Literary Clusterfucks 2013

lol thats true i forgot abt that

Isn’t her new book effectively the plot of Y: The Last Man?

yah it's also kinda like The Leftovers

should call this book Why The Last Man?

Or John Wylie's The Disappearance

Or Frank Herbert's The White Plague

Or, uh, Herland

Y oh Y Are All the Wangs Gone?

-Pete Seeger

Or Lauren Beukes' Afterland (which is only 2 years old) where 4 billion males die off in a plague

Or...jesus

https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9780385696630-us.jpg

Y oh Y Are All the Wangs Gone?

― Nedlene Grendel as Basenji Holmo (map), Monday, March 7, 2022 2:02 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol

over here singing "when will we ever learn?" to myself

apparently her *next* book is a retelling of 1984 from julia’s pov

High concept writing

pic.twitter.com/ARcuWefq7y

— Sandra Newman (@sannewman) January 30, 2018

.

^ I'm curious, why do you post these?

yeah seems pointless

Not sure. Can't think of anything to say but for some reason want to respond. Thought it was local ascii for "speechless." I couldn't think of anythingg to top anything on that thread. Almost said "I stopped at the twentieth one."

(to be clear, "pointless" was just a bad pun)

I scrolled until I got to 100 and gave up

Also wanted to ask mookie whether that1984 thing was a joke or not. If it isn't true it might as well be.

Ha, I figured the "pointless" thing was a joke but wasn't sure how to respond to that either. Was hoping somebody would follow up with a further punctuation gag.

Ah, gotcha, thanks for the explanation.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/07/feminist-retelling-of-nineteen-eighty-four-approved-by-orwells-estate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TN-kDEKxF0

This author is like Amanda Palmer and Pomplamoose [insert yr other ILX faves here] rolled into one.

But perhaps this is an injustice to her sui generis originality or lack thereof.

I thought about it a lot, and questioned my position, and etc But after a while

and etc

getting some sort of initial success as a writer must be very much like cocaine

I still can't believe the Pomplamoose guy is the CEO of Patreon

ugh, things i didn't know i didn't want to know

of course he is

like least surprising thing ever

To be fair, in the new one the men don’t all die, they vanish and go elsewhere and behave alarmingly and are visible through unclear means and then at the end they come back.

Haven’t read anything else by her, though.

So are you…recommending it then? You got an advance down under copy?

Basically a worldwide boys' weekend?

Go elsewhere and behave alarmingly

it’s written in a goofy made-up lingo by someone who has never heard more than 30 seconds of someone speaking AAVE but thinks they are an expert in it

― castanuts (DJP), Monday, March 7, 2022 4:17 AM (twelve hours ago)

it's like she tried to do a version of the Belter slang from the Expanse novels, which was set in space in the future and combined with enough other linguistic elements to not be racist-cringe, but, she set her novel on Earth, in America, and added in some "pastoral" elements, and it reads like someone took "Uncle Tom's Cabin" ran it through google translate for Expanse Belter and then translated it back to racist-cringe

https://www.npr.org/2015/08/27/434970724/the-wake-is-an-unlikely-hit-in-an-imaginary-language

I accidentally bought this without realizing it's written in a (much less offensive) invented version of (I guess) 'old English.' The only way I made it through ten pages was to read out loud and then I decided it wasn't worth the effort.

how did it compare to Game of Thrones?

Less incest presumably. But maybe not.

I accidentally bought this without realizing it's written in a (much less offensive) invented version of (I guess) 'old English.' The only way I made it through ten pages was to read out loud and then I decided it wasn't worth the effort.

If you know any Nordic languages it helps. Lots of the words are just misspelled/modified Scandinavian words. Which of course makes sense (the Danes were there before the French). Anyway, it's a really good book.

So are you…recommending it then? You got an advance down under copy?

Yeah, got an advance copy. I liked it, but having read it after watching the Y The Last Man TV series meant it wasn't exactly fresh (though it did do a number of different things with the premise). To be honest my main problem was the plot relies on one character being an incredibly charismatic natural leader lots of people are irresistibly drawn to, and it did not sell me on their charms.

Paul Kingsnorth of The Wake has his own problems, being an anti-vaxxer let-everything-fall-apart accelerationist.

Basically, my advice is forget everything else in this thread, everyone should read RIDDLEY WALKER, which is brilliant.

haha i like hoban but couldn't deal with that patois either

Saw that stuff about Kingsnorth elsewhere.

I see that Sandra Newman got some good reviews for The Heavens, maybe I will check that one out.

Kingsnorth may be an accelerationist and a former-conservationist-turned-IRL-prepper (IRL in both senses lol) (also, didn't know about the antivaxxer stuff?) but The Wake is too brilliant a work to flippantly dismiss, and one which very much allows its reader to take a different moral viewpoint to its narrator's

Without giving away any spoilers. And also without giving away any spoilers, lol milo

International Rugby League?