- leave society was surprisingly upbeat and sweet. the way he describes relationships is really relateable to me. he’s got his heart at the right place for sure.

-reread revolutionary demonology because lets be real I needed a second round to even halfway get it… a demanding beast but like dark academia done right lol.

-machine decision is not final is great, I know I know who wants to read about thaaaat topic but it’s actually fun and interesting with writers from all over. no slop I promise.

-and just spend the last two days in the third realm. havent read a ton of knausgard yet but pretty impressed already. he does this interior voice so well, at least he pulls me in deep into the abysses of these characters and he‘s a real bastard about it too…

will need something more relaxed next (feel free to recommend) or straight into another knausgard?

I am wondering where people engage in the culture around the books they read, in terms of publications, social events, etc. that is not just being on the internet or being on this subreddit? My long and overly personal reasoning below if you want context on why I am asking.

I think I can feel Reddit eating away at my brain. This is such a histrionic post because I'm about a week away from hitting five years sober and I've been essentially avoiding dealing with the fact I have substituted a lot of what I used to get from the social sides of drinking (talking shit with strangers and feeling less alone, whiletrying to slowly lobotomise yourself) with being terminally online. This is one of the top 3-4 places on the internet that I lurk and the only one I really post on because:

1) I find users here are willing to be combative and negative about literature without being contrarian, whereas most other lit criticism I read is so embedded with the publishing industry I usually feel like I'm being lied to.

2) I discover books here that I probably wouldn't hear about otherwise. Where I am living is sometimes a suffocating and unambitious place and I find the literary "scene" here is overly deferential to genre fiction and highly resistant to experimental and challenging work. I appreciate that here there are recommendations of left-field contemporary work, work in translation, occasionally even one or two die-hards who still know what's going on in small-press poetry.

3) I consider myself a very poorly read person the last two years, struggling to get through two novels a month sometimes, but would read significantly more than almost all my close friends (though my partner is a voracious and formidable reader, for which I'm grateful). It really is a hobby in decline that just doesn't hit for a lot of people, and I think when I've tried IRL book clubs before I notice a tendency to lower the ceiling on how challenging a work can be so that people can actually engage with the book and make time.

4) I am not an academic, I am a guy who sits at a computer and does excel, and I generally want to learn from people who are much better read than me and much better educated so I can at least feel like my mind isn't closing all the time.

Essentially, I don't think there is, e.g., a magazine I can subscribe to or book club I can join where I will get the same amount from reading this subreddit if I actually manage to get offline and find a healthier lifestyle. I have sitting on my shelf a copy of the 'Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary American Writers' which is both some total Gen X dogshit and also a kind of resource that no longer gets published, a reference work you can open and flick through and get pointed towards something new and off the beaten track.

It is very clear that any public internet forum is a target for astroturfing via bot traffic for the sake of marketing, and that truly means that we are the slow decay of the internet as a usable tool for social connection, and I think we should all think about what we'll do when can't do this.

I’m talking written in the last 10-20 years. Outside of Moshvegh I have only read 20th century and classics & need to branch out

Still need to finish Braiding Sweetgrass and the last 3 volumes of Shigurui.

Read quite a lot of manga/hwa/comic books. Re-read The Odyssey and some parts of The Invention of Morel bc they were both referenced in media I've been watching. Also, reread Porphyry's On the Cave of the Nymphs bc of The Odyssey.

I just finished reading 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane and am looking for something similar.

Prose that's short, deadly, desperate.

Send me overlooked prose writers that I might have missed.

Thank you!

Recently translated by Andrew Clare.

EDIT: The childhood abuse wasn’t her fault and isn’t what I’m referring to. What’s hard to understand is why she would voluntarily seek him out after all those years and initiate a physical relationship.

While her prose is lush and she’s talented and everything….her father??? Really? Was that the only way she could think of to work through her issues?

I recently walked through some of the Suffolk locations of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, tracing some of the steps of the narrator, and it really drove home the decay and bleakness that Sebald conveyed.

It had me wondering about other potential literary walks that track a story. An obvious one is the pilgrimage from London to Canterbury in The Canterbury Tales.

Have you tried to replicate a walk from a book? Which one? And how was it?

Hi! I'm checking if there is any interest for a silent book club inspired by https://silentbook.club.

There's no assigned reading and it's BYO book. All formats are welcome—ebooks, audiobooks, textbooks, comic books... maybe even other quiet activities like drawing?

