John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

An American classic, at Amazon, John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

*BUMPED.*

Following-up from last night previously, "New Interview with David Foster Wallace."

At Amazon, David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.

Albert Camus, The Stranger

At Amazon, Albert Camus, The Stranger.

John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy

*BUMPED.*

Picking up from yesterday earlier, "David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest."

I wasn't planning on a "postmodern literature" jag, but Thomas Pynchon's got me going. I have Infinite Jest on order, and this is my Barth copy below.

At Amazon, John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy.

Richard Powers, The Overstory

At Amazon, an amazing book, Richard Powers, The Overstory: A Novel.

ICYMI: Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling: A Novel.

Jean Raspail, Camp of the Saints

At Amazon, (check the Kindle edition), Jean Raspail, Camp of the Saints.

Cyber Weekend Sales

At Amazon, Deals of the Day.

And especially, Bounty Hunter TK4 Tracker IV Metal Detector.

Also, Pelican 1650 Case With Foam (Black).

More, Bose QuietComfort 35 (Series II) Wireless Headphones, Noise Cancelling, with Alexa voice control - Black.

Here, uKeg 128 oz Pressurized Growler for Craft Beer - Stainless Steel.

And, Sound and Sleep MINI High Fidelity Sleep Sound Machine with AC and Battery Power, Real Non-Looping Nature Sounds, Fan Sounds and White Noise.

Plus, LG Electronics 55SK8000PUA 55-Inch 4K Ultra HD Smart LED TV (2018 Model).

Still more, Sherwood DANISH DELIGHTS Butter Cookies, In a Nice Gifting Tin, box (340g).

More here, Black Rifle Coffee Company Complete Mission Fuel Kit, Coffee Rounds for Single Serve Brewing Machines (96 Count) Coffee Pods Cups.

BONUS: Roberto Bolaño, 2666.

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day: A Novel.

New Interview with David Foster Wallace

Actually, it's not "new." It's an interview by Eduardo Lago from 2000, previously unpublished.

Wallace is most famous for his novel, Infinite Jest.

At Electronic Literature, "A Brand New Interview with David Foster Wallace":

"The internet is almost the perfect distillation of the American capitalist ethos, a flood of seductive choices with no really effective engines for choosing." https://t.co/IPHPRMjtfV

— Electric Literature (@ElectricLit) November 20, 2018

Eduardo Lago: I know you’re not teaching right now, but can you talk a little bit about the reading lists of your courses?

David Foster Wallace: Most of what I teach is writing classes where we’re concentrating more on the student’s own writing. When I teach literature classes, I’ve taught everything from freshman literature, where the department will buy an anthology and I will teach them John Updike’s “A & P,” and John Cheever’s “The Five-Forty-Eight,” and Ursula le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas,” “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, a lot of very what I consider to be very standard stories that are in all the anthologies. I’ve tried teaching more ambitious or strange or difficult fiction, but with freshmen and sophomores their preparation isn’t very good and it doesn’t work well. Graduate literature courses are usually themed courses, so what the reading lists are depends a certain amount on how I design the course, as I’m sure you know. I’ve taught a fair amount of Cormac McCarthy, who’s a writer I admire a great deal, and Don DeLillo and William Gaddis. I’ve taught quite a bit of William Gass, but usually his earlier books, and I teach poetry … I’m not a professional poet but I’m an avid reader of poetry, so I teach most of the contemporary poetry that’s available in book form.

EL: Do you consider yourself an accessible writer, and do you know what kind of people read your books?

DFW: That’s a very good question. I think the sort of work I do falls into an area of American fiction that, yes, that is accessible, but that is designed for people who really like to read and understand reading to be a discipline and to require a certain amount of work. As I’m sure you know, most of the money in American publishing gets made in books — some of which I think are very good — that don’t require much work. They’re almost more like motion pictures, and people read them on airplanes and at beaches. I don’t do stuff like that. But of the American writers I know who do some of the more demanding fiction, I think I’m one of the more accessible ones, simply because when I’m working, I’m trying to make it as simple as possible rather than trying to make it as complicated as possible. There’s some fiction that’s very good that I think is trying to be difficult by putting the reader through certain sorts of exercises. I’m not one of those, so within the camp people usually talk about me being one of the more accessible ones, but that camp itself is not regarded as very accessible and I think it tends to be read by people who have had quite a bit of education or a native love of books and for whom reading is important as an activity and not just something to do to pass the time or entertain themselves.

I think I’m one of the more accessible ones simply because when I’m working, I’m trying to make it as simple as possible rather than trying to make it as complicated as possible.

EL: I’ve read in a number of places that you intended Infinite Jest to be a sad book. Can you talk specifically about that aspect of the novel and what else were you intending to do when you started writing it?

