Why does Veeky Forums hate contemporary literature so much?

Because pretending to like classics that have stood the test of time is an easy and lazy way for the intellectually lacking to appear smart without having to defend what they read themselves. They can pretty much just appeal to authority by parroting some experts review on a classic without being in danger of being called out by any of the other phonies.

This exactly.

>How would you know, are you reading contemporary fiction?
Like most people, it was a phase I went through. You'll get over it too, eventually.

>Do you think they are going to only write about SJW-related stuff, in hopes of getting published by some mainstream publisher?
Given that mainstream publishers are actively soliciting this, yes I do.

>Fuck off, pseud.
You keep using that word ...

First do Harold Bloom's favorites, and favorite authors of public figures you respect.

Award winner longlists for Man Booker, Premiya Bolshaya Kniga, Miguel de Cervantes Prize, National Book Awards, Commonwealth Prize, sometimes the Nobel. I also like country awards (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_State_Prize_for_European_Literature) because they are less well known and thus less open to political force.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_awards

Note I didn't say winners, because that is often political. The NYRB, London Review and the New Yorker are liberal as fuck (and I care about that less than most, but Zadie Smith does not deserve 1/10 what is written about her), but they can still do decent reviews when they arent complaining about this or that: I found Chirbes and Ferrante through them. If you need further right The New Criterion, American Conservative, and Lapham's Quarterly have great recommendations. Contemporary book threads here actually are great once they get past the whole 'contemporary threads are shit", Philip Roth is still contemporary and his novels are obviously masterpieces.

god damn it go back to /pol/

contemporary lit =
>this is me not trying, take it or leave it.
>if you don't get it you're not deep or "artsy" it's "art and me being vulnerable therefore i should win a prize"""""""

I have no idea how you would apply this to something like Brief History of Seven Killings or The Vegetarian.

shut up cuck

You're not exactly dispelling any stereotypes there, m80.

What an embarrassing post.

it just seems like our shitty society makes crappy art. No mystery here.

Most music sucks now
Most movies suck now
Most contemporary literature sucks
Most modern art sucks now

It's just our shitty society. People have said all through history that art is reflective of society. Our society has values that don't really translate well into good, universal art. There is too much narcissism and hedonism. Obviously there are still good, even great works in all these mediums, it's just harder to find them among the noise. I think it has more to do with the supermassive industries that have built up and pump garbage out for $$, which is a unique modern thing that is detrimental to modern art. Unless you think an executive boards of producers and marketing teams in now way impact the art in a negative way, which I disagree.

I don't care if you think I'm a le wrong generation fag.That's not even really a valid criticism. I would not like to be born in another era to experience their art in real time, I'm fine where I am, thanks. Just commenting.

I don't. Murakami is comfy.

this. it's what happens every time women demand access into something. they invariably ruin it because they're so desperate to prove themselves.

I sure don't. There's a lot of good stuff coming out. Just peruse Amazon and Goodreads and you'll see

As always, a broad generalization and crap argument

This is wrong. You just haven't waited long enough for people to sort out what is good and what is bad for you, so you look at the shit-coated surface of art, lazily refuse to dig any deeper, and then come on Veeky Forums and start screeching about how bad art is these days. It isn't. Go look around.

I clearly said there is good shit you just have to look for it IN MY POST

Learn to read

I also disagree and feel your assumption is wrong. There is less good shit now, prove me wrong.

the book you posted only confirms what he said though

Where did mommy hit you?

theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/27/us-study-finds-publishing-is-overwhelmingly-white-and-female

This is why

Cervantes and nobel are joke prizes

Any book I posted would have been responded to like that though.

Because western culture is degenerating and literature is a product of culture.

People will refuse to admit this even though it is literally brought up by tons of contemporaries all through history any time a society falls into degeneracy.

But no lol you're just not lookin hard enuff tee tee xD

Art has always been 99% shit.
The only difference between old art and contemporary art is that there has been more time to filter the shit works.

>Art has always been 99% shit.

Not true. It's just that when skill has been deconstructed from it.

It isn't that our society sucks at art, it's merely that were not truly suffering. How can one make art out of a time so prosperous as ours?

And the ones that do attempt in our age? They're laughed at, because we know that their demons are imagined; self made vices imprisoning souls--"woe is me for my specific brand of psuedo-marxist gender studies is laughed at". Nobody suffers indolent lyrics anymore, they instead choose to masque their sorrows with technology, memes, and faux social interactions. As my professor says: You gotta have a little dirt in the mix.

Indolently*** fucking auto correctly

Hubert Selby shows that really all you need is deep cynicism. In fact, most great contemporary literature derives from that.

>implying he's not false-flagging
/pol/ is a board of peace.

A deep cynicism for what? The culture that is too self absorbed to even care? Write a novel about how far man has fallen from grace, from suffering and emotion. You'll be laughed at as edgy, misinterpreted by the self-ascribed misanthropes. Or worse, lack nourishment like a hunger artist, as your esoteric brand of cynicism fails to connect with any souls. You might as well laugh surreptitiously at the masses while yearning tales from a genre.

