"novel-nausea"

From: HDtrainwreck

"Literary fiction is dead – or if not dead then finished, according to the Goldsmiths prize-shortlisted writer Lars Iyer, who argues it has become a 'repertoire, like The Nutcracker at Christmas' and suggests that novelists should spread the word that 'the time for literary novels is over.' But literary fiction has always been dead, has always needed the mould-breaking writing which the Goldsmiths prize celebrates.

     Ever since its birth, writers have been suspicious of the novel, reaching for the authenticity of the real – often presenting their work as memoir, à la Robinson Crusoe. For Scheherazade, storytelling is, literally, a stay of execution. For the rest of us, it is merely a pastime; a distraction from our ultimate destruction. Ashamed of its frivolity, fiction drapes itself in the gravitas of non-fiction.
     If literature needs to be something more than just storytelling, then perhaps one could argue with Maurice Blanchot that it only truly becomes grown-up when it 'becomes a question' hanging over the space separating it from the world. By showing its sleight of hand, the novel can live up to Adorno's definition of art as 'magic delivered from the lie of being truth,' but it loses its innocence in the process. No longer is it possible for a serious novelist to go back to the 'good old days' when – as Gombrowicz put it – one could write 'as a child might pee against a tree.'"
— Andrew Gallix, The Guardian Books Blog
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"... where on earth can Homes go now?

"An often breathtakingly dark and crazy satire on modern American life caused a literary upset on Wednesday night  [June 5, 2013] when [May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes] won the women's prize for fiction beating novels by Zadie Smith, Kate Atkinson and the bookies' favourite, Hilary Mantel.

     AM Homes became the fifth American in a row to be named winner of the £30,000 prize, formerly known as the Orange, for her sixth novel, May We Be Forgiven. The actor Miranda Richardson, who chaired the judging panel, said the book went beyond the prize's criteria of originality, accessibility and excellence. 'It was so fresh and so funny – darkly funny – and so unexpectedly moving,' she said.'
— Mark Brown, The Guardian
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"The first section is a tour-de-force of pitch-black comedy.... The story begins at Thanksgiving: Harry Silver, an under-achieving Nixon scholar, describes his hatred for his taller, richer, more aggressive brother George, a TV network boss, who sits 'at the head of the big table, picking turkey out of his teeth, talking about himself.' George's children, aged 10 and 11, are 'sat like lumps at the table, hunched, or more like curled, as if poured into their chairs, truly spineless, eyes focused on their small screens, the only thing in motion their thumbs – one texting friends no one had ever seen and the other killing digitised terrorists.' Harry is picking the stuffing out of the 'heirloom' turkey carcass in the kitchen, his lips smeared with grease, when his sister-in-law Jane suddenly kisses him on the lips.

     A few months later George is arrested. He has run a red light and smashed into a people carrier, killing a couple and leaving their son orphaned; it's not clear that it was an accident. Then, in startlingly quick succession, all sorts of bad things happen: an affair, a murder, a divorce; and Harry suddenly finds himself in sole charge of his niece and nephew. After the first exhilarating 50 pages, the reader wonders: where on earth can Homes go now?"
—Theo Tait, The Guardian
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Praises and Prizes

"Fresh from being named one of Britain's best young novelists, and from making the final cut for the Women's prize for fiction, Zadie Smith today received her third literary garlanding in just three days after she was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje prize.

     For a book in any genre which best evokes 'the spirit of a place,' Smith was picked for her latest novel NW - also shortlisted yesterday [April 16, 2013] for the Women's Prize. The shortlist's 'places' range from South Africa to the Antarctic, but NW is set in Smith's childhood home of north-west London. Judges Julia Blackburn, Margaret Drabble and Ian Jack described the novel as 'tender and witty,' and said it 'shows London as chaotic and unfair, by turn happy and unhappy.'"
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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"Terry Fallis [author of Up and Down] , who claimed the Stephen Leacock Medal For Humour in 2008, is one of five authors short-listed for the honour this year.
     'He won for Best Laid Plans, which was a self-published book,' recalled Todd Stubbs, vice-president of the Stephen Leacock Associates. 'So it was quite unique, the fact that it made it through the short list and was eventually chosen. We do get a large percentage every year of self-published books. They are long shots, without a doubt.'
     The Leacock Associates have awarded the medal annually since 1947 to honour the late author [Stephen Leacock], and to support humour writing in Canada."
— Frank Matys, Simcoe.com
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You can meet Terry Fallis on Sunday, May 26, at the Elora Writer's Festival; get the details here…

