The Guardian's Blog, page 64

A brief survey of the short story: David Foster Wallace

For all its elaborate formal tricks, Wallace’s work is marked by a deep desire for authentic connection, to his subjects and to his readers

David Foster Wallace was a maximalist. His masterpiece, Infinite Jest, is a 1,000-page, polyphonic epic about addiction and obsession in millennial America. His journalism and essays, about television and tennis, sea cruises and grammar, always swelled far beyond their allotted word counts (cut for publication, he restored many of them to their full length when they were collected in book form). In a letter sent to a friend from a porn convention in Las Vegas, Wallace exclaimed that, “writing about real-life stuff is next to impossible, simply because there’s so much!” It might seem surprising that a writer like this could or should want to function within the confines of the short story, yet besides Infinite Jest it is arguably his three story collections that represent the most important part of his work.

That said, many of Wallace’s short stories aren’t all that short, and often test the limits of traditional conceptions of story. As he told Larry McCaffery in 1993: “I have a problem sometimes with concision, communicating only what needs to be said in a brisk efficient way that doesn’t call attention to itself.” In fact, Wallace’s later works would rewire this statement: in order to say what needed to be said, he found his writing had no option but to call attention to itself. To experience a Wallace story is often also to experience someone making an agonised attempt to write a story. This was nothing new, of course: the postmodernists of the 1960s were committed to metafiction, the literary technique of self-consciousness that puts the lie to realism, making the audience constantly aware that what they are reading is an artificial construct.

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Reading American cities: books about Detroit

The Motor City has inspired impassioned poetry, meticulous realism, tales of the supernatural, riveting non-fiction dramas and more. Anna Clark sorts through a great city’s stories

What are your favourite Detroit books? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll feature a selection in an upcoming readers’ list

Try as you might to hammer Detroit into a single story, it cannot be done. Detroit inspires heated poetry, painstaking realism, stories of the supernatural, riveting non-fiction, and unclassifiable imaginative works. In a city celebrated for its history of making things, the Detroit literary arts are overdue for attention.

Start with Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker, the 1954 bestseller which follows a Kentucky family as they migrate north for wartime jobs and settle in the factory housing of “Flint’s Motor Company”. There is a fierce hum behind the unfolding drama of what it means to “adjust” in this crowded alleyway, tucked inside a towering city that styles itself as the engine of the world. Joyce Carol Oates called the book “our most unpretentious American masterpiece,” and she’s right.

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Literary festivals are getting too big for their books

Some authors flourish in front of the crowds at the biggest book festivals, but do readers get more from a smaller event?

What is the point of book festivals? To see your favourite authors on stage, hear them read from their books and in conversation? Or meet them, queue up to get their signatures in your first editions, and ask them questions? To discover new writers you had never heard of, try things out and broaden your mind? Or learn how to do something – such as how to make bubble writing bunting, as my children will be doing at the first-ever Greenwich book festival this weekend?

Festival-goers want different things, and festivals, while superficially very similar, have different priorities. All feature authors sitting on stages in tents or theatres, individually or in pairs, usually with a journalist or another writer to introduce them, have a conversation and mediate an exchange with the audience. But the focus and atmosphere of such events can vary hugely, and is not only an effect of the author’s level of fame or success.

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Fantasy cannot build its imaginary worlds in short fiction

‘Mega-novels’ are not a marketing wheeze, but a necessarily giant scaffolding for vast imaginative reach

Recently Damien Walter wrote about the tyranny of fantasy serial mega-novels. He suggested that fantasy novels now tend toward the enormous because of market forces — because everybody in the publishing and television industries is looking for the next Game of Thrones, and a new author who can open a factory of imagination that will lead to commercial success. I don’t think that’s the reason behind the size or format of fantasy books at all.

Last year, I was teaching on a short fiction course and agreed with the convenor that I’d do genre fiction while he covered high literary, New Yorker-style stuff. But although I read truckloads of fantasy, and write it, it was very difficult to find fantasy short stories that don’t lean in some way on an existing corpus of novels. There’s a very good reason for that, and it’s nothing to do with market forces – and everything to do with the requirements of the genre itself.

