Why There’s No ‘Millennial’ Novel

>>8811860
john green

>>8811860
>www.nytimes.com
no

>>8811870
lol I did the same thing. gg

>>8811860
if a lot of people end up liking a book and it becomes a large part of the cultural landscape then it becomes whatever the fuck you call it, the great American novel, the generational accessory or whatever he was trying to say. A lot of these novels deal with similar themes because people relate with unhappiness. It only matters who it is about if you make it matter. I think that most people feel the same way across all walks of life. Not a lot of people have tapped into that though or if they have, it doesn't seem to have sold well. Idk, has there been anything written recently that captures our experiences well? I think of Tao Lin. That's pretty much it for me.

>>8811891
Nice try Tao

Actually, Undertale has established itself as the novel of the millennials. It gives a complete understanding of the millennial mind.

>>8811860
>Globalization

truuuuuuue

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>This Side of Paradise
>The Sun Also Rises
>The Catcher in the Rye
>On the Road
>Infinite Jest

>novels by straight white guys about straight white guys

>For starters, why did we ever pretend novels by straight white guys about straight white guys spoke for entire generations
Anyone who constructs a sentence like this will never produce anything meaningful. As for the question of the millennial novel, it won't be written by some trendy latte-sipping coastal degenerate. That kind of person simply doesn't have the sheer hatred for the way things are required to write it.

>>8811860

I don't even have to read the article to tell you the reason is because there is far less literary talent due to lack of education, plus the soaring industry for TV, movies, and videogames has killed culture. Culture doesn't even exist anymore, society is on a constant assembly line of superficial trends disguised as real culture.

>>8812381
>hemingway
>straight

Because us millennials are BORING. There's no rebellion anymore. It's all hugboxes and safe spaces. You can't write anything innovative if you wanted to for this demographic because they're so sensitive that any social commentary would need to be castrated so as not to hurt any feelings. Any book that widely appeals to millennials is going to be trash. Kids my age have no sense of humor or drive for adventure.

>>8812437
Reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Dead Souls:

>It is enough simply to say that there is a stupid man in a certain town, and it already becomes personal; suddenly a gentleman of respectable appearance pops up and shouts: “But I, too, am a man, which means that I, too, am stupid”—in short, he instantly grasps the situation.

>>8811860
>millennial lit sucks because there is not enough focus on degenerates and nonwhites
It's the opposite m8

>>8812437
Millennial are a lost generation. They are fucked. Nobody will remember any of them, they won't do anything great, they'll just make kids and consume.

The next cultural and artistic movement will be neo-fascist and revolutionary. Millennial won't be a part of it though. You wasted your time on degenerate leftist nonsense.

>tfw not a millennial

>>8812407
lol fuck off grandpa

>>8812437
>>8812448
>>8812488
>Kids my age
>one of my favorite passages from Dark Souls
>The next cultural and artistic movement will be neo-facist and revolutionary

Are these posts ironic?

>>8812448
>suddenly a gentleman of respectable appearance pops up and shouts: “But I, too, am a man, which means that I, too, am stupid”—in short, he instantly grasps the situation.

lel Nu-male got shrekted

>>8812500
No. Stay mad, nu-male.

>>8812502
Nice projecting nu-male

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>>8812511
>projecting your own projection

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>>8812521
Ah the whole reverse projection suplex

You've fallen right into my trap nu-male

>>8811941

Assuming that the idea of a 'millennial novel' is supposed to attract people from 16-25, I don't quite think Undertale counts. It feels like the fan-base for that game are like around 13.

>>8811860
>why doesn't anyone like my novel?!?!?!?

>>8812500
>doesn't know the difference between Gogol and a fucking playstation game
>pretends to understand the nuances of modern culture more than other posters

>>8812437
but i loooove traveling!

>>8812541

>doesn't know the difference between Gogol and a fucking playstation game

What is the difference?

>>8812535
Millenials ended in 1995 friend.

>>8812407
No one who has it in them to write a great novel is going to be stopped by the crappy entertainment we have now. Plebs have always been doing plebby things and patricians have always been doing patrician things.

