The Man Booker shortlist was announced today

The Man Booker shortlist was announced today.

>Paul Beatty - The Sellout
>Deborah Levy - Hot Milk
>Graeme Macrae Burnet - His Bloody Project
>Ottessa Moshfegh - Eileen
>David Szalay - All That Man Is
>Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Have you read any of the contenders? Anything you think should have made the cut but didn't?

Does Veeky Forums even read anything that doesn't have decades of critical consensus behind it?

Other urls found in this thread:

goodreads.com/book/show/26883528-hot-milk
goodreads.com/book/show/25694617-his-bloody-project
goodreads.com/book/show/23453099-eileen
goodreads.com/book/show/26046318-all-that-man-is
goodreads.com/book/show/27876415-do-not-say-we-have-nothing
bookdepository.com/wishlists/WFQYC1
lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/michael-hofmann/muted-ragu-tones
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

I have read none of these nor do I care or know of any modern authors. I will however attempt to characterize the author and the basis of the drivel they have sold.

>Paul Beatty - The Sellout
Possibly black; male; novel is about some Trump-like figure that is characterized as selling his integrity for meme-fame by the support of 'backwards' and/or 'immoral' views.

>Deborah Levy - Hot Milk
Black woman; something about religion or internalized racism or whatever being the opiate of the people (and specifically, black men and especially black women).

>Graeme Macrae Burnet - His Bloody Project
WHITE MALE; something about rape or menstruation. Or a serial rapist/murderer

>Ottessa Moshfegh - Eileen
African migrant; something about a high school/middle school girl that was raped and blackmailed, or blackmailed into stripping -- regardless she killed herself and this novel is a criticism of 'rape culture' through an 'African lens' -- whatever that means.

>David Szalay - All That Man Is
WHITE MALE with dumb hair because Meds often have such hair; something about toxic masculinity and how men are shallow for defining themselves on such things.

>Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Ching chong; female; something about how mankind and its diverse cultures are great and invaluable and something about inalienable human rights -- possibly rape culture as well.

Feel free to judge my accuracy.

>I have read none of these nor do I care or know of any modern authors.
A pseud if I have ever seen one.

You should try reading books user, it'll do you some good.

I've read Beatty, which seems to be the frontrunner for the award. I thought it was definitely worth my time and I now intend on reading some of his earlier works

Books on the Longlist that I will possibly read:

The Sellout
His Bloody Project
The North Water
The Many

Last year had some great works like The Moor's Account and The Fishermen, Brief History was a Masterpiece, and A Little Life gave me some feels.

>Does Veeky Forums even read anything that doesn't have decades of critical consensus behind it?
The whole "nothing good has come out in the last 40 years" circle jerk is due to most of Veeky Forums being college students who need others to tell them what is good and what isnt see chart threads. They have been guided (kicked) down a road by academics, including inept highschool department heads and their anemic curriculums, and mostly havent discovered what they truly enjoy yet. The fact that DFW is talked about more than Ferrante, Chirbes, and Marlon James is typical of the poisonous groupthink that figures in this forum. Add in /pol9k/ and Poe's law, and you have middling/beginning readers actually believing that there hasnt been a good book written since Blood Meridian, which apparently has bad prose but dont mention IJ as being contemporary or everyone will scream

>Possibly black;

Just looked him up and surprisingly he is. Good call

If my presumptions are even remotely true, then I feel my avoidance is justified.
I read plenty
I presumed so, since 'Beatty' is a surname I have never heard before and sounds awfully black. By this, I mean the name Paul I cannot see being the name of a non-bong or N.American, so 'Beatty' is likely not foreign -- so it must be 'domestically foreign': an African American surname.

It sounded close enough to Ann Beattie that I presumed Paul Beatty was white.

lol what. you sound awfully young. beatty doesn't sound anglo-irish to you? paul doesn't sound like a name a white person might have? where the hell did you grow up?

>'Beatty' is a surname I have never heard before and sounds awfully black

>most of pic is white
I see what you did there! :^) :^) :^)

Why didn't you crop this photo?

>hits right for the wrong reasons
>displays full extent of ignorance
nuhh

>wen u tryna type out a thoughtful post but have a seizure instead

insouciance

Which post got you banned?

WOWBOYO

it goes:
muh canon
omg contemporary literature is prretttyy good
ehhhh
muh canon

you're still in phase 2

>he doesn't know about phases 4-12

Fair enough.

I'm 28, Beatty does sound anglo-irish but it did not seem anglo-irish in this context. I live in Western Canada, which does have its Irish migrants. I believe there are Dutch, Swedish, etc. and German migrants, though. Maybe that is my bias since I am one.