Because for all my wailings--and I can't be alone in this, surely--literature has died. The most beautiful book could have been written this morning, but no one would notice, because we've become inculcated with the swathes and swatches of the mediocre for far too long.

Yarning*** autocorrect is a pleb.

>Because for all my wailings--and I can't be alone in this, surely--literature has died

Bullshit hyperbole, and I even agree that suffering is important to literary fiction. Even your last point falls flat if you look at Harper's Weekly top sellers in literature in the 19th century, lots and lots of pulp. Same as best-sellers throughout the early 20th century.

is the truth, and even then if you are reading widely in literary press you can still be one of the first to find the gems.

Veeky Forums only cares about appearing smart. contemporary literature isn't propped up and validated by the canon, and therefore to claim you like something contemporary requires an individual stake and risk.

You have the luxury of retrospect, my friend. People back then had to do the same thing- rummaging through the shit to find the good. The shit- and this is a revolutionary thought here- is forgotten in favor of what is good. In every field of art this is how it works.

Ah, but look at what percentage of the population read then versus now. And even looking at the now, view the demographics. A Cadre of counter-culturists does not a sustaining demographic make.

Back then--as it is now, too-- popular culture was adapted to the medium. During the time of the moderns, reading or watching a play was all you could do. Contrast that with now and nobody has the time or energy to read, they'd much rather sit and watch a movie. Even the late moderns felt and saw this coming. Sure, literature exists and still comes out like the 19th and 20th century best sellers, which you call "pulp", but that doesn't ensure it will keep coming out. I maintain that literature is dead or, if not yet, dying.

Please give us the last 10 books you read that have been published since the year 2000.

Basically, this. We live in a post-literate world. Committed readers are rare, and poseurs ever more common. Even language is dissipating into a thin, internationalised gruel of prosaic symbols.

You can't have literature without mastery of language, and electronic communication deprecates this skill a little more every day. Twitter, anyone?

Twitter forces you to write cogently within 140 characters. If that isn't teaching the youth brevity, I don't know what is.

because contemporary literature is bad. constant media distraction coupled with narcissism means authors no longer feel the need to read the classics or to hone their craft. the result is trite ideas and low vocabularies. i can't enjoy a book when i have the constant urge to correct the prose like a schoolteacher

or maybe you are using phony rebelliousness to justify being too dumb to read the classics

Well it sure as hell isn't teaching them how to spell or construct a sentence.

Arcadia
Let The Great World Spin
In Defense of Food

Off the top of my head

What constitutes contemporary literature, if a writer is still living or not?

What is contemporary? The last 5 years? The last 10 years?

Mankind has been writing for thousands of years. It is not "hatred of contemporary literature" to say that recent works represent at best 10% of what is worth reading.

Zadie Smith
Toni Morrison
Jennifer Egan
Dawn Lundy Martin
Maxine Hong Kingston
Clarice Lispector
Maya Angelou
Gayl Jones
Suzan-Lori Parks
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Jhumpa Lahiri
Margaret Atwood
Theresa Hyak-Kung
Ruth Ozeki
Ursula Le Guin

People who have made up their mind on something and totally lack the self-awareness to reevaluate their opinion are so fucking frustrating.

Good post. I don't read too many contemporary novels myself but there are plenty of contemporary poets and playwrights that are worth reading.

Publisher said: librarians would reject the new Lord of the Rings; they would tell the next Saul Bellow to fuck off, tell the next James Joyce that he is worthless.

But instead, they will take in the next Stephenie Meyer, or the current YouTube eceleb and the new so called diverse and progressive writer that you so much loathe. Why? Because they're trendy and normalfags buy them. They don't give a shit that you write this century's next masterpiece. That won't sell: they want money and profit.

It may hurt your feelings but that's how money truly works: not for quality or for art but for benefits. Write as a hobby m9. You will only publish the next literary masterpiece if you are renowned.

>ten
>TEN
Muh nigga.

Why should you waste your time searching a pearl in a mountain of shit, when you can read the greates works humanity created? Think of it as an higher form of communication, that comes from the past and always from the past.

I see this only as cowardice and intellectual boredom. See

Then stop reading. You nihilist.

A-user? You don't really mean that do you?

Because it's politics over aesthetics.

Exactly. I bet he already got his "literary" awards for making himself so vulnerable to criticism.

First response. why are we so desperate to prove women are inferior? Why is Veeky Forums so afraid of a womyn being better than them? did your mother hit you when you were young Veeky Forums?

contemporary lit pro here.
just read.

- the nix
- the instructions
- paralel stories
- the dying grass
- canonball
- witz
- jerusalem
- last stories and other stories
- middlesex
- never let me go
- buried giant

>le degeneracy meme

How is people having sex outside of marriage more degenerate than starting a fucking world war? We live fucking wonderful times and the real reason you think contemporary art sucks is because you're a filthy pleb.