DFW: I think what I meant by that was that there are some facts about American culture, particularly for younger people, that seem to me to be far clearer to people who live in Europe than to Americans themselves, which is that in many ways America is a wonderful place to live from a material standpoint, and its economy is very strong and there’s a great deal of material plenty, and yet — let’s see, when I started that book I was about 30, sort of upper middle class, white, had never suffered discrimination or any poverty that I myself had not caused, and most of my friends were the same way, and yet there was a sadness and a disconnection or alienation among I would say people under 40 or 45 in this country, that — and this is probably a cliche — you could say dates from Watergate, or from Vietnam or any number of causes. The book itself is attempting to talk about the phenomenon of addiction, whether it’s addiction to narcotics or whether it’s addiction in its original meaning in English which has to do with devotion, almost a religious devotion, and trying to understand a kind of innate capitalist sadness in terms of the phenomenon of addiction and what addiction means. Usually I would tell people I meant to do it a sad book because when I did a lot of interviews about Infinite Jest all people would seem to want to talk about was that the book was very funny and they wanted to know why the book was so funny and how it was supposed to be so funny, and I was honestly puzzled and disappointed because I had seen it as a very sad book, and that was my attempt to explain to you the sadness that I’m talking about.

EL: How would you define your literary generation?

DFW: Boy.

EL: If you believe in that.

DFW: Can you explain the question a little bit, say who are the writers of the generation?

EL: Perhaps I mean that you belong in a certain age group that has inherited a literary tradition that you are trying to transform somehow. In other words, what are young American writers today like yourself — in a certain type of fiction because there are many different approaches to literature — doing. Do you think you belong in a group where your original work plays a role, or something like that?

DFW: Well, I don’t know. See, when people would ask me that question before it was because I was very young and I was in the youngest generation, and I think there’s probably a whole new generation now. A generation in American fiction is probably every five or seven years. Usually when people talk to me about my work, the other younger writers they lump it in with are William T. Vollman and Richard Powers, Joanna Scott, A. M. Homes, Jonathan Franzen, Mark Leyner. Those are all — I think Powers and Scott are in their early 40s, I’m 38, I think it’s all sort of writers now in their later 30s and early 40s and I think we all started publishing books at about the same time. And that group of younger writers, as I’m sure you know, we’re only a small percentage of the younger writers who are out there. There are plenty of active, productive young writers who do what I think is called Realism with a capital R: the sort of traditional, third person limited omniscient, central character, central conflict, classically structured kind of fiction. I know a couple of the other writers I get lumped in with, whom I just mentioned to you, and if there seems to be something in common, it seems to be that we all, particularly in college, were exposed to a great deal of first of all literary theory and continental theory, and second of all, classic American postmodern fiction, which means Nabokov and DeLillo and Pynchon and Barth and Gaddis and Gass and all these guys. And both of those exposures, it seems, make it constitutionally more difficult to do traditional stuff, because some of the best classic postmodern fiction really, at least for me, exploded or destroyed the credibility of a lot of the sort of conventions and devices that classic realism uses. Nevertheless, I think that what gets called classic American postmodernism — which would be, you know, metafiction or really high surrealistic fiction — has a very limited utility. Its essential task appears to me to be to be destructive — to clear away, to explode a lot of hypocrisies and conventions — but it gets rather tiresome rather quickly. Now that’s being kind of general. I myself personally find John Barth’s first few books interesting and then it seems to me that all he’s done since is work out certain techniques and certain obsessions over and over and over and over and over and over again. I don’t think any of the writers that I’ve mentioned, myself included, are comfortable with the idea of simply doing more of that kind of fiction. On the other hand we’ve all been influenced by it a great deal and I think for a whole lot of different reasons don’t see and understand the world in the way that classic realist fiction tries to capture or mirror.

So I think what I’m trying to say, in a long-winded way, is [that] probably the group I get lumped in with has been heavily influenced by American postmodernism, and of course by European postmodernism too — I mean Calvino — or Latin American writers like Borges and Marquez and Puig. But nevertheless we are also uncomfortable with some of the self-consciousness, and for me in particular some of the intellectualism, of standard postmodernism, and are interested in trying to do fiction that doesn’t seem to be formulaic or “traditional” but nevertheless has an emotional quality to it; is not meant simply to be about language or certain cognitive paradoxes, but is supposed to be about the human experience, what it is to be particularly an American and yet not be a John Updike or John Cheever traditional story.

More.

Hat Tip: The Young Hegelian, at the comments at Althouse, "At the Thanksgiving Café..."

Today's Deals

At Amazon, New deals. Every day. Shop our Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals and more daily deals and limited-time sales.

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More, Black Rifle Coffee Company JB Just Black Coffee Rounds for Single Serve Brewing Machines (32 Count) dark Roast Coffee Pods Cups.

BONUS: Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge: A Novel.

The Premature Death of the Novel

This is interesting, particularly since I've been reading so many novels this year.

