's just not worth trying to pick your way through it.

I understand the vegetarian thing, not the "I am becoming a plant by reason a blood dream" thing. Also, the reactions by the family and husband seemed ridiculous. If I found out my wife was becoming a vegetarian I would say "shit" and if she rejected me sexually I would wallow a few years until a divorce happened. She basically jumped from saying "hey no more hamburgers" to "hey I am now a recluse to "hey my husband is raping me and my family is assaulting me. The progression to flower sex and the asylum also seemed disjointed, along with the structure of the book.

You guys should get an NYRB or Paris Review subscription. Ferrante's sincerity, Marlon James' violence, even the Vegetarian are doing things that are really wonderful. I suspect you are younger Veeky Forums students though. Old does not mean good.

>implies having read M&D
>beingthisdumb.jpg

I cant stand PR nowadays. Tin House is the only remotley tolerable lit mag. Even the interviews have descended.

that does look rad, ordered

i really, really liked this

>translated by

ITT: essential middle-brow core

The one valid point the "only dead authors" posters have is that we won't know who will have lasting power until after authors die. Some will emerge as having ignored and barely published in their time, sure, but plenty of others will be well-received writers whose works will be found to hold up in the cultural context at some later point in time.

>best of last 10 years
>no one mentions 50 shades of gray or twilight

plebians

Now there's the post of an avid reader ...

>baby's first shit post

Nice contribution faggot.

>implying those books are shit
>implying making more women open to kinky sex doesn't make 50 shades great

admit it, if i was a faggot you'd be first in line to suck my dick

"Kinky" sex is lame af, it's the fedora of coitus

Just started Laurus as it seems to be the absolute be all and all of contemporary lit. Anyone read it?

I agree the alternating texts are disjointed and some are stronger than others but they all tell her story adequately. I enjoyed it man, shame you didnt

prude

Thanks for introducing me to leve.

Gotta second Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Beautiful prose and can be both hilarious and touching in the same essay.
Ghost Machine by Ben Mirov is the first chapbook to make me realize: I fucking love poetry. Ambient and lonely.
I think it's worth finding a literary publication that you really admire and discovering great writers that way. I'm still working to read a lot of classics so I'm not searching too much for contemporary work, but I generally enjoy reading Harper's, Paris Review and Conjunctions.

It sounds like an interesting read, I just wish the protagonist wasn't named Bro

How is H is for Hawk?

>"Hello? I asked what you're doing?" It was cold enough as it was, but the sight of my wife was even more chilling. Any lingering alcohol-induced drowsiness swiftly passed. She was standing, motionless, in front of the fridge. Her face was submerged in the darkness so I couldn't make our her expression, but the potential options all filled me with fear. Her thick, naturally black hair was fluffed up, disheveled, and she was wearing her usual white ankle-length nightdress. On such a night, my wife would ordinarily have have hurriedly slipped on a cardigan and searched for her shower slippers. How long might she have been standing there like that- barefoot, in thin summer nightwear, ramrod straight as though perfectly oblivious to my repeated interrogation? Her face was turned away from me, and she was standing there so unnaturally still it was almost as if she were some kind of ghost, silently standing its ground.

I like the themes and some of the moments but the translation prose is terrible.

i liked it a lot too, but i agree with the other poster... remainder is his best work. C is also better than Satin island

i bet youve never read it

>be all and all

There's a lot of contemporary fiction that I'd like to read, but I'm restarting with the greeks.

I don't see any other way desu. At least by the time I've read all the major works covering all significant movements up to and including twentieth century pomo, the mediocre millennial chaff will have been forgotten and I wont need to read 95% of the stuff in this thread.