Why do you presume youth with ignorance of the reality of a surname, but an 'innate' sense of it that happened to be true in this situation?
How dare I have a justification for a view that is, in this instance, correct, but not correct in every situation?
I never understood why you progressive types feel 'ignorance' is some supreme evil. Damn bourgeoisie college kiddies.

Nowhere did I say I was correct, rather I said this was my line of thought that came from my ignorance.

>I can't count to 4

>I never understood why you progressive types feel 'ignorance' is some supreme evil. Damn bourgeoisie college kiddies.

lololo

4 would be a repeat of 1. if you broke the cycle you wouldn't get to "muh canon" again

To be fair, there are very few good modern authors.

How much of a contrarian shill do you have to be to say that most people here need someone else to tell them what to read in the same breath as you gush over books nominated for a prize?

Chirbes and Ferrante are not up for it at all.

>showing your work

So bitter, user. Why?

She left ya for Ahmed or something? It's OK. Happens to the best of them. Meanwhile, why don't you read something for a change?

Not him but most of the prizes nowadays are solely about how much new books align themselves with the socially liberal agenda. Some people are sick of it, and he's entirely right to have those assumptions.
Also, you write like a fag or a roastie, you should fuck off to tumblr or something.

>The Sellout
>A prize that rewards writers who take mass-media horseshit seriously

No thanks.

Hystopia was on the longlist and I'm enjoying it. Check it out. Hot Milk, The North Water and My Name is Lucy Barton sound good too, I've read excerpts on Amazon and the writing is decent.

>with dumb hair
googled this, hoyl shit

4 is obviously a separate stage, informed by stages 1-3

The Sellout is one of the funniest novels I've read in a long time. Probably the most memorable contemporary book I've read in the past two years.

Otessa Moshfegh's Eileen is actually pretty good too, very strong tone and a narrator that shouldn't but somehow does work very well.

I personally didn't like her short novel McGlue that much, but I feel like people who like Melville, body horror, and/or psychological horror might be into it.

The canon doesn't change between the stages of 1 and 4

I agree with this. Lit is actually extremely toxic in how petty and narrow minded it is. I can barely stomach this board anymore because a lot of it is a shallow echo chamber of people proving they've read the same translated classics of you.

I'm not saying this board is devoid of interesting discussion, because you still find decent threads like this, but a vast majority is drivel here.

And then you have knee-jerk reactions like this fucking idiot

>muh open-mindedness
Eat a dick, t b h.

I want to read His Bloody Project because the subject matter seems interesting, but I still worry I'm going to be disappointed. The only recent Man Booker short list book I enjoyed enough to finish was the winner last year, and even that wasn't amazing

Have any Veeky Forums thread on books from the last 15 years every turned out well?
Anyway, I'm rooting for Eileen.

I:/
I haven't heard of Hot Milk, sounds interesting but also maybe stupid depending on how the psychology goes.

>Two strangers arrive in a small Spanish fishing village. The older woman is suffering from mysterious paralysis, driven to seek a cure beyond the bounds of conventional medicine. Her daughter Sofia has spent years playing the reluctant detective in this mystery, struggling to understand her mother's illness.

>Surrounded by the oppressive desert heat, searching for a cure to a defiant and quite possibly imagined disease, Sofia is forced to confront her difficult relationship with her mother. Examining female rage and sexuality, Deborah Levy explores the strange and monstrous nature of motherhood, testing the bonds of parent and child to breaking point.

Sounds hideously boring, like every stereotypical "literary" fiction book from the past decade.

>Have any Veeky Forums thread on books from the last 15 years every turned out well?

Veeky Forums has only been around for 5 years tho

He means threads about books published in the past 15 years, not that the threads themselves have been posted for 15 years.

4. (as prev. stated) muh canon
5. books suck
6. children's books again
7. YA same quality as canon
8. YA sucks
9. Canon is better than anything
10. Old, but non-canon stuff is best
11. contemporary lit is awesome
12. muh canon

it's because things are now 1800s-tier sincere again. That is good, but indicates the audience is aging.

>9. Canon is better than anything

that's "muh canon" tho

The 1800s weren't sincere.

Perfect accuracy but I'm sure your just bitter or whatever the new buzzword is.

How dare you not eat and enjoy!?

>Brief history was a masterpiece

I can't believe anyone actually believes this

>Brief history was a Masterpiece
FTFY

Disappointing The North Water didn't get through. Great book. Brutal, but great

Check out Hystopia.

Bumping am reading them

It's better than proclivity of progressives toward professing to know things they may have a glanced at in a book once.

"The Sellout's" opening line: "This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man but I've never stolen anything."