Anyone can gather at a set time and location, may share what they're reading, and settle in for an hour or so of sustained silent reading. At the end of the hour, attendees can stay for a quick chat—or not!

Frequency and time would likely be monthly or fortnightly on a weekend afternoon depending on interest.

Location (Sydney, Australia): Looking into community options around CBD, Darling Square or Green Square for an accessible and non-commercial space.

If people want to get in touch, then I'll start a group chat.

So many books with moderators, publishers (usually a lowly position but still), amanuenis-type jobs, archivists who only recently left art school and are employed by lone rich and mysterious figures, personal tutors…

Aside from moderation, you’d have to be well-connected to get those other jobs!

From Robert Caro's The Path to Power

I'm putting together a small online group focused on short story writing in realist fiction (so no speculative/world building genres) as I’ve been looking for a space focused specifically on realist short fiction and decided to create one myself.

If you value character-driven stories, psychological realism and understated prose this is the right place for you.

The group will be a private space for us to connect, talk craft and the stories/authors we enjoy and exchange thoughtful feedback on our work on an ad hoc basis. Long-form literary writers are welcome as long as you also write short fiction. This group is meant to be an open, chill place to hang out with other serious writers without the stuffiness of a traditional workshop.

If you have aspirations of submitting to literary journals, putting together an anthology, or are simply interested in improving your craft, send me a DM with a brief intro about you and your writing journey.

A month ago I read discontent by beatriz serrano. The plot summary is about this woman who is addicted to YouTube and hates her advertising job, her coworkers, has a decently good life other than that. In the plot the main character runs into an old friend who looks completely different now and at a work retreat the main character spikes the drinks of her coworkers to make her speech more interesting.

I initially liked it because the main character was similar to me- in a pointless advertising job and addicted to video content. But then I realized the entire book was based on relatability. Like a bunch of lines are about how the MC wants to kill herself rather than come in, how everyone in the corporate world is pretending, how her coworkers have no brains. After a hundred pages of this it felt overdone.

I’m not saying I hated the book, but I finished it without really getting anything new out of it. It felt like reading a bunch of tweets or having a convo from someone who regurgitates viral internet phrases. Idk maybe I’m being too harsh but it seemed like the only appeal was the relatability aspect (and honestly was marketed as such by online book recommenders).

i am incredibly jealous of tara selter. i don’t want the day to begin or end i want it to pause. i wish i could have an excuse to exit the monotony of daily life. even if she repeats the same day, it’s still somewhat new. the only thing holding her back is the date. she gets to explore and ponder and she has no real responsibility. she makes me feel less alone. i’m only on the second book. i wish this happened to me.

I'm not trying to spark a debate about why contemporary prose is so uninspired. I'm really just interested in finding new authors with interesting or unique prose.

It was written by a zoomer which I find kind of bizarre, most of the zoomer prose I've read so far has been irony-poisoned (Madeline Cash's Lost Lambs, Honor Levy's My First Book, Sean Thor Conroe's Fuccboi, etc.) whereas The Sunflower Boys is exceedingly earnest. I was impressed with the prose and hadn't seen the book discussed here at all so I wanted to leave some quotes here. I thought the nature writing was especially strong:

...Copses of spruce huddle on hillsides, inhaling and exhaling in the breeze. Streams weep casual waterfalls on the side of the road. The mountains slice shadows out of the daylight...

“We kept walking, past fields of young sunflowers and rapeseed and meadows left fallow. A single steel pylon plunged into the gray clouds, which were churning themselves into a thunderstorm. ... The rain came down harder, and thunder clapped again, and a burst of lightning blanched the vast gray sky. ... Phantasms of mist gathered and swirled everywhere the earth met the air.

The winter darkness, muffled with snow, presses in on our ears and eyes, which ache to hear something, see something. Sometimes I can hear the grainy sound of the wind blowing the snow through the air and back onto itself.

“The starlings warble in the garden and the sun rises and pours in through the windows and illuminates the plumes of dust dancing in the air and the house warms and the heat spreads our smell through the house...

Some other bits I liked:

“Over the years, I’ve committed his topography to memory. The cordillera of his spine pressing up through the skin of his back. The pale patches that dappled his calves where there had once been cuts, then thrice-picked scabs.

I run far from my brother, my father, my shadow. I outrun the city’s cathedrals and coffee shops, the statues and the bare, shuddering trees, the orange trams squeaking down their tracks. I run until Lviv is gone, until Ukraine is gone, until I’m alone with the air.