Related: Fantasy must shake off the tyranny of the mega-novel

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Everything you need to know about László Krasznahorkai, winner of the Man Booker International prize

Little known in the English-speaking world, the Hungarian author has been praised by Susan Sontag and WG Sebald and his fans include a film director whose life’s mission is to bring his novels to the screen

Man Booker International prize 2015 won by ‘visionary’ László Krasznahorkai

Awards such as the Man Booker International prize are doing their job if they bring relatively unknown authors to new readers. If you’ve missed out on László Krasznahorkai’s writing so far, here’s a potted history.

This Hungarian novelist and screenwriter has long been an open secret in some circles, and was described by Susan Sontag as the “contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse”. If you are among his admirers, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

What do the International Booker judges say about him?

What strikes the reader above all are the extraordinary sentences, sentences of incredible length that go to incredible lengths, their tone switching from solemn to madcap to quizzical to desolate as they go their wayward way; epic sentences that, like a lint roll, pick up all sorts of odd and unexpected things as they accumulate inexorably into paragraphs that are as monumental as they are scabrous and musical.

László Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful. The Melancholy of Resistance, Satantango and Seiobo There Below are magnificent works of deep imagination and complex passions, in which the human comedy verges painfully onto transcendence.

What about his other prominent admirers?

In his own words

If there are readers who haven’t read my books, I couldn’t recommend anything to read to them; instead, I’d advise them to go out, sit down somewhere, perhaps by the side of a brook, with nothing to do, nothing to think about, just remaining in silence like stones. They will eventually meet someone who has already read my books.

Letters; then from letters, words; then from these words, some short sentences; then more sentences that are longer, and in the main very long sentences, for the duration of 35 years. Beauty in language. Fun in hell.

I’m not interested to believe in something, but to understand the people who believe.” ― in a Q&A

However apparently insignificant the event, whether it be the ring of tobacco ash surrounding the table, the direction from which the wild geese first appeared, or a series of seemingly meaningless human movements, he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off it and must note it all down, since only by doing so could he hope not to vanish one day and fall a silent captive to the infernal arrangement whereby the world decomposes but is at the same time constantly in the process of self-construction.” ― Satantango

Get it into your thick head that jokes are just like life. Things that begin badly, end badly. Everything’s fine in the middle, it’s the end you need to worry about.” ― Satantango

“ [...] What one ought to capture in beauty is that which is treacherous and irresistible” ― War & War

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Terry Pratchett and the real science of Discworld

You can learn a lot about this world from the fictional universe being carried on the back of a giant turtle, as the man who became Pratchett’s collaborator after telling him to shut up at an SF convention explains

I’m guessing that people will read Terry Pratchett for generations to come. Partly for the intrinsic value of the books – because they are so funny, so smart and so perceptive. And partly because, surprising as it may seem considering they are fantasy novels, there can be few better guides to contemporary thinking in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

“He is of course writing about us,” said AS Byatt – a quote I keep coming back to because it gets to the heart of Pratchett’s achievement. He used fantasy to demonstrate all kinds of truths about mankind, including things that might otherwise have been impossible to say. To return to Night Watch and my article last week, Pratchett remarks of the people of Ankh-Morpork that they “tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness”. It’s harder to be so blunt about real UK citizens. Would you feel entirely comfortable suggesting as much about – for example – a place where lots of people vote Ukip (or whichever political party you like least)?

Related: Terry Pratchett's Night Watch - politically inspiring, gloriously funny

Related: Is The Colour of Magic a good introduction to Terry Pratchett?

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Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them

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Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, which range from disappointing endings to unmissable classics and the Indonesian author everyone should read – plus our favourite literary links.

The discussion of disappointing book endings was prompted by Oranje14:

Has anyone else ever loved a book so much initially, only to be profoundly disappointed by the time they reached the end?

