Read Some Real Literature: Anyway hail satantango

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Take the plunge! Okay!: Feb 24, 2007

Franchescanado posted:

I know this isn�t the rec thread, but what are some good autumnal literary novels or poetry?

Krasznahorkai�s Satantango has a very autumnal vibe IMO, with the constant rain and mud and everything.

# ? Oct 8, 2019 20:54

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# ? May 19, 2024 23:45

cda: Jan 2, 2010; by Hand Knit

Franchescanado posted:

I know this isn’t the rec thread, but what are some good autumnal literary novels or poetry?

Wallace Stevens The Auroras of Autumn includes the poem of the same name...I dunno if you can get it by itself anymore though but in a collected Stevens it should be in there

# ? Oct 8, 2019 21:39

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

October Light, by John Gardner.

# ? Oct 8, 2019 22:20

Mira: Nov 29, 2009; Max illegality.

What would be the point otherwise?

Nobel winners announced. The Handke win was long overdue from what I understand. Only read like two things by him.

Have actually never even heard of Olga T.

# ? Oct 10, 2019 12:11

Vogler: Feb 6, 2009

I was surprised that Handke won, but then I realized that his alleged support of Slobodan Milo�ević was a debate that only raged in Norway.

# ? Oct 10, 2019 12:23

Jrbg: May 20, 2014

quote:

The Nobel committee took to Twitter to apologise for awarding the prestigious literary honour to the controversial Austrian author. One noted, 'You do not, under any circumstances, "gotta Handke it to him"'.

# ? Oct 10, 2019 13:51

Peggotty: May 9, 2014

Vogler posted:

I was surprised that Handke won, but then I realized that his alleged support of Slobodan Milo�ević was a debate that only raged in Norway.

No, it was a debate in (at least) Germany and Austria too. And his support for Milosevic wasn't "alleged", he talked about it in a million interviews. He even went to his funeral.

# ? Oct 10, 2019 15:57

Bandiet: Dec 31, 2015

I read Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead just last month. I thought it was pretty poo poo. Some quirky wacky murder mystery. Better than Bob Dylan though.

# ? Oct 10, 2019 17:20

Eugene V. Dubstep: Oct 4, 2013; Can't post for 8 years!

Olga Tokarczuk is the first literature Nobel winner in a while that I'm not at all skeptical about. Flights and Drive Your Plow were the best books I read in each of the years that I read them.

# ? Oct 10, 2019 17:47

Cloks: Feb 1, 2013; by Azathoth

Eugene V. Dubstep posted:

Olga Tokarczuk is the first literature Nobel winner in a while that I'm not at all skeptical about. Flights and Drive Your Plow were the best books I read in each of the years that I read them.

n + 1 printed some of her short stories, they've brought them out from behind the paywall:

Everywhere and Nowhere

Kunicki, Water (!)

On My Way Again

# ? Oct 11, 2019 00:47

derp: Jan 21, 2010; when i get up all i want to do is go to bed again; Lipstick Apathy

Cloks posted:

Kunicki, Water (!)

That was really fuckin good

# ? Oct 11, 2019 01:36

Eugene V. Dubstep: Oct 4, 2013; Can't post for 8 years!

derp posted:

That was really fuckin good

That's a section of Flights and yes, it's very good.

# ? Oct 11, 2019 14:43

Boatswain: May 29, 2012

Vogler posted:

I was surprised that Handke won, but then I realized that his alleged support of Slobodan Milo�ević was a debate that only raged in Norway.

IMO non-Serb Serbian Nationalists are underrepresented in the world of literary prizes, good on them.

# ? Oct 11, 2019 15:14

Karenina: Jul 10, 2013

Franchescanado posted:

I know this isn�t the rec thread, but what are some good autumnal literary novels or poetry?

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann feels very autumnal to me.

# ? Oct 12, 2019 02:59

Dead Goon: Dec 13, 2002; No Obvious Flaws

Another recommendation request even though this thread isn't (I did try the actual recommendation thread, but I am impatient).

Read an article, Nobel prize too Eurocentric, mentioned someone called Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber), apparently the greatest living poet of the Arab world.

Is anyone familiar with his work, can suggest a starting point, is his work even translated so a pleb like me could read it?