>>8811860
There's more rigor in an intro to philosophy final essay than this "professional writer's" piece.

>>8811860
WHITE
FUCKING
MALES

>>8812381
>>8812638
enough of this autism

>>8812631
exactly.

this guy made me seriously consider popular-vote euthanasia as an acceptable method of decentralized murder. holy shit, he's so stupid i'm sure that if you told him he was being an idiot, he wouldn't believe you. oh my fucking god, i'm so triggered right now.

how is it possible that any one person could be *just this* idiotic. it doesn't even make comprehensible sense. this is stupidity that predates stupidity, some inceptive grain of stupid that was supposed to be used to inseminate a little bit of stupid into everyone, only god fucked up, and now all the stupid of the world is incapsulated into this one dumb motherfucker's mind.

i wonder if he needs people to help him wake up in the morning. does he listen to an audio track that repeates "breathe in, breathe out" over and over? how does he not asphyxiate on the fact that he must be so stupid he hasn't once in his life been able to pour water out of a bowl and onto the floor?

>>8812654
>"You might get some vague notion of me if I told you I’m a first-generation Thai-American, middle-class, atheist, single, childless, postgraduate, freelancing, New Englander, straight, male millennial. But it’s probably more telling to say that I once took a first date home to watch zit-popping videos on YouTube, or that I accidentally interrupted my college graduation ceremony with a screaming toy monkey I’d forgotten I’d been carrying all day ('Sorry, my monkey went off,' I explained)."

i'm earnestly so confused at how anyone--even a fucking child scribbling with crayon months after being born--could put together a sentence like this, step back from it, EDIT IT, then think, "yes, this, this is okay," AND THEN send it off to be published.

i don't understand how some THING, let alone some ONE is capable of such insulting idiocy. it makes me feel guilty to be human. it makes me guilty to even breathe the same air that this "writer" breathes, day in, and day out.

>>8812664
i wonder what he thinks every day. i wonder what compels him. i wonder the kinds of things he does on a daily basis. does he bathe regularly in his own feces, not for enjoyment, but because he genuinely thinks it the sanitary thing to do?

how do you think he approaches solving problems? how do you think his conversations with people go? do you think everyone around him just pities him because of his profound lack of any semblance of the ability to process information, let alone the ability to reason? i think it's quite likely he got this far in his life only because people felt so badly for him that they didn't want him to just fall between the cracks.

i don't understand how this is possible, i really don't. someone, PLEASE explain how this is possible. this stupidity is not of this universe. i have no words to even describe it.

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>>8812672
>So why do I get acid reflux whenever someone says, however truthfully or flatteringly, that I’ve written a novel about millennials? Partly because I don’t want to be taken for the kind of putz who declares himself a poster boy for anything, but also because my only goal was to write about my own experiences.

THIS IS WHAT HE CLAIMS
THEN
I GO TO HIS WEBSITE
LOOK WHAT IS ON
THE
FIRST
FUCKING
PAGE

SOMEONE STOP ME BEFORE I HAVE A FUCKING STROKE

>>8812500
You fucking idiot.

>>8812653
But it's just cliche and annoying at this point.
I have nothing against diversity in literature. But to sit there an unironically type out shit like this is cringeworthy.
>There's no great American novels because of
>WHITE
>FUCKING
>MALES

>>8812437
The "rebellion" that exists today is that of complaining about tv shows not being inclusive and why videogames are so sexist. Trump may be the end of America, but he sprouted more tumblrinas that could ever have occurred naturally.

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>>8811860

>Those white guys amirite?

Fuck off Tony I know a banana when I see one. You're next on the sjw shitlist after me and rightly so.

>>8812684

Is that novel on the right any good? I keep seeing it at work.

>>8811860

If he doesn't say that it's because everybody is simply too busy trying to be their own brand then he's wrong.

>>8811860
Isnt TAIPEI by Tao Lin considered millennial?