Find out more about Terry Fallis here…

"Politics beat out art on Monday [April 15, 2013] as historian author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy, won Andrew Preston, the 2013 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.
     Considered a long shot, the book on U.S. diplomacy by an expatriate Canadian at Cambridge University beat three books devoted to culture and one other on high politics to win the prize."
—John Barber, The Globe and Mail
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Meet the winner of last year's winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, Andrew Westoll, at the 2013 Elora Writers' Festival; find out more here... 

 Buy all the books mentioned in this post (and books by Stephen Leacock)  here...

Un-American Activities

"On Monday afternoon, the Pulitzer Prize Board will announce the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Or not.
     Last year, for the first time in 35 years, there was no prize awarded for fiction. Imagine Bono walking on stage to award the Grammy for Album of the Year and announcing that there wouldn't be an award for Album of the Year. It was like that. The snub earned the Pulitzer Prizes more publicity — and not the good kind — than the actual awards, and I can't imagine them laying an egg again this year. […]

     First, let's knock out three of the most praised books of the year on technicalities. The Pulitzer for fiction is limited to American authors (how rude!), so Alice Munro's much-loved short story collection Dear Life (Knopf) is out because Munro is — wait for it — Canadian.
     Also out: UK's Hilary Mantel, who wrote the Booker Prize-winning Anne Boleyn novel, Bring Up the Bodies (Henry Holt), and Zadie Smith, who wrote the London-set NBCC finalist NW (Penguin)."
— Scott Porch, Huffington Post
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Buy the books by Hilary Mantel, Alice Munro and Zadie Smith; and the works of all the Pulitzer prize contenders here...

"[…] mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. […]" — from the The Confiteor of the Catholic Mass (Wikipedia)

"[…] The gist of the thing is this: novelist Ian McEwan had just been accused [2008] of plagiarising from a historical memoir in his novel Atonement […]
     Authors of the caliber of Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Updike, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis and even Thomas Pynchon (who is notorious for shunning publicity) all wrote letters published in that week’s Daily Telegraph, basically standing up and saying 'I am Spartacus' – saying that if [Ian] McEwen was to be so casually accused of this heinous crime then they themselves were intimately acquainted with the crime in question. If anyone was to be waving a tar brush, it seemed, the overwhelming response from the writers was 'tar one, tar all.' The authors all admitted with gay abandon that they themselves had cheerfully plundered other work – be it historical writing, autobiography, primary-source documents, even other novels – in the writing of their own books, and said that such research was the lifeblood of any novel that depended on period detail. […]
     Literary editor of the august Times of London, Erica Wagner, weighed in too: 'We have come to a pretty pass where an author like Ian McEwen has to write on the front page of The Guardian explaining what research is. The myth of originality? There’s no such thing.'
     Research is essential, and we all do it, from all sorts of sources. Some of the authors who wrote their letters in support of Ian McEwen revealed their own sources – Colm Toibin admitted to using actual phrases and sentences from the work of Henry James in The Master, his (fictional) re-imagining of a period in the life of said Henry James; Rose Tremain acknowledged that her book Music and Silence depended, as she put it, 'to a shocking extent' on a small illustrated book by the name of Christian IV by one Birger Mikkelson; […]"
— Alma Alexander, Science Fiction & Fantasy Novelist
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Sour grapes of wrath? Or merely a difference of opinion...

"David Foster Wallace, the critically acclaimed American writer who took his own life in 2008, has been described as 'the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation' by American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis.
   According to Zadie Smith Foster Wallace 'was an actual genius.' Dave Eggers believes his writing is 'world-changing,' and the Booker-longlisted novelist Ned Beauman wrote last week that today's novelists must try 'to work out how in a million years we might ever hope to absorb the magnificent advances and expansions Wallace offered to the form.'"
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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Buy books by all the authors mentioned in this article here...

