Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 3901. page

>jonathan franzen
>winner of the national book award
>the nyrb quote
I don't know if Gary is a cunt or not, but I surely know that I'm not reading this book once in my lifetime.

He's a reflection of his creator.

He was a self-insert.

>>7997565
Because he is an Asperger's victim with a fondness for objectivism and popery.

>>7997565
Because it works well with cool space opera.

This guy wears a goddang fedora that he tips

>>7997563
What makes The Lorax such a powerful fable is partly its shamelessness. It pulls no punches; it wears its teacher heart on its sleeve. This is commonplace and accepted in children’s stories, but considered largely undesirable in literary fiction.

In fact snarkiness and even snobbishness can be brought to bear by some critics if they believe they’ve sniffed out a whiff of idea-mongering in fiction.

But I happen to believe in the urgency of now.

I don’t accept the proposition that ours is a historical moment like any other, that we can handily shrug off our duty to the future by placing ourselves in an endless, linear continuum of progress that makes its share of errors but is finally, comfortingly self-correcting.

Rather I follow the strong evidence for the singularity of this human era, its unique power to make or break that future, directly linked to tipping points associated with climate catastrophe and the irreversibility of extinction.

I cleave to science and the need to communicate science, or at least the products of science. Beyond and within science, love: not the love we have for ourselves, but that greater love we forget or take for granted in daily life, the love of otherness.

The desperate need for otherness. And I suspect there’s no place, in art or journalism or politics, that isn’t ripe for that discussion.

>>7997570
I rarely write a book where I’m not trying to approach some idea or set of ideas that I think is of interest in the cultural moment.

Some of my books touch on the loss of animal and plant life and what that means to people; my new novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven, is partly about the use of religious belief in politics and the intersection of that use with the diminishment of diversity, cultural and linguistic as well as biological.

In approaching these ideas in a fictional vein I’ve had to wrestle, on the technical side, with the trickiness of balancing the aesthetics of contemporary writing (grounded in the subjective and averse to the didactic, committed to the personal and hostile to the general) with what might unfashionably be called a moral vision.

In fiction, philosophical, political, or religious ideas tend to be most convincing when they arise organically out of a character.

It’s also about pulling back and allowing ambiguity—enough that the reader can decide his or her own relationship to what’s being encountered.

You have to establish a certain authority for the reader to suspend disbelief, but there’s great fluidity in fiction: You don’t need to be representing your own position, indeed you don’t need to be representing any real position. You’re not a historian and you’re not a journalist.

You can write whatever you want, however you want, and it can be read however the reader wants to read it. That’s the risk and the excitement. Two private minds in conversation.

>>7997578
We shouldn’t forget that literary fiction is part of the now, part of social discourse. It’s not a medium for polemics, but it is clearly a medium for speculation. And for the examination of collective choices as well as individual.

This is nothing new; it goes back well before Dickens or Hardy or Eliot.

My feeling is that the struggle to write well is also the struggle to write honestly, even when they seem to be at loggerheads. And that candor—elusive and sometimes rudely naked—shouldn’t be just the easy honesty of me but a more ambitious honesty of us.

Not the sole purview of children’s books, but the purview of any book at all.

In the end, I think a bit of shamelessness is called for.

My own life.

File: Homer.jpg (220KB, 1200x1200px) Image search: [Google]

220KB, 1200x1200px

>>7997464

>Has there ever been a book, or work of fiction that you just can't stop thinking about, even years after you've finished reading it?

Uh.. most of them?

>>7997464
which book did this to you, OP?

No, you should let someone who has taste have the opportunity to own those books because they're wasted on you.

>>7997469
Can you explain yourself?

>>7997478
If you can't understand the subtext of my post then you won't get anything from those books.

>>7997425

>more than 1000 pages

for what purpose?

all the infinite jest threads and this one need to have a problem with the length? its a great book about a spaceship going back to a home planet after this old guy beelze spent a very long time on earth and he is telling his grandson about all the shit he learned there.

its like the first sci fi book ever but also imbued with esoteric spiritual knowledge.

god damn, no one? fuck yall

>>7997550
If it is any consolation I'm watching this thread in order to learn more, drunk though I may be

Don't think about it consciously. You should just intuitively know what you're doing and what will work. You can't build a good story from reading critical analysis tropes.

>>7997417
>compare 1984 and Brave New World
>this is a legitimate thesis Idea
shouldn't you be able to come up with something more in depth and original than that.

Actually this is bait. never mind

File: Aloysius_-_Brideshead_Revisited.jpg (170KB, 778x1166px) Image search: [Google]

170KB, 778x1166px

>>7997417
>never heard of Evelyn Waugh

anon, i don't know whether to envy you, because you will have the experience of reading Brideshead Revisited for the first time, or pity you, because you appear to be a massive idiot

>>7997749
I'm not a /lit/fag by default. While I do enjoy reading, it is not my main hobby and so I have not come across some of the great ones.
I think that you should envy me, it's the only scenario in such cases.
>>7997733
Great trippledubs boi.
Yes, it is not deep and is shallow, but as I said, I wanted to do something easy.
Like, very easy.
Like "a week work with sessions of playing videogames in spare time" easy.

And the more original one was the objectivism idea.

The Library of America.

This
> http://www.amazon.com/Cthulhu-Stories-Penguin-Twentieth-Century-Classics/dp/0141182342

>>7997405
It aesthetics looks shit

>>7997298
yep, probably

>>7997298
reading book iii right now.
where the fuck did he source this from??
i realize he spoke to different people but was he channeling the narratives, the emotional sequences, from a higher source? i feel like there's an aspect of authenticity that i'm still not getting

>>7997347
Obviously it was divine inspiration for God.

Is this really what you do with your spare time?

File: 1440712846378.png (338KB, 1237x867px) Image search: [Google]

338KB, 1237x867px

>>7997266
Spare time is a spook

File: dramamine.webm (392KB, 1920x1080px) Image search: [Google]

392KB, 1920x1080px

spooks is a spook

hail eris

Candide

shoplifting from american apparel

>>7997220
the god delusion

>>7997210
This?
>http://www.creepypasta.com/the-gift-of-mercy/

>>7997152
leave your cellar and go to a bookstore

Isn't this the DFW guy?

I'm here, OP.

Come to me.

Where are you at?

>>7997203
conceptual phase

>>7997208
Oh damn.