>>8812500
>Dark Souls

haha holy shit. you cant make this up.

>>8812500
MEIN SIDES

>>8812488
oh yeah no one remembers the Lost Generation

>>8812566
Kek, i thought i was a millenial.

>>8812827
Nah man, we're the next generation.

Millenials are the Vice News, Lena Durnham, Sam Hyde types.
Their childhood was in the television age and the internet was this big new opening to them, where new possibilities questions and horizons are in front of them.

We the Post-Millenials are born and raised on memes. We're jaded and realistic as a result.

>>8812407
not just education (ie people who want to make being a writer their primary job) but there's no money in it, earlier in the 20th century you could make a living publishing short stories so then you could write novels or whatever- now even pretty successful writers have to have academic jobs so they have to be a. lucky b. able to play that game, getting a mfa first and even then from only a few (expensive, exclusive) programs (look at the top books published this year- most newcomers are from the same schools) and still work on writing and/or c. come from money/connection to the publishing world so now 90+% of new novelists are dilettantes, rich kids, molded into the same old dullness or suck ups- usually all of the above

>>8812850
>why-theres-no-millennial-novel
even this author
"he currently attends the Iowa Writers' Workshop,"
>>8812849
lol ok
being jaded is not new

>>8812858
Everyone thinks they're actually the jaded one. Its like Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

You Millenials live in a fairytale world and will never know it

>>8812654
>>8812672

what's your problem with him exactly though, you're sort of just railing on about how "stupid" he is

>>8812500

nice

>>8811860
>>8812782
His main argument is that novels are too narrow in their focus (often on the problems of one or a small group of characters) to really capture the entire breadth and depth of a generation.

As a corollary, he adds that most "voice of a generation" novels follow the same general themes (unhappy middle or upper class young people experiencing emotional development), they tend to be abstractions more than an actual representation, and the attempts to define "generations" in the first place are just an attempt to create easy marketing checkboxes and discourage individualism.

Unfortunately, he chose to take a halfhearted swipe at the straight white male bogeyman, which both undercut his point about identity being personal and not just a bunch of demographic checkboxes, and inadvertently triggered a couple of posters to chimp out. Very few people seem to have read or understood the article.

>>8812862
Hey! You just did that thing!

>>8812407
>killed culture

You're too stupid to breathe. Culture can't be killed, it only changes with the introduction of new mediums and distribution platforms. The internet and video games have changed culture. The booming movie and TV show industry have changed culture. Social media turned culture on its head and rewrote the books on interaction. This kind of bullshit gets parroted by idiots every time a new form of entertainment media is introduced throughout history.

>>8812880
Its simple to see in how politics functions between generations.
For Millenials you had your Occupy Wallstreet and you have your figures on both side of the "culture war", scrapping over bullshit about identity.

We on the other hand are natural nihilists, we weren't exposed to the truth about how the planet is near doomed and how meaningless everything is as adults. At which point you simply deploy cognitive dissonance to ignore these stark realities.
We accepted them as the basis, before anything else.

>>8812567

Then why is that most college students can't be fucked to read a book?

That kind of philistinism would have been unheard of in 1916. Even the guys who only cared about sports and dances would have done their course readings.

>>8812891
so basically the millenial+1 generation has the same philosophy as the chinese government?

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All the "voice of a generation" novels are subpar anyway. The Great Gatsby is pretty good, true, but The Sound & The Fury is better, and I'd hardly call Faulkner a representative of his generation.

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>>8812488
Social trends are moving in the opposite direction though, towards acceptance and infantalization. Generation Z (the kids coming up right now) are even more radically progressive. Neo-Marxism is enormously trendy among kids. Liberalism will go downhill in favor of stronger leftism. Racism as a social institution is against the ropes and being bludgeoned to death, your fascist revolution would die in the cradle. The youthful rebellion is against the rigid social standards of their parents and accepting those who are different from them, but striking back hard against those who oppose their acceptance. Its a bizarre form of totalitarianism

If you want to discuss what the future will look like, at least pretend you go outside every once in a while or interact with media sources outside of your internet fascist hugboxes.

>>8812893
this is necessarily true. There are a ton more people now than in 1920 so there are more people who don't read books because of that. And also if anything people are reading more in general being on their phone or computer 24/7 so people havent lost the urge to read just the urge to concentrate on one thing for several hours at a time.

>>8812654
>>8812664
>>8812672
>>8812684
Holy fucking hell you are triggered. Its like you've never heard of a dumbed down clickbait piece before.

>>8812908

its probably just taste, both are very good.

>>8812912
Good thing i'm not like that (or bad, idk). I hope tha t doesn´t apply to my country, since leftism (and bad management) is ruining this place. I fear we will be the next Venzuela.

>>8812862
>he actually thinks being jaded and unhappy with the world is a construct of modern youth culture
:^)

>>8812906
Yes. Which is rather poignent

>>8812927
No, Gatsby is "very good." TSATF is sublime. It's an order of magnitude better.

>>8812407
People have been saying that for well over a fucking decade and a half

>Lack of education

rly

>>8812932
Its all about degrees, for millenials their "edginess" is saying
"Huh man there's no God and the Government isn't perfect, what a fucked up world."

Martin Shkreli is an example of what we can expect from this new generations future.

>>8812912
No it isn't you tards. Edgy kids are mostly fascists and neo-Nazis now. Marxism is dead to the youth.

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>>8812946
What bothers me more than anything is the self-defeating politics of millennials.
>the government is bad!
>we should vote for a new president from one of two status quo candidates while ignoring local elections, alternative choices, or midterm elections!
>but...but wait! Why did nothing change?
>oh well, the system is broken, might as well not vote
>but we can riot for a while and bitch on social media about the results
Millennials are paper tigers. A totalitarian state could wrap its fist around them and they would embrace it with open arms if it promised to be nice to gays and women and used fluffy teddy bears and cute kittens for its symbols instead of iron eagles.
And its one thing to be irreligious, but this new atheism, basically a faith based on not believing in any faith, is a new and militant construct of edgy rebellion that effectively leads fucking nowhere. There's no ideology behind it, nothing but angst.

maybe that generation doesnt care enough about the novel as a medium

>>8812955
I'm not talking a couple thousand edgy white kids in the bowels of the internet yelling about teh joos, I'm talking about mainstream youth culture, the one that makes up 95%+ of their scene. I'm talking about the culture in major urban centers and college campuses that actually controls influence.

>>8812966
This is accurate. Most literary critics worth a shit agree on this.

>>8812974
>I'm not talking a couple thousand edgy white kids in the bowels of the internet yelling about teh joos, I'm talking about mainstream youth culture, the one that makes up 95%+ of their scene. I'm talking about the culture in major urban centers and college campuses that actually controls influence.
>implying the Marxists aren't breeding the new edgy generation to become even more right-wing
>implying that THESE kids are more important than THOSE kids
Go back to leftypol you delusional child

>>8812962
And of course they hate guns, so violent rebellion is out of the question.

>>8812987
>a small minority is more important than a majority
>a couple rebellious teens online spouting racial nationalist rhetoric have any relevance in the political process

You have too much hope for the new generation. They're embracing cultural marxism hook, line, and sinker. I bet you also think 4chan elected Trump instead of the disillusioned anti-establishment conservatives looking for a "straight talker" lmao.

>>8812992
That's the punchline to the whole joke. They're literally disarming themselves.

Definition of a millenial and sjw bullshit and counter-bullshit aside can we acknowledge that this article is just fucking bad on a basic level

How do people end up writing something in the goddamn New Yorker that just half-assedly states a truism, shows no supporting facts at all, brings up no real counter-arguments, and just wanks over a single opinion that he repeats in every paragraph until that limp-wristed ending

What the fuck is this

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>>8812919

>phone
>computer
>reading

I mentioned "books" anon. Reading a synopsis of a show on Netflix isn't exactly what I had in mind.