Thanks

# ? Oct 13, 2019 15:34

Dead Goon: Dec 13, 2002; No Obvious Flaws

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldLr4M1cP28

# ? Oct 13, 2019 18:23

CestMoi: Sep 16, 2011

Dead Goon posted:

Another recommendation request even though this thread isn't (I did try the actual recommendation thread, but I am impatient).

Read an article, Nobel prize too Eurocentric, mentioned someone called Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber), apparently the greatest living poet of the Arab world.

Is anyone familiar with his work, can suggest a starting point, is his work even translated so a pleb like me could read it?

Thanks

blood of adonis is a nice collection in english. i also have a tiny trilingual copy of 'how can i call what is between us a past' in chinese, arabic and english which is really cool. there's also a more recent collection in english just called the poems of adonis which i haven't looked at but it's adonis so it's really good. his essays are also fantastic, introduction to arab poetics is an incredible introduction to something i assume you won't know much about if you're just now hearing of adonis and sufism & surrealism is also really really good

# ? Oct 13, 2019 20:41

Tree Goat: May 24, 2009; argania spinosa

CestMoi posted:

there's also a more recent collection in english just called the poems of adonis which i haven't looked at but it's adonis so it's really good.

is that the "selected poems" collection out from yale up a few years ago or is there another orthogonal collection effort?

# ? Oct 13, 2019 20:59

Dead Goon: Dec 13, 2002; No Obvious Flaws

CestMoi posted:

blood of adonis is a nice collection in english. i also have a tiny trilingual copy of 'how can i call what is between us a past' in chinese, arabic and english which is really cool. there's also a more recent collection in english just called the poems of adonis which i haven't looked at but it's adonis so it's really good. his essays are also fantastic, introduction to arab poetics is an incredible introduction to something i assume you won't know much about if you're just now hearing of adonis and sufism & surrealism is also really really good

Thank you so much, I read the Wikipedia page on him, with a few poems and he is totally my thing. I even watched some stuff on YouTube, Arabic with subtitles and wow, so good.

I will try and get hold of as much as I can!

# ? Oct 13, 2019 21:37

ulvir: Jan 2, 2005

the �87 �Modern Arabic poetry� anthology also has a handful of Adunis poems plus, of course, a ton of other poets

picked it up from a used bookshop in town, but i would assume book depository might have it in hand too

# ? Oct 13, 2019 21:46

CestMoi: Sep 16, 2011

Tree Goat posted:

is that the "selected poems" collection out from yale up a few years ago or is there another orthogonal collection effort?

errr yeah that is in fact what i meant

# ? Oct 13, 2019 22:07

CestMoi: Sep 16, 2011

Dead Goon posted:

Thank you so much, I read the Wikipedia page on him, with a few poems and he is totally my thing. I even watched some stuff on YouTube, Arabic with subtitles and wow, so good.

I will try and get hold of as much as I can!

huh cool, hes not really a poet i think of as someone immediately vibeing with unless you were already neck deep in sufism so thats good

# ? Oct 13, 2019 22:08

CestMoi: Sep 16, 2011

oh there's a bilingual collection by adonis, mahmud darwish and samih al-qasim called victims of a map as well, you might enjoy looking into that to get a bit more modern arabic poetry in your life

# ? Oct 13, 2019 22:11

Tree Goat: May 24, 2009; argania spinosa

CestMoi posted:

errr yeah that is in fact what i meant

whew okay that's what i have

# ? Oct 13, 2019 22:46

Bilirubin: Feb 16, 2014; The sanctioned action is to CHUG

So is anyone talking about how the Man Booker Prize violated some rule or other in order to award Atwood for her new book? Because apparently that happened today

# ? Oct 14, 2019 23:08

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

I looked it up, and it is extremely funny.

# ? Oct 15, 2019 01:31

Bilirubin: Feb 16, 2014; The sanctioned action is to CHUG

https://www.washingtonpost.com/ente...84aa_story.html

# ? Oct 15, 2019 01:35

Boatswain: May 29, 2012

Bilirubin posted:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/ente...84aa_story.html

gently caress the Bezo, post the article coward.