A quote from "Hot Milk": " "My love for my mother is like an axe," Sofia says, more than once. "It cuts very deep."

They say never judge a book by its cover.

Just awful. I've honestly seen better things in the critique threads here.

That's also ignorance

Those lines alone aren't enough to judge the entire books, you doofus.

Anyone have any money riding on the Booker winner? I'm considering making a bet.

I'm going to try to surmise some of these based on the sources I can find online so you guys can pass judgement on them;

>>Paul Beatty - The Sellout
Wrote the book because he was broke; the book was received as satirical but the author is more concerned with its more serious elements. Essentially, a man is living in a Los Angeles-area urban, yet agrarian center where he feels doomed to continue a life in the lower-middle class. His family is falling apart, and his dad dies in a police shootout after leading the narrator to believe that he left a memoir that would explain everything he would need to mentally free himself. The memoir doesn't exist. The narrator, a black man, attempts to introduce slavery and segregation into his neighborhood and gets summoned into the Supreme Court. Prose is 6.5/10 quality, but seems kind of funny.

>>Deborah Levy - Hot Milk
Feminist mystery novel. Prose is 4.5-5/10.

>>Graeme Macrae Burnet - His Bloody Project
Murder-mystery-thriller set in the Scottish Highlands. 4/10 prose; reminds me of something I might have written in middle school. Compelling question about the nature of truth but it's an overused one.

>>Ottessa Moshfegh - Eileen
Another mystery novel that is I guess supposed to tug at the heartstrings a bit. The concept and the prose seem a bit pulpy, yet self-aware - 6/10.

>>David Szalay - All That Man Is
Seems like a semi-interesting concept; the author traces the connection between various men in Europe to examine what it really means to be a man (not touching on concepts of "toxic masculinity" I believe) and what men have in common. 7/10 prose - this one isn't as easy to surmise.

>>Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Analyzes the connections between Mao-generation Chinese and the generation that would fight back against his regime. It seems to try and highlight the dichotomy between these very different groups yet ultimately demonstrate that they are similar. Prose is probably the most solid on this list.

Thank you for this. The majority of Veeky Forums bothers only with stuff that deepthroats their ego. Anons like you make it worth coming back here.

But you haven't read any of them, though?

Thanks

>I'm going to try to surmise some of these based on the sources I can find online
No

>Wrote the book because he was broke

Isn't that the story of 99% of authors?

Yes but they don't all get published.

Moshfegh is pretty good

you're all fucking stupid

>"This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man but I've never stolen anything."

Weird comma placement.

>Another mystery novel that is I guess supposed to tug at the heartstrings a bit. The concept and the prose seem a bit pulpy, yet self-aware - 6/10.
lol there is no tugging on heartstrings, it's told from the point of view of a fucked up girl and more about her depressing life than the mystery, which is just the last 1/5 or 1/4, very bleak and grimy in a good way

>it's told from the point of view of a fucked up girl and more about her depressing life than the mystery
Ok, so like I said it has an appeal to emotion

>very bleak and grimy in a good way
>The concept and the prose seem a bit pulpy, yet self-aware
Thanks for your insight

My wife is a French nationalist living with me in Canada, and thereby especially hates the Ayy-rabs.

I read at a very inconsistent but definite pace through my backlog.

Me again,

I still haven't read any of this trash, but I will now do a Google search of all of the authors alongside a novel synopsis:

>Paul Beatty - The Sellout
Paul Beatty, as we discovered a while back, was in fact black.
Wikipedia synopsis:
>The novel concerns a narrator, referred to only by his last name, "Me", who attempts to reintroduce slavery and segregation in his Los Angeles neighborhood. This attempt leads to a Supreme Court case.
Also,
>The novel takes place in and around Los Angeles and concerns a protagonist who grows artisanal marijuana and watermelons.
This is hilariously close to my presumption and even fits in with the author being black. 10/10 on my end.

>Deborah Levy - Hot Milk
I discovered Deborah Levy was just a white woman, her name like Beatty's felt awfully American black so I presumed it so.
Synopsis:
>goodreads.com/book/show/26883528-hot-milk
Kind of accurate, a quick skim seems to reveal it has themes of going against the grain to find one's own desires/solve problems in life. My premise of her being black was very important in my presumption, and that being false while some semblances being true means I can only give this a 6/10.

>Graeme Macrae Burnet - His Bloody Project
Burnet is a WHITE MALE, novel is about a triple murder:
goodreads.com/book/show/25694617-his-bloody-project
8/10 since my presumption was very vague.