>>8813022
>How do people end up writing something in the goddamn New Yorker that just half-assedly states a truism
>in the goddamn New Yorker
>New Yorker

The solution is to stop holding the goddamn New Yorker in high esteem. Its a jizzrag for the liberal establishment to bitch and moan for pageviews.

>>8812891
>meaning and permanence are equal
>you millennials don't get how deep I am
Cut yourself much on that edge?

>>8812500
Lol I was talking about the book, you dip.

>>8813075
>intimidated millenial clinging to cartoon pop-philosophy

Away away, old children stay in the pram

I'm gonna read Private Citizens

>>8813087
>le nihilism le best philosophy

kek good luck with your deadwood worldview

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>>8812437
>rebellion is the sole source of innovation
>he actually thinks the outrage culture isn't an extreme minority that's actively dying
>boo hoo us millennials suck I was born in the wrong generation like if you agree

The only reason you're informed enough to make this half-assed attempt at social commentary is because you were born when you were. The irony is palpable when I see millenials complain that such and such generation was better and not realize they only have the ability to see this because of the Internet. We live in a time where everyone is free to be a perfect individual, millions upon millions of unique individual cultures have been formed because we have the ability to communicate instantly and take influence from every time, era, culture, movement etc.

>>8812912
This.

>>8812849
>we're jaded and realistic as a result
You do realize that the opinions you have are actually carefully engineered by the memes you digest right?

Post-millennials shit on the news media, yet fall for the exact same shit if it falls into the form of a buzzfeed article or meme.

Nigga quit thinking you shit when you aint.

>>8811860
I don't know what everyone's problem is with this guy. I think his points are fair, if not exactly groundbreaking. Culture is nowhere near as cohesive as it used to be. A society might take Paradise Lost as a fair representaiton of itself when everyone in that society is Protestant, for example, but it's hard to see the threads that tie this generation together.

>>8812912
Bah, if they're so infantile they'll be easily manipulated. They already are. One would merely need to alter the information they received and the influences they imbibed, and they'd be easily redirected.

>>8813299
To add to this, I don't know why everyone's bagging on him for the "white male" comment. I'm an Eastern European white guy with an English degree, and there're definitely novels that I think I understand more as a result of that. I read Baldwin or Ellison, and while I appreciate them, I don't quite relate to them in the same way or understand them as I do something like Bulgakov, Roth, or DFW.

>>8813299
>>8813330
Fair points, but why actually read something and give the author a fair shake when you can play culture warrior on a Thai fisherman pants appreciation blog?

>>8813299
I think the equivalent to religion in our society is our general outlook on political identity, stuff like not questioning democracy, equal rights, the plight of the oppressed, etc.

I can't think of anything people get quite so worked up about as political identity

There's no millennial novel because millennials don't read books.

>>8813351
50 shades of shit?
The fault in our stars?

>>8813382
>50 shades of shit

This joke is to humor as a coffin is to a child.

>>8813113
Spoiler alert: it's terrible.

>>8812893
Youre either not a college student or you have no friends or you attend a pleb school

>>8813459
>>8812774
Private Citizens is good if you can stand lines like this:
"The heat itched on his face and his need to fart had a medical direness to it – possibly IBS, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's, polyps. Or death. Yeah: chronic death; death not otherwise specified."

>>8813468

what would you consider a non-pleb school? I go to Columbia and i'd say 8/10 kids don't read unless its for class

>>8813342
This. Liberalism is our new religion.

> For starters, why did we ever pretend novels by straight white guys about straight white guys spoke for entire generations?
Truly a mental illness.

>>8812404
>Anyone who constructs a sentence like this will never produce anything meaningful.

Indeed. And people like this are the gatekeepers for the current publishing industry -- they are cultural true believers not cultural skeptics who might recognize and publish a work deeply skeptical of the culture (which all "Great American Novels" have been), a la Robert Gottlieb with Catch 22, or Michael Cowley with On the Road.

>>8812404
>>8813574
>That kind of person simply doesn't have the sheer hatred for the way things are required to write it.