The one that immediately springs to mind is The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters. I was so excited during the first half of the book that Waters was doing something different with the twentieth-century woman’s domestic novel but it fell apart in the second half. —MsCarey

Good question. Unfortunately I can never discount the possibility that I misunderstood something in the text which has caused me to miss the point come the conclusion, I read a lot of fiction in translation whilst being about as cultured as a rusty wheelbarrow with a deflated tyre. I remember reaching the end of The Master and Margarita and feeling that there was something missing, given the power of the characters ... Ah crap, now I want to reread it and figure out where I went wrong. —Wordnumb

The most difficult experience I’ve had of loving a book and then being profoundly disappointed by its ending was with Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. In it he imagines an alternative American history, in which Lindbergh defeats FDR by a landslide in the 1940 election and comes to an understanding with Hitler. Though Roth has often used his Newark childhood in his work, I thought he never wrote about it so movingly and lovingly. There are scenes in it which are unforgettable, such as all of Newark staying up to hear Lindbergh’s speech to the 1940 Republican convention which wins him the nomination, people emptying onto the streets afterwards in their pyjamas, as if an earthquake had erupted. —Albertine67

I just read August by Gerard Woodward. It was a gem of a find, a superbly-written, character-driven novel about the development of a family over a decade or so. What I really loved about it was its use of a simple, basic narrative form (as opposed to post-modernist preoccupations with deconstructed narratives) that was a timely reminder that a book doesn’t have to be outlandishly different or outrageously creative to be brilliant.

Oh I just finished in one sit the book Child of all Nations - by Pramoedya Ananta Toer (one of the Buru Quartet book series). How splendid, how thrilling, how sad, how I cried, how I even slept with the book in my hands. Anyone that never read Mr. Toer’s book is losing an opportunity to educate (including myself) in a very profound way on history, economics, othering (the act of making a person into an non entity). It is the best book I have read in a long while. Compared (if one can say that word), only to the likes of the Russians grand masters of literature.

I’m enjoying it tremendously. Given that Crusoe describes himself as an undutiful good-for-nothing before the shipwreck, he is incredibly ingenious in coping with his situation on the island. He’s just seen the footprint in the sand, and I was interested to note that this occurs exactly half-way through the novel, in terms of page count (in my copy, anyway). Would Defoe have planned this? Is anything known about his writing process as an early novelist? How much rewriting and editing would he have carried out?

Preparing for the hilarious and wonderful Mindy’s new book coming out later this year!

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Why Hong Kong is clamping down on creative writing

The decision to close City University’s MFA programme is plainly intended to limit free expression – showing just how vital it is

Last month, City University of Hong Kong abruptly shut down its MFA programme in creative writing. During Occupy Central – the campaign of mass civil disobedience that disrupted Hong Kong universities and brought part of the territory to a standstill for nearly three months last year – a number of our students had published essays in support of the demonstrations.

One of the most prominent was by lawyer Keane Shum, who wrote in Atlantic of his fears for Hong Kong in the face of increasing political interference from China. He said: “I choose words of protest. Others can bet against the march of democracy, but I still go with the better odds. I am a student no longer, but a dreamer, and a Hong Konger, always.”

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Poem of the week: You May Have Heard of Me by Shazea Quraishi

This allegorical coming-of-age story uses the figure of a bear to represent the ordinary yet thrilling process by which adulthood is attained

You May Have Heard of Me

My father was a bear.
He carried me through forest, sky
and over frozen sea. At night
I lay along his back
wrapped in fur and heat
and while I slept, he ran,
never stopping to rest, never
letting me fall.
He showed me how to be as careful as stone,
sharp as thorn and quick
as weather. When he hunted alone
he’d leave me somewhere safe – high up a tree
or deep within a cave.
And then a day went on …
He didn’t come.
I looked and looked for him.
The seasons changed and changed again.
Sleep became my friend. It even brought my father back.
The dark was like his fur,
the sea’s breathing echoed his breathing.
I left home behind, an empty skin.
Alone, I walked taller, balanced better.
So I came to the gates of this city
—tall, black gates with teeth.
Here you find me, keeping my mouth small,
hiding pointed teeth and telling stories,
concealing their truth as I conceal
the thick black fur on my back.

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Everyman: a character fit for the next 500 years

Carol Ann Duffy’s reworking of the early-Tudor morality play is just the latest example of a legacy that stretches across more than half a century

You could be forgiven for seeing Everyman, an early-Tudor morality play in which the titular hero is summoned by Death to judgment, as a cultural cul de sac. In fact, it has a remarkably rich legacy, stretching across more than 500 years to Carol Ann Duffy’s reworking that has recently opened at the National Theatre.

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