Liked because people like it...

"So, why didn’t I read [Stephen] King’s fiction? Was I simply an elitist, anti-populist literary snob who felt he would be soiled by reading stuff that sold? I do have some snob in me — it’s my sense that a lot of the books read by practically nobody are often good, whereas a lot of the books read by millions are often crap — but the term doesn’t fully describe my resistance to King’s fiction. [...]

     My wife felt it was wrong to stand in judgment of people who read fiction in order to escape from life, and I said she was right: I didn’t feel morally superior because I read John Cheever or David Foster Wallace or William Styron or Zadie Smith or Mary Lee Settle instead of Stephen King.
     I did feel, however, that I demanded something different (something more?) from a novel than I guessed most of the readers of Stephen King did. (Not that this made me morally superior, just more demanding, a high-maintenance reader.) Though of course I’d never read a King novel (or story), so maybe I was wrong.
     [...] Why, I wondered again, do some people in the literary business regard this extremely successful writer of genre fiction as a first-rate writer of literary fiction, a 'major' contributor to American literary culture? How is it possible that a novel as bloated and mediocre as 11/22/63 is can be deemed by the New York Times Book Review as one of the five best books of fiction of the year? Do we fear being labeled 'elitist' or 'liberal' if we don’t reward commercial success in other ways (as if an enormous advance and a river of royalties are not reward enough)? Or do we believe that commercial success on the King scale signifies, almost by definition, quality, the way a 20,000 square-foot house supposedly signifies to passersby that the owners must be important?"
— Dwight Allen, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Buy all of Stephen King's books here...

David Foster Wallace Revisited

"The writer must write knowing that the reader is more intelligent than he. The reader knows something the writer and his editor do not. He knows the future, he will be there when we are gone."

— Italo Calvino (The Uses of Literature)

"The New York Times journalist A.O. Scott once described David Foster Wallace as ‘nearly impossible to quote in increments smaller than a thousand words.’
     [...] Dave Eggers dispels some misconceptions in his foreword to Infinite Jest. 'A Wallace reader gets the impression of being in a room with a very talkative and brilliant uncle or cousin who, just when he’s about to push it too far, to try our patience with too much detail, has the good sense to throw in a good lowbrow joke.’ This conversational style is equally evident in Wallace’s collections of journalism, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster (2005). Wallace wrote on subjects ranging from Kafka to professional tennis, the campaign trail and the bizarre purgatory of cruise-ship holidays, all with the same unrelenting intelligence, eye for the absurd and determined lack of pretension.
     Wallace’s dismally early death, by his own hand at the age of 46 in 2008, means that most articles about him read like eulogies. This can only add to the doubter’s impression of him as a cultish figure, turning out worthy post-modern tomes. In fact he is entirely accessible; his writing can be hyperactive, verbose and sprawling, but he is a master of old-fashioned skills like story-telling and joke-cracking. As Zadie Smith said: ‘A visionary, a craftsman, a comedian…he’s in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us. Goddamn him.'’’
— Victoria Beale, Intelligent Life Magazine
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"On September 12th, 2008 David Foster Wallace left this strange and hazy world we inhabit. Like some choose to, Mr. Wallace left early, by his own hand. He left behind a wife, friends, students and fans. He also left behind an unfinished novel [The Pale King] that, even in its imperfect form, so far, once again showcases the man’s genius. The problem with genius is, as I’ve lamented, studied and pondered for years, it is the noisy upstairs neighbor to insanity. Van Gogh knew it. Artaud knew it. William S. Burroughs may have known it. And Wallace knew it. So when you take that into consideration, and think, 'What might this man who had and understood so much, what might he have known that tipped the scale?' you enter a dark and slippery slope. A frightening path to tread, but one that no doubt will be with me the entire time I plod sometimes quickly and in delight, other times perhaps cumbersomely through The Pale King, looking for answers that may not be inherently easy to access but will be damn enjoyable pondering. I like to think Mr. Wallace would want it that way."
— Shawn C. Baker, CHUD.com
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Buy all of David Foster Wallace's books here...