Finnegans Wake, Joyce's famously unreadable masterpiece (read it online
here), was considerably
more readable
in one of its earlier drafts. Watch Joyce cross out decipherable words and replace them with less decipherable ones! Watch him end, not with a whimper, but with a
slightly less impressive whimper! Sadly,
Shem's schoolbook, which in the finished version is a
House of Leaves-esque compendium of side columns and footnotes,
was not written until much later (according to the footnotes of that section). The introduction to this draft by David Hayman, who assembled it, is
worth a read.
posted by Rory Marinich
on May 20, 2013 -
54 comments
In 1929, John Galsworthy won a Guardian poll as the novelist most likely to still be read in 2029. Three years later, he won the Nobel Prize, and the prices of his first editions skyrocketed. His reputation has since been on a 80-year wane that shows no signs of abating. The New Yorker asks
Why is Literary Fame So Unpredictable? And who will they be teaching in literature class a century from now?
posted by Horace Rumpole
on May 22, 2012 -
65 comments
"
It all started with wondering what it was really like to be tapped on the shoulder and told that you are the savior of mankind. Ten years of thinking about that, and I began writing." He was James
Oliver Rigney, Jr., a Vietnam vet who went on to get a degree in physics from The Citadel, and was then a nuclear engineer for the US Navy. He put all that behind him and started writing a variety of fantasy novels under various aliases. As Reagan O'Neal, he wrote
the Fallon trilogy of historical fantasy in the early 1980s, which he followed up with
a quick series of Conan novels as Robert Jordan. Under this pen name, he spent a decade planning and four years writing
The Eye of the World, the first book in
The Wheel of Time, an epic storyline in a fantasy world. Jordan had planned out the broad story arc from the beginning to the "
final scene in the final book," but
he died before his epic tale could be completed. A young author,
Brandon Sanderson, was chosen by Rigney's wife and editor, Harriet McDougal, to complete the portions of the tale left as a loose collection of notes. One last book became three, and just last month, the release date of the final book was set:
January 8, 2013, in the final month of the Year of the Dragon. Now that the end is in sight, you might feel the pull of nostalgia to finish the series, or maybe you're interested to see what all this fuss is about. With around 11,000 pages, 635 chapters, and more than four million words, it's a complex, daunting world to (re)enter. Fear not, the internet is here to help.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Mar 10, 2012 -
66 comments
Since its last
* appearance in the blue,
yWriter has been updated to version 5. Designed specifically for
novels, this freeware "contains no adverts, unwanted web toolbars, desktop search programs or other cruft".
posted by Trurl
on Feb 11, 2012 -
56 comments
Despite the popularity of long-arc, serialized TV shows,
no one really wants to read serialized fiction, apparently. That's not stopped anyone from trying, though, like say Stephen King with
The Green Mile and
The Plant, semi-successful efforts from
a mega-successful author. That was before the current rise of the ebook, though, and a few
authors (also
here and
here and
here) are betting technology will turn serialized novels into
the next big thing, that we're in "
the perfect environment for a resurgence."
posted by nospecialfx
on Dec 7, 2011 -
44 comments
For decades Dawn Powell was always just on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion. But despite the work of such dedicated cultists as Edmund Wilson and Matthew Josephson, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, Dawn Powell never became the popular writer that she ought to have been. In those days, with a bit of luck, a good writer eventually attracted voluntary readers and became popular. Today, of course, "popular" means bad writing that is widely read while good writing is that which is taught to involuntary readers. Powell failed on both counts. She needs no interpretation and in her lifetime she should have been as widely read as, say, Hemingway or the early Fitzgerald or the mid O'Hara or even the late, far too late, Katherine Anne Porter. But Powell was that unthinkable monster, a witty woman who felt no obligation to make a single, much less a final, down payment on Love or The Family; she saw life with a bright Petronian neutrality, and every host at life's feast was a potential Trimalchio to be sent up. - Gore Vidal
posted by Trurl
on Nov 12, 2011 -
38 comments
An American writer hasn't won the Nobel Prize for Literature since 1993 (Toni Morrison).
Slate's Alexander Nazaryan tells us why: "The rising generation of writers behind Oates, Roth and DeLillo are dominated by Great Male Narcissists — even the writers who aren’t male (or white)."
posted by bardic
on Oct 4, 2011 -
121 comments
Gamers, have you ever looked in the sci-fi aisle of your bookstore and wondered how there could possibly be
novels set in the worlds of "Gears of War" or "Doom," but nothing in the
richly imagined distopia of Bioshock? Have you fed your Art Deco obsession with
Ryan-inspired fan fiction, wishing for something more? Wish no longer: Bram Stoker Award winner, sci-fi novelist, punk rocker, Blue Oyster Cult lyricist, etc.