This is an interesting sentiment. And gives me hope for living in flyover country.

>>8813542
How can you say that with a straight face when Trump just won the election, slightly less than half the country is vehemently conservative, Fox is the most popular cable news source, and pretty much every legislator is at least nominally a Christian? Even basic things like the Washington Consensus are being being challenged lately.

>>8813342
Political identity has become more and more prominent as a source of identity. But there's no political identity or even (lately) a general set of principles that defines the country as a whole, not in the same way that Protestantism used to define a country.

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>>8812407
>culture is only books

>>8813128
Hit the nail on the fucking head.

>>8813633
'liberalism' is not a useful word in this context. Personally I would identify the main theme of our times as 'anti-nobility' where nobility signifies the notion Western Europeans had until the revolutions started happening.

The main tenets are things like a belief in the potential of all people, of society being inherently unjust due to its hierarchy, of self-sufficiency, of the evil of oppressive overseers, etc.

These concepts are not limited to those on the Left, and the Right usually follow the left after a few decades anyway where the particulars are concerned.

It is magical thinking to be sure, and self-contradictory, but that's to be expected of quasi-religious beliefs.

>>8813633

a little more than a quarter of registered voters voted for trump. same for hillary. half of the registered voters in the US did not vote.

>ctrl + f "white" and get "why did we allow novels by white guys about white guys for generations"
holy fuck im a black dude and this is getting annoying to me

>>8813633
>implying Trump isn't a liberal

>>8813699
Good house negro, massa is pleased

>>8813722
>be black
>defend white people from racism
>get called a house nigger

>be white
>defend black people from racism
>no one dares call you a nigger lover
really gets the ol' cerebrum a-joggin'

>>8813718
Can we lay down, for the purposes of this thread, which sense of "liberal" we're using? Are we meaning the classical sense of the word or the dumb American sense of the word?

>>8813733
>be white
>defend black people from racism
>no one dares call you a nigger lover

Are you new to this site?

>>8813498
my professor who went to columbia told us yesterday that every columbia student could detail Plato's conception of justice or talk about Kant's prolegomena. That's kind of frightening for an ivy league school though as I go to a "pleb school" and could talk with 3/4 of my classmates about most classic novelists and philosophers. Maybe its the nature of the classes I take though. I also know a virtual retard who goes to Columbia, it probably has something to do with the city

>>8813722
Bait but I don't vie for white attention any time but it's tiring as hell for people to say that everything is x white people's fault like it's some secret truthful eyeopening statement, it's honestly like the socially aware young adult's counter culture statement that almost every body else says
You all do start a whole bunch of shit though

>>8813748
>my professor who went to columbia told us yesterday that every columbia student could detail Plato's conception of justice or talk about Kant's prolegomena.
How is this impressive?

>>8813748
Professors say that in nearly every school. There's always a place where they project students that actually do their work

>>8812538

this.

ol' Tony Tony here sprinkles the names of famous writers into his blurbs and interviews so they'll show up when you google his name. (this is exaggeration, but this is essentially what he's done to the literary community.

unrelated but:

"wow the cover looks just like THE CORRECTIONS! and it has like five characters, just like THE CORRECTIONS! and it's overwritten and lofty, just like THE CORRECTIONS!"

christ this is embarrassing. seriously, whose dick did he pull? new yorker publications, O'Henry prizes, an interview with Seth Meyers. because the book is not good. let's get that out of the way. (i torrented it). he achieved this fame elsewhere. not his writing. parents were doctors, so i guess he just shook all the right hands at Stanford or something. the Alexandra Kleeman blurb made me interested, until i realized it was probably a proposal bc they share publishers

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>>8811860
>the idea of a one-size-fits-all masterpiece runs squarely against the novel form...they’re still all about specificity.

This is a fine point, but is irrelevant to the discussion of what makes a "generational novel" (not to mention poorly argued/supported). He's assuming that novels are _essentially_ about characters. While many are, the "Great Novels" are essentially about ideas, and use characters to engage with them.