# ? Oct 15, 2019 02:20

Bilirubin: Feb 16, 2014; The sanctioned action is to CHUG

Boatswain posted:

gently caress the Bezo, post the article coward.

Can't you just incognito your way around the paywall still?

quote:

Breaking the Booker Prize rules, the judges named both Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo winners of the 2019 Booker Prize tonight in London.

Atwood won for �The Testaments,� her long-awaited sequel to �The Handmaid�s Tale.� Evaristo won for �Girl, Woman, Other.�

The Booker Prize has been shared only twice before, but that was before the early 1990s before the rules explicitly forbade sharing the prize. Peter Florence, chair of this year�s judges, announced to a shocked audience, �We found that there were two novels that we desperately wanted to win this year�s prize.�

This is the second Booker win for Atwood, a 79-year-old Canadian writer, who won in 2000 for �The Blind Assassin.� In the prize�s 50 year history, she is only the fourth author ever to have won twice, but over the years, several of her novels, including �The Handmaid�s Tale� (1985), have been shortlisted.

Evaristo, a 60-year-old Anglo-Nigerian writer who lives in London, is the first black woman to win the prize since it began in 1969.

Coming to the stage with Evaristo to accept her half of the prize, Atwood said, �Neither of us expected to win this. I�m very surprised. I would have thought that I was too elderly. And I kind of don�t need the attention, so I�m very glad that you�re getting some. That makes me happy. It would have been quite embarrassing for me, as a good Canadian, if I had been alone here.�

Atwood and Evaristo�s shared win of the Booker Prize comes just a week after Peter Handke and Olga Tokarczuk both won separate Nobel Prizes in literature.

Atwood, the author of dozens of books � including novels in a variety of genres, works of nonfiction, children�s books and collections of short stories and poetry � is one of the most prominent writers in the world and is rumored to be a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Aside from �The Handmaid�s Tale,� considered one of the greatest dystopian novels of the modern era, her best known books include �Cat�s Eye� (1988), �Alias Grace� (1996) and the MaddAddam Trilogy (2003-2013), a work of speculative fiction about the dangers of environmental destruction and genetic experimentation.

Oddsmakers in Britain, who follow the literary prize intensely, had predicted Atwood would win the Booker this year. Among her competitors was former Booker-winner Salman Rushdie and the Turkish-British writer Elif Shafak. The Booker Prize � worth about $63,000 � recognizes the best novel written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.

As one of the world�s top literary awards, the Booker has a reputation for dramatically boosting the winner�s sales, but �The Testaments� has already been a runaway bestseller since it was published on Sept. 10. In the United States, Penguin Random House said that �The Testaments� sold more than 125,000 copies in its first week, with the best opening day sales of any book in 2019.

Reflecting on the paucity of minority characters in fiction, Evaristo wrote last week in the Guardian, �What, then, does it mean to not see yourself reflected in your nation�s stories? This has been the ongoing debate of my professional career as a writer stretching back nearly 40 years, and we black British women know, that if we don�t write ourselves into literature, no one else will.�

Atwood, an indefatigable writer with nearly 2 million Twitter followers, has been conducting a whirlwind book tour for packed audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. She paused only briefly when her long-time partner, the novelist Graeme Gibson, died on Sept. 18.

For decades, Atwood resisted writing a sequel to �The Handmaid�s Tale,� her classic feminist dystopia about a country called Gilead in which fertile women are enslaved to produce children. But the election of Donald Trump revived fears about the possible loss of reproductive freedom, which pushed the novel back onto the U.S. bestseller list. And then the award-winning Hulu TV adaptation starring Elisabeth Moss brought the story to millions more. Beset by questions about what happened next in the totalitarian society she�d created, Atwood finally relented and began work on a novel that, as she tweeted, was inspired by �everything you�ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings.�

�The Testaments� is a far more hopeful and witty novel than �The Handmaid�s Tale.� It opens 15 years after the close of the previous novel, which ends without revealing what will happen to the narrator, a rebellious handmaid named Offred. The sequel employs three narrators, most notably, Aunt Lydia, a matriarchal tyrant who trains women to be obedient and passive handmaids. As we follow her secret journal entries, we learn how the society of Gilead was constructed � and how she plans to bring it down.

Although the Booker Prize is meant to recognize the supreme quality of a single novel, today�s win for Atwood is surely more of a lifetime achievement award. Although �The Testaments� is an exciting thriller that wraps up many questions for fans of �The Handmaid�s Tale,� it is not a particularly impressive work of literature on its own. But Gilead has seeped into our political consciousness as deeply as the horrors envisioned by George Orwell in �1984.� Protesters around the world now dress as red-cloaked handmaids, most notably at the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh earlier this year. So few novels achieve that level of cultural power that it seems appropriate for the Booker judges to recognize the sequel to �The Handmaid�s Tale.�

For 18 years, the Booker Prize was sponsored by Man Group, a UK financial services firm, and called the Man Booker Prize. Earlier this year, the Crankstart charitable foundation took over funding of the prize and its name was again shorted to the Booker Prize. The winner of the prize is chosen by a panel of five judges, which this year included Peter Florence (chair), Afua Hirsch, Liz Calder, Xiaolu Guo and Joanna MacGregor.

Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com.

# ? Oct 15, 2019 03:00

ulvir: Jan 2, 2005

even atwood seems embarrassed by this lol

# ? Oct 15, 2019 07:25

Jrbg: May 20, 2014

Friend of mine who had to read the booker nominees said they chose by far the worst two lol

# ? Oct 15, 2019 11:28

Guy A. Person: May 23, 2003

Like its a self imposed rule so whatever but fuckin lol they obviously badly wanted to put their sticker on the one literary book in years that also has broad commercial appeal while still awarding a "real" winner

Just pick one don't be cowards

# ? Oct 15, 2019 11:37

A human heart: Oct 10, 2012

Take the plunge! Okay! posted:

Just finished Malaparte�s Kaputt, it�s good. Plenty of bizarre moments, my fave probably being when an SS asks Malaparte whether he thinks Russians are homosexual, and he goes something like �IDK you�ll find out when the war ends for sure�. Anyone have access to an Italian copy of the book? I would like to know what word is used in the original that the translator chose to translate into �tommy gun�.

now read the skin which is more focused than kaputt and has malaparte constantly making ironic comments at american soldiers about how benevolent they are

# ? Oct 15, 2019 12:15

EmmyOk: Aug 11, 2013

Guy A. Person posted:

Like its a self imposed rule so whatever but fuckin lol they obviously badly wanted to put their sticker on the one literary book in years that also has broad commercial appeal while still awarding a "real" winner

Just pick one don't be cowards

I had no choice but to stay up past the bedtime I myself set for myself. This was a brave stand :hai:

# ? Oct 15, 2019 12:18

Cloks: Feb 1, 2013; by Azathoth

The testaments, a book largely written in response to our current political situation, hinges on how revealing the hypocrisy of leaders will be their downfall.

Lol.

# ? Oct 15, 2019 13:02

Shibawanko: Feb 13, 2013

Atwood is schlock for normies

# ? Oct 15, 2019 13:12

Bonaventure: Jun 23, 2005; by sebmojo

say what you will about the late BotL but his critique of Atwood is great

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3833655&pagenumber=22&perpage=40#post484896608

# ? Oct 15, 2019 15:32

derp: Jan 21, 2010; when i get up all i want to do is go to bed again; Lipstick Apathy

that was a good post. too bad people cried so much about him mocking their wizards.

I am not so perceptive to have been annoyed at all those things in handmaid's tale, but I did find it very frustrating to read because Offred didn't do anything. She didn't even try and fail to do something. That doesn't make for a very good character imo. I figured the point of it was that she, like many people irl, just accepted and adapted to everything as it happened because, moment by moment, that's easier to do than to fight back. But then at the same time she's supposed to be an inspiration or something. anyway, bye bye sci fi

# ? Oct 15, 2019 16:02

3D Megadoodoo: Nov 25, 2010

derp posted:

I did find it very frustrating to read because Offred didn't do anything. She didn't even try and fail to do something. That doesn't make for a very good character imo.

I don't think you've followed the thread title's advice much.

# ? Oct 15, 2019 16:11

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# ? May 19, 2024 23:45

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

What I don't get is how deeply, desperately important it was to give her some kind of "lifetime achievement" Booker when she already had one.

# ? Oct 15, 2019 16:27

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