What are you reading?

[Fade to Black]

yeah that thing about Roth, he himself mentions a certain detachment towards his work...while not entirely impossible to a certain degree, one wonders this is at all possible with respect to the craft of writing. It seems the most revealing insights about the self come out in one's portrayal of others, particularly the figment of imagination he has no physical attachment to, hence he can dump his mental self onto it to ease the load a bit, so to speak.

[klangspiel]

Cyclonopedia

as in negarestani on repress?

i'm currently reading giordano bruno's the expulsion of the triumphant beast

[destroyed]

^ Yeah, that's the one. I just looked on my desk, 45 degrees to the right of where my very keyboard is, and confirmed, yes, Negarestani on re.press. Have you read it?

[klangspiel]

^ nope but i've encountered his article in collapse and it's always hard
to avoid books on repress since they're local (as in melb, aus).

[D_S]

My girl just got me Chris Harman's A People's History of the World. I think I mentioned it a few years back and she happened to be in the book store this week lol. Zinn speaks highly of it so ill give it a go just to see.

[maldoror]

crazy. I've been following negarestani ever since his nigredo article as well, and picked cyclonepedia up as soon as possible. even had a back and forth with klang about it earlier on. def never expected it to show up here, but thrilled that it has. I'm on my second read through now and feel that I have a better grasp on the nature of the text at this point. since I was able to let it be what it was, let go of a speculative realist pigeonhole, it's proved to be a much richer work. also makes strange and wonderful bedfellows with the other book I'm reading atm,

the box man by kobo abe. this novel had a huge impact on me in high school and somehow I neglected to revisit it until all these years later. thrilled that I finally have, because it's every bit the darkly enigmatic jewel I remembered.

[maldoror]

i'm currently reading giordano bruno's the expulsion of the triumphant beast

what are your thoughts so far? I've had it on my to read list forever but haven't managed to get around to it yet.

[mamaboy]

kalina krasnaia

[mamaboy]

russkaia babushka..pelmeni...etc.....sorokin is my man...russian marquis de sade......

[Raw Edge]

It's great so far (altho I got the title wrong). Very dense like a lot of the books talked about here, but he's one of my favorite authors. I liked savage detectives, and "Last Nights on Earth" stories collection is the best.

Sorry to pull this up so far after the fact, but how are you liking this? Hoping to get it for xmas. I've heard some mixed things, but it sounds like something I'll enjoy (hopefully, for the kind of commitment required).

Just finished Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear by Javier Marias. I've enjoyed everything I've read by him thus far, for more or less similar reasons each time around...

Now I'm back to some more Borges, currently the Aleph and Other Stories... really loving this stuff.

Next year is gonna be crazy-stacked with massive tomes. Not gonna finish these, but aside from Bolaño I'm still gunning for Anathem and now I've been tipped to Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler... and I'm sure plenty more shall invade the radar as well... need a blinder/filter...

[Fade to Black]

does anyone know of any good online resources with a vast collection of good short stories readily available in text form? I like reading em, but got no idea where to start...i managed to find The Swimmer by John Cheever during a random google search, most other searches have been futile.

[Real Real]

http://www.bibliomania.com/

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find"!

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~surette/goodman.html

Garden of Forking Paths http://courses.essex.ac.uk/lt/lt204/forking_paths.htm

Extricating Young Gussie

http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/947/

(and a lot more Wodehouse, all pure gold: http://www.readbookonline.net/stories/Wodehouse/103/)

Hadji Murad http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/tolstoy/leo/t65h/

I could swear Miss Lonelyhearts was online somewhere, but I can't find it. Hadji Murad and Miss Lonelyhearts are novellas, though, I guess.

[skecr8r_l8r]

Yes, mal, Kobo Abe! He is paradigmatic in my world. God. Japanese writers are just by far the most extraordinary in the sense that their literary tradition is so different from any other. There is Japanese fiction - and everything else (or the other way around, not a value judgement.)

[maldoror]

couldn't agree more. there's a certain, ineffable commonality of narrative flow among all the great japanese novelists I've encountered, e.g., mishima, abe, and even murakami (despite his claim of stylistic indebtedness to the western literary tradition) that is both without extra-cultural parallel and instantly recognizable. I wish my japanese were good enough to verify if this is merely a quality of the language in translation, or inherent to the language itself. either way, there's only one possible linguistic domain where x can be analogized to "a fake fish, newly conscious of its unreality." unfortuantely, come to think of it, I can't place which abe text this line originates from. I want to say the box man, but it could also be the face of another . . . either way, absolutely brilliant stuff.

also teshigahara did a few, excellent film adaptations of abe's work which you might be interested in checking out if you haven't already (but I get the sense you probably have)

[Schadenfreude]

this has been on my "to-read" list for ages, i think tomorrow is a good time to finally take it off that list.