The fact that he mentions (for example) Infinite Jest but none of Delillo's work is very telling.

But hey, the NYT scored 57 more people's click money by getting their article posted here.

>>8813766
he wasn't saying it to be impressive. It was in the context of telling us what he tells freshman to take gen-eds seriously. In other words he was using columbia as an example of students who take gen eds seriously versus my pleb school

>>8813781
because using a DeLillo would subvert his argument

>>8813748
That guy went to school at a different time. I went to Stanford, not Columbia, but I can safely say that the vast, vast majority of students don't know anything about Plato's conception of justice or Kant's prolegomena. I couldn't tell you much about the last one myself, and I majored in English.

>>8813746
I assumed that we were using the American sense, but I don't believe that either version defines millenials.

>>8813468

One out of three.

>>8813748
>Plato's conception of justice or talk about Kant's prolegomena

Sure CC makes kids here read Kant and Plato but most don't get that much out of it. Your professor is likely playing up his alma mater. The Core Curriculum is still the gold standard for college "gene eds" though. There's intelligent kids for sure, but many of them are too preprofessional to care. If you talked to a philosophy major here, I'm sure you'd get a better response than you got from your classmates. Also Columbia's student body is diluted by the Combined Plan, General Studies, joke master's degrees, and Barnard. The real non-pleb school is Columbia College.

>>8813823
>Columbia College
are they as sneaky as their name would suggest?

>>8813838

Don't know what you mean by sneaky.

>>8813796
So, to answer OP's question: "No, he is not right."

>>8813841
Perhaps I'm thinking of Cornell College, which is in the middle of bumfuck but conveniently sends out their mail adverts around the time the Common App is due.

>>8811860
He's too old to be a millenial

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>>8813733
>be black
>skim a short article to cherrypick a statement that doesn't accurately reflect the thrust of the argument being made when taken out of context because you want to make a point of publicly being the good negro that takes issue with criticisms of whites
>get called the good negro
golly gee who could have foreseen this outcome

>>8813851

Columbia College of Columbia University
is by far the most selective undergraduate school at Columbia with an acceptance rate around 6%. There's a Columbia college in Chicago, Illinois but that has nothing to do with Columbia University.

Harvard's main undergraduate school is called Harvard College, same with Yale's. Nothing sneaky about appending college to the end, it just means that it's an undergraduate school within a university. All the schools at Oxford and Cambridge have - College at the end too.

>demographics are reductive tools for marketers, you should read books as individuals
I didn't mind this, because he started off the piece complaining about white males and I was expecting worse. I am so sick of identity nonsense anything contrary is acceptable.

>>8813772
>the Alexandra Kleeman blurb made me interested
Do you actually think Kleeman's work is good?

>>8814035

Absolutely. I can't recommend it enough.

>>8813772
Ironically, Jon Franzen praised Tulathimutte on more than one occasion.

I agree, though, I don't think he or his Iowa friend Jenny Zhang deserve their fame based on merit. I'd also guess Iowa's clout helped them get such prestigious publications.

>>8814047
Maybe the Amazon preview doesn't do "You Too.." justice; I'll give her a second chance. Thanks.

okay, problems with Private Citizens:

1. the author clearly wants to transfer experience to the page (he's even said so) DITCH THE CHARACTERS. fuck. no, don't say "they're all kinda me" because then none of them are.
2. tries to balance >3 characters with fluid prose. this rarely happens. the result is awkward third-person form.
3. i don't think he considered tone. meaning is crystal clear–not engaging.

>>8814068

haha i was offset by the description. it sounded too "ohh young avant garde lit" but it's really meaningful and nuanced.

>>8814096
Which is why good writers today need to work hardest on their first few pages.

Private Citizens' opener ("They were on a day trip, a nothing...") was good, but then we meet Linda and the book shits itself

>>8812962
>but this new atheism
There is nothing new in the anti-Christian secular humanism, or the identity politics, or the signaling or the cowardice. This has all been unfolding for quite some time. The internet handed everybody a megaphone, and you're hearing age old drives and directives more clearly now.