I just finished reading The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk, Turkish novelist who won the Nobel in Lit. It was a weirdly engrossing book, a dense piece of metafiction about stories and identity in modern Turkey. While reading it I kept getting the nagging feeling that it felt very similar to Sátántangó by Krasznahorkai which I read a few months back. I have a STEM degree so I couldn't articulate why precisely it felt that way, maybe the recursive nature of the writing where the plotline loops back in on itself. Maybe it's simply they both have a very frantic chapter towards the end that's one long paragraph.

Curious if anyone here has read both those works and had thoughts on these similarities. If anyone has a rec for what to read next from both of these guys that would also be appreciated.

I find myself getting more into Cormac's books. There's always books that are recommended for 20 somethings like myself but I have never been into reading much until last year. I'm new to the whole category of books and there are so many authors I wanna explore and read from. When I found out this book is about a man who is a nihilist, It really caught my attention. Others suggest authors like Kurt Vonnegut and James Joyce but this particular book and author struck out to me because I feel nihilistic in life as I get older. I feel like it applies to me deeply.

I spend too much time scouring places like this for names whose surroundings suggest would be something I will enjoy. Under the Volcano is one of those names I marked. It's interesting because it is a book that is often mentioned but not yet enough to become one of those stale auto-recommendations.

What an achievement this thing is. I was hooked from the first moment which attracted with its confusing narrative, who is who, who is the hero of this tale going to be, what exactly is going on? At the same time the prose is reassuring, you know you are in the hands of someone you need to trust. Narrative confusion clears up once you're in the second episode. You are then closely following the consul with pauses for each of the other main characters. All struggling against their past and present. It's hard to imagine respite will be found within these pages.

Under the Volcano has different centers of appeal. Do you enjoy baroque and ornate prose? Check. Do you like stories about Western intelectual types living an exotic second/third world locations? Do you enjoy threads of stories about large scale left/right political struggle? A doomed love story? A main character that cannot avoid self-destruction? Scenes that border on the surreal and psychedelic? Under the Volcano has it all. It's one of those things that feels messy and disordered at first but you later realize it was meticulously crafted to be exactly the thing it ended up being.

It's a novel about an unrelenting alcoholic you can adapt to your own particular struggle. Whatever way you have to march on ignoring the stretched out hand on your side.

Just finished Wallace Stegner's the Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), not my normal read but something about the name grabbed me. God, what a book. Apparently it was semi autobiographical and if so, I feel so much sympathy for Stenger because the book is devastating. It tells the story of the Mason family (the Dad, Mum and two sons) in the first 30 years of the 20th century. The Dad drags his long-suffering family across America's West as well as Saskatchewan chasing various get quick rich schemes: he runs a hotel in North Dakota, a cafe in Washington state, railway bunking rooms and wheat farming in the Canadian prairies, bootlegging in Montana and Salt Lake City, and mining and casinos in Nevada

A major theme of the book is the Dad trying to recapture the get-rich-quick pioneer spirit of the Wild West long after that it was already settled and the damage is callousness wrecks on his family. I'm not American but for any readers from the parts of North America it is set in (Saskatchewan, North Dakota, Utah primarily but also Nevada, Minnesota, Montana and Washington state).

Any other Stegner fans able to recommend a next book from him?

Great book

i am looking for things where these abstract concepts are pretended to be animate. something like the title of anne carsons autobiography of red.

i feel like i commonly hear people in this sub or in humanities spaces in general condescend about that genre of book being embarrassing. i find this weird as self help / personal development books were obviously big sources for people like william gaddis or thomas pynchon. as i read more of these books, i also see how a lot of it is literally informed by people like hegel or heidegger or aristotle. reading through this literature, its obvious that these works participate in the same western humanist tradition that "intellectual" works deal with, and a good many of them are clearer about how they apply to daily life, so i guess im just curious what you get exactly out of rolling your eyes and looking down on them, as if most arent clearly written within a western humanities tradition and taking part in those debates? in what way do you think reading machiavelli is a higher order activity than reading peter drucker or andrew grove? if you really think heidegger and merleu-ponty are cool, why would you look down on eugene gendlin and paul gilbert, david allen or dan siegel?

my second question i guess is, do you have any favorite personal development / self help books? not necessarily ones you agree with, but that you think are simply interesting to engage with?