>Ottessa Moshfegh - Eileen
Moshfegh was some odd slavsmite, already a poor grounds.
Synopsis:
>goodreads.com/book/show/23453099-eileen
No rape from what I can tell, but definitely following the ''''''PTSD'''''' and self-loathing that will often arise from rape, as well as a warped sexuality. 8/10 for fundamental accuracy.

>David Szalay - All That Man Is
Somebody already confirmed David Szalay is a WHITE MALE with dumb hair.
Synopsis:
>goodreads.com/book/show/26046318-all-that-man-is
10/10, I would give myself a lower grade since the title makes it somewhat obvious, but then again so was the title of Beatty's book.

>Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Thien is some kind of azn, Chinese if the synopsis is accurate.
Synopsis:
>goodreads.com/book/show/27876415-do-not-say-we-have-nothing
Very wrong, more like a cultural examination of a Chinese family line or something. I don't really care. Seems like a chinaman's 'The Sound and the Fury' but lacking what made that interesting. She'd probably say something like "WHITU PIGGU NO UNDERUSTAND BECAUSE WHITU" or some other exaggeration of a person I don't know.
2/10

The majority of my presumptions were fundamentally accurate, two were almost perfectly accurate, two were very close but had a few flaws, one was pretty wrong and one was completely wrong but still sounds awful. I have succeeded in what I set out to do, and thus will continue to not read contemporary fiction. One cannot blame me, since my 'ignorant biases' were confirmed.

>8/10 for fundamental accuracy.
textbook rationalization

The protagonist could have actually been raped and it would not change the plot at all beyond having flashbacks or something. The themes would remain exactly the same.

>clairvoyance
spoopy

for the record though protag isn't raped but the mystery is about a young boy being raped, there's also a brief mention of a time that Eileen's dad groped her while drunk and called her her sister's name- implying that the other sister had been molested and that's why she split right out of high school, leaving Eileen to take care of her drunken crazy piece of shit dad-that's basically a sentence though, further implying that Eileen/the narrator either hasn't made that connection or has deeply repressed it

inb4 shill accusations, but Eileen is really good, Veeky Forums would like it if they'd give it a chance- closer to creepy Patricia Highsmith/Shirley Jackson psychodrama than whatever stereotypes of 'women's fiction' a lot of you have

so my 8/10 is perfectly justified

yes fine chill, just adding some context

>You write like a fag or a roastie

Weren't you just bitching about literature railroading it's own agenda into books and being unkind to opposing opinion? You fucking hypocrite. You embarrass yourself further when you defend the fucking deep purple prose of the user who made blanket assumptuons, but you call someone out for not talking in your secret club style. Crying is for pol fags, fuck off there unless you want to critique outside the echo chamber..

I think you don't read because your head is stuck up your ass and there's no light in it. Obviously you couldn't fit a light up there, and of course you the patrician supreme would never read off a Kindle.

You sound like Elliot Rodger if he were more of a pussy and he just gave up and bitterly posted to lit.
I'll score my presumption based on whether you shoot up a school or you shoot up your bedroom.

God damn you infuriate me. Your prentious prose is more purple than the blackest lips. When you make a huge glaring mistake and look like a total fucking idiot, you just try to justify your answer, like a 10 year old who thinks that because his mom said he was a smart kid he is suddenly the smartest child in all the class. You probably were that kid, which might explain why you have no friends and instead have to try and validate yourself to the faggots of lit who reject good literature the moment it doesn't align with their values.

Tell me if I succeeded, cunt.

Fuck this dumb shit discussion and answer me this:

Why are woman nominated for the MAN booker prize? Shouldn't there be a separate category for woman bookerz?

Checkmate fags.

Kek. Thanks for providing something even remotely valuable to this thread.

Not even him, but damn

I've been working my way through the long list. Hystopia was great, Eileen was boring and fucking awful, very surprised at the acclaim for it. I read the Sellout months ago and really liked it. Honestly I thought more people here would like it considering its about reinstituting slavery willingly.

never heard of Warren Beatty?

late but deserved

That is the definition of a pseud though, to guess and hope they're right instead of reading and judging accordingly. So lazy

I care so little, I will now spend my time giving you all a run down of them just to show what a cunt I am. So full of your own self importance and your delusions of intelligence. Do you even think about what you're typing, you absolutely worthless fuckwit?

>bookdepository.com/wishlists/WFQYC1
>$86 with free shipping
Who's with me?

Team Szalay all the way: one of the few contemporary writers I could foresee myself cautiously using the word Joycean to describe. For anyone wanting to know more (and the reason I bought it immediately on release) read the ever-great Michael Hofman review in LRB:

lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/michael-hofmann/muted-ragu-tones

survey: what is the worst book that's won the man booker?