Elena Ferranted = descent to good

A little Life = bad to mediocre

Yanagihara's People of the Trees was better.

contemporary literature can't be any good because the contemporary world isn't any good

what is a contemporary writer supposed to write about?
how social media is rotting their brain?
how identity politics is rotting their brain?
how the economy is so shit?
nobody needs to read these things when you're already living it

The world has always had problems.
There are plenty of subjects -including the ones you've listed- to write about.

>nobody needs to read these things when you're already living it

Nobody wants to read these things because (figuratively) nobody wants to read. Like, anything, at all.
Those who do read use literature for the sake of escapism. They want love stories, sex, action, easy-to-digest stories and genre-fiction that can be consumed like a TV show, mindlessly, without much thinking.

Contemporary literature can't be good because there's no real demand for good literature.

I mean its like this

do you think that when WW2 was going on and all these people were writing about it that they ever thought "man in several decades everybody is gonna love this stuff"
I figure probably not
what they were probably thinking was "man if the world isn't destroyed by nuclear warheads in a few decades its gonna be so advanced and people are gonna look back on this and realize how stupid it all was"

so I think that the present day is pretty much like that too except this time they really are gonna realize how stupid it all was

the fallacy of induction

they didn't have supermassive industries pumping out pop-garbage to sift through, though

do you honestly think it was the same back then? or do you think capitalism and marketing ad execs have had no impact on the overall average quality of literature?

hint: the times have changed

>How is people having sex outside of marriage more degenerate than starting a fucking world war?
we're on the brink of world war buddy

not sure what you're getting at

>America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash–and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the ‘Lamplighter,’ and other books neither better nor worse?–worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the 100,000.

Hawthorne, on the state of contemporary American literature 159 years ago

>we're on the brink of world war buddy
who vs who?

yeah, and he's not wrong.

but his industry wasn't as large as ours.

so he's like a level 5 gnome complaining about swamprats where we are already level 29 and fighting dragons n sheeit.

We have more to wade through but more tools to wade through it with. So it might balance out. But either way, I'm sure the drivel from the early 18th century is ten-thousand times more interesting and classy than the dreck from today.

usa vs russia obviously

>There is too much narcissism and hedonism.
You really think now has more so than in generations or societies before us? There's nothing new under the sun, more than likely we just see more of those parts of each other than there's more of it now (or maybe there is more of it now because there's more people but you could say that about anything)

I read a book. It's shit. Look at the author. It's a woman.

Not likely. Isn't Trump supposed to be a Russian proxy?

t. hipster faggot from brooklyn

That's impossible. They'll just continue fighting each other trough proxy wars.

...

>Most music sucks now
wrong
>Most movies suck now
Half-true
>Most contemporary literature sucks
wrong
>Most modern art sucks now
Don't know enough about it to judge, and frankly neither do you

There is always someone out there pushing the boundary in these mediums. Film is tougher due to money being such a ruling factor in exposure. But generalising like this is fucking dumb to begin with.

Nah you just like garbage

Try and prove that there were communities of furries and men in adult diapers in 1815

I'll wait.

(Communities, by the way. Not James Joyce writing about farts or Mozart licking ass. Communities)

>war will never happen it's impossible
Says the increasingly nervous faggot for the 12th time this year.

Keep telling yourself whatever is most coddling though. You do you.

the majority of Veeky Forums are young males wanting to fit into a community, so they read the pre-ordained classics and 'must-reads'

its why flowcharts are bandied about here, people see each author and book as more Veeky Forums social credit to bank, then when they've read enough acclaimed-but-still-inaccessible-to-the-general-public books they can comfortably feel superior to others in their new Veeky Forums identity

the end result is that no one ever develops a taste of their own. why would anyone read books that dont have any social credit attached?

you can see a similar phenomenon on /mu/, and in a much more spectacularly embarrassing way on Veeky Forums

There's obviously more great works in total from Homer to the 1950's, and they also stood the test of time. Sure there's works that are published today that will still be praised in 100 years but it'll only be a fraction of the ones people actually consider great right now, meaning it's a waste of time searching for them.

a war between russia and the us will not be a world war, it will be the end of us all. pretty sure russia is not willing to end humanity for a naval base in the black sea and some influence in the middle east

H

people have been fucking animals since the dawn of mankind and scat wasn't a thing prior to the invention of tp because having your arse caked with shit was the standard back then

>muh communities

/pol/ pls go

just go

I don't. I'm less familiar with it though. Recommend me something non-YA, non-sci-fi, non-romance or ero-novel that is top shelf.

Convert me.

Knausgård desu

...

this is such a dumb luddite assumption

a. people are reading books, still.

publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/72450-print-book-sales-rose-again-in-2016.html

b. what the fuck do you think people do on the internet...theyre reading

obviously a lot of stuff is not good, but that has always been the case.