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>MFW I'm not a millennial
>MFW I'm 18 so not violating 4chan rules
>MFW I'm a dumb frogposter
Checkmate.

>>8812535
I know a guy that's like 32 and is a pretty big hip hop producer that loves Undertale.

I hate it.

idk if it's the case with this guy's book or if it's actually good, but I feel like every time a young guy has his (was going to say 700-1000+ page book, but this one is under 400) book published that checks off some of the boxes for "next IJ" other younger guys are really excited to jerk it off regardless of quality or merit so they can feel in the know and on the ground floor if it does end up being the "next IJ" (the real joke being DFW was trying so hard to be the next Pynchon+a few other writers, do young writers even read Pynchon anymore?).

>>8814241
this book is not good and doesn't check off any boxes for "the next IJ" so there's that

>>8814241
theres not as much pynchon in infinite jest as you might think. Read some DeLillo, McElroy, and Gaddis

>>8814262
I'm not saying it was successful...and I have read them, fuck off, the etc was there to imply other heavy influences I wasn't going to list off.

>>8814282
jk I've only read delillo, but I do take the implication that anyone alive hasn't very personally

>>8813441
children die every day, anon.

>>8813574
I hate the way things are now and live in Arizona
Can I write the great American novel

>>8813866
They're all terrible too. Factory schools that exist solely to make cash to pay their overpaid researchers and rent out children.

>>8814357

Sorry you didn't get into any

Whoever wrote that article needs to be hanged.

>>8811860

>The generational novel, like the Great American Novel, is a comforting romantic myth, which wrongly assumes that commonality is more significant than individuality. You might get some vague notion of me if I told you I’m a first-generation Thai-American, middle-class, atheist, single, childless, postgraduate, freelancing, New Englander, straight, male millennial. But it’s probably more telling to say that I once took a first date home to watch zit-popping videos on YouTube, or that I accidentally interrupted my college graduation ceremony with a screaming toy monkey I’d forgotten I’d been carrying all day (“Sorry, my monkey went off,” I explained). The experience of identity — whether it’s race, religion, nationality, gender or generational membership — is certainly necessary for a full portrait of a person, but never sufficient. There’s also memory, thought, feeling, perception, neurochemistry, mood and everything else.

this is pure ideology. as the neoliberal centrist party collapses into itself, its agents in the cultural sphere will do all they can to suppress anything of a collective politics. for two reasons

1. they were, first of all, defeated by a profoundly collective politics. whether or not his administration's reality matches his popular narrative, trump's message on the whole signaled a firm rejection of identitarian politics of advancement, individual success, and personal gain, substituting these with communal advancement, regional—no racial—identities, and shared goals.

2. the countervailing tendencies within the centrist party, meanwhile, tended also in this direction. the sanders campaign founded itself on a rhetoric of class, which above all understood racial and gendered discrimination from the right as local articulations of a wider class unconsciousness. the promised attack on "wall street" also, to many in the democratic camp, signaled the possibility of a more radical leftism centered on labor power across all industries—except of course financial and celebrity—and the end of cultural elitism.

the politics opposed to all that, namely identitarian neoliberalism based entirely on the possibility of personal gain and individual opportunism—and not at all on racial equality, though this was how it presented itself, even TO itself—is now utterly powerless. it has no mandate in the political sphere, its adherents have no one to rally behind, and so you see good little drones like the one writing this NYT hit piece denouncing the possibility of collectivism, even at the far flung sphere of the novel, which itself is rightly in some disrepute.

>>8813574
Gottlieb is still around but you're kind of a sucker if you buy into his hype about how great and revolutionary he was for the publishing industry. Gaddis hated him because like everyone else in the publishing industry he talked big while being just another opportunist.

>>8814262
The marathe steeply parts and everything having to do with the AFR was a pinecone knockoff. In general DFW tries to base his prose style on Gaddis but Pynchon is a major source for his deadly serious but still goofy ideas schtick.

Journalism is now treated like literature.
It's one of the issues