John Shirley has written the first official BioShock novel, "
BioShock: Rapture," which hit store shelves yesterday. An excerpt of the book, which is a prequel to the first game, is
offered here from publisher Tor.
[more inside]
posted by jbickers
on Jul 20, 2011 -
63 comments
OK, so you've partly written a novel, but you're having trouble finishing the damn thing. What to do? Summon stamina, press on, and be proud of your literary success? Or, post your abandonment for all the world to see! Ladies and gentlemen, a
place for your unfini--
posted by anothermug
on Jul 12, 2011 -
39 comments
"Reading a novel of punishing difficulty and length is a version of climbing Everest for people who prefer not to leave the house. And people who climb Everest don’t howl with exhilaration at the summit because the mountain was a good or a well made or an interesting mountain per se, but because they’re overawed at themselves for having done such a fantastically difficult thing." Mark O'Connell writes about
how he overcame his fear of reading very long novels.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear
on May 18, 2011 -
83 comments
Bad (and some so bad they're good) excerpts from bad romance novels. Includes things like: "And as he ground sinuously against her tender flesh, she began to quake and contract, whimpering with tortured delight. Her senses exploded; her very body seemed to dissolve into a fierce, white-hot blast of elemental heat. And in that boundless, exploding star of pleasure she felt his essence mingle with hers as he buried his face in her hair and erupted, pouring his passion into her soft, responsive frame."
posted by fantodstic
on Apr 16, 2011 -
95 comments
Locus, the Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, is the paper of record in the science fiction community. Every year the editors and reviewers at Locus publish a recommended reading list which includes novels, YA novels, first novels, anthologies and collections, related non-fiction, art books, and three types of shorter work (
novellas,
novelettes, and short stories). If you are at all interested in the current state of the SF&F genre you can't do better than Locus' yearly effort. The
list for 2010 appears in the February issue.
[more inside]
posted by Justinian
on Feb 18, 2011 -
25 comments
Rise of the Neuronovel. Marco Roth at N+1 argues that the recent interest of contemporary novels (
Motherless Brooklyn,
Saturday,
Atmospheric Disturbances) in the disordered wetware of their characters represents a defeat for fiction. "...the new genre of the neuronovel, which looks on the face of it to expand the writ of literature, appears as another sign of the novel’s diminishing purview."
Jonah Lehrer responds to Roth and Roth responds back.
posted by escabeche
on Jan 2, 2011 -
58 comments
Figment.com is a new, free community and platform for young people to share their fiction writing, "connect with other readers and discover new stories and authors. Users are invited to write novels, short stories and poems,
collaborate with other writers and give and receive feedback on the work posted on the site." (
Via)
posted by zarq
on Dec 5, 2010 -
19 comments
Graham Greene, Arthur Ransome and Somerset Maugham all spied for Britain, admits MI6 "The authors Graham Greene, Arthur Ransome, Somerset Maugham, Compton Mackenzie and Malcolm Muggeridge, and the philosopher AJ "Freddie" Ayer, all worked for MI6, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service admitted for the first time today . They are among the many exotic characters who agreed to spy for Britain, mainly during wartime, who appear in a the first authorised history of MI6."
posted by Fizz
on Oct 11, 2010 -
27 comments
One of the hottest authors of the 1910s had been dead for over 200 years before she ever published a word.
Patience Worth, as channeled through the ouija board of St. Louis housewife Pearl Curran, published
several novels and
scores of poems before the death of her link to the material world in 1937.
posted by Horace Rumpole
on Sep 14, 2010 -
16 comments
"Meanwhile, down in Vaginaland, Mr Condom's beginning to feel a bit iffy. He's overheating. For some reason, the shagging seems to be twice as fast this evening, and he grimaces as he gets flung willy-nilly in and out of the pink tunnel. He starts getting friction burns, hanging onto Bobby's stiff penis for dear life, headbutting Georgie's cervix at 180 beats per minute. 'Help me!' he yells in the darkness, feeling himself melting."
This year's worst sex. [NSFW or post-turkey family reading] [more inside]
posted by iamkimiam
on Nov 25, 2009 -
44 comments
"This is a novel born out of the intersection of two eras. The first is a story of the Cultural Revolution, a time of fanaticism, repressed instincts, and tragic fates, similar to the European Middle Ages. The second is a story of today, a time of subverted ethics, fickle sensuality, and every kind of phenomena, even more like the Europe of today. A westerner would have to live four hundred years to experience the vast differences of the two eras, but a Chinese would only need forty years for the experience." Yu Hua's
Brothers, a sprawling, foul-mouthed, comic-historical epic, and the best-selling novel in China's history, is available in English.
[more inside]
posted by escabeche
on Oct 18, 2009 -
25 comments