At Quillette, "The Novel Isn't Dead — Please Stop Writing Eulogies":

Many novelists find it harder to make a living today compared to just a decade ago, but that doesn't mean there aren't ways to monetize true writing talent with crowdfunding tools, writes @GabrielScorgie. https://t.co/rF3os7t3Pi

— Quillette (@QuilletteM) November 14, 2018

The 69th National Book Awards Ceremony will take place this Wednesday in New York City. Nominees for the Fiction award include Brandon Hobson’s novel Where the Dead Sit Talking, Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers and Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend—all excellent and acclaimed specimens of a literary genre that English novelist J. B. Priestley had called a “decaying literary form” even before Nelson Algren’s The Man With the Golden Arm won the inaugural National Book Award for Fiction back in 1950.

Two decades later, postmodernist American author John Barth argued in The Literature of Exhaustion that the novel may have “by this hour of the world just about shot its bolt.” He won a National Book Award six years later for Chimera. More recently, Zadie Smith discussed her “novel nausea” while paraphrasing David Shields’ description of the crafted novel, “with its neat design and completist attitude,” as being “dull and generic.” Her most recent novel, Swing Time, made last year’s National Book Award longlist.

None of these obituarists seem to agree on the novel’s hour of death. According to veteran The New York Times writer Doreen Carvajal, the novel died in the 1980s, when books started to be valued less on their literary content and more on their sales. And yet over at The Guardian, Robert McCrum claimed a few years ago that the 1980s ushered in a golden age for writers and publishers alike. Meanwhile, Will Self, author of 11 books and five collections of short stories, claims the novel has been in a state of decay since the beginning of the 20th century, and is “absolutely doomed to become a marginal cultural form, along with easel painting and the classical symphony.”

While it is hard to argue with grand, subjective generalizations about the state of the novel, some objective facts are known: It is true that many novelists find it harder to make a living today compared to just a decade ago. A study done by the Authors Guild in the United States found that from 2009 to 2015, the average reported income of full-time authors decreased by 30%. Self-described part-time authors had their income decrease by 38% over the same period. However, this trend doesn’t seem to be affecting the best-selling literary novelists. Colson Whitehead sold 825,000 copies of The Underground Railroad. Emma Healey sold 360,000 copies of Elizabeth is Missing. Kate Atkinson sold 187,000 copies of A God in Ruins. These are strong numbers for literary fiction.

It is the “midlist” writer—the novelist who dedicates years of her life to writing a book that will sell perhaps 15,000 copies from Amazon and the deep recesses of Barnes & Noble—who is seeing her income disappear. Midlist writers frequently are having their manuscripts either rejected outright or accepted with a small advance. Rupert Thomson, a midlist author of over 10 novels, reports that an editor at Faber & Faber told him that he’d love to publish Thomson’s new work, but can no longer afford to offer respectable compensation. When Thomson asked what the editor could offer, he was presented with an amount so tiny that, by the author’s report, “I went home and sat at the kitchen table and drew up a balance-sheet. I thought: I’m going to have to change the way I live.”

Broadly speaking, there are two reasons commonly cited for the decline in sales and income. The first is what author Douglas Preston calls “the censorship of the marketplace”: Since midlist writers are no longer given advances large enough to survive on, many great books are simply never written in the first place because would-be authors are too busy working full-time jobs...

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, the the old Bantam paperback edition, Gravity's Rainbow (Mass Market Paperback).

And the current edition, Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition).

Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

*BUMPED.*

This book is really cool.

At Amazon, Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings: A Novel.

Stephen Harrigan, The Gates of the Alamo

*BUMPED.*

I just finished Sylvia Plath's, The Bell Jar (which I picked up on a whim).

Now I'm starting Stephen Harrigan's, The Gates of the Alamo.

And thanks for shopping my Amazon links.

Kate Morton, The Clockmaker's Daughter

Available October 9th, at Amazon, Kate Morton, The Clockmaker's Daughter: A Novel.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

There are dozens and dozens of different published editions of Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

Someone's selling this Signet version I have for $45.69.

Don't buy that one, unless you're a hard-up collector, lol.

Buy this one, the recent Signet version, for just under $6.00.

And thanks for your support! As you know, I've been having a blast with book blogging (and book reading, of course) over this last year or two. It's what keeps me sane, heh.

Shop at this Amazon link for more. And thanks again!

Howard Fast, Freedom Road

I've finished The Human Factor. It was surprisingly good. I was trying to figure out some of the story lines, as I'm not a big spy novel aficionado, but it all came together in the last third of the book, and it was moving, even sad.

In any case, I read Howard Fast's Spartacus last summer, and that book made me a forever fan of Fast, who has a fascinating personal history (or "had" one; he died in 2003).

At Amazon, Howard Fast, Freedom Road (American History Through Literature).

Graham Greene, The Human Factor

Mr. Greene's classic paperbacks go for prime dollars, lol.

The mass-market is available at Amazon, Graham Greene, The Human Factor (Mass-Market Paperback).

And see also, The Human Factor (Penguin Classics).

Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

At Amazon, Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow.