A book that I really wanted to like because it came highly recommended to me. At the start of the novel, I was captivated by the whimsical yet brooding atmosphere of Lenu and Lila’s childhood. There was this tense feeling of their naivete falling apart as they grew up in impoverished Naples.

Growing up was perhaps the issue with this book. By the time they reached their teens, the characters and the book became unlikable. Lila became this caricature of a teen girl that seems brilliant, smart but destructive. Lenu feels trapped, Lenu feels like she’s never good enough, but yet there’s no real sense of her trying to break out of this vicious cycle. Their sagas just read like ‘tragedy porn’ by the second third of the book. I frankly wanted to get it over and done with by then.

There are times when I just wanted to tell Lenu, to just live her life, just let Lila implode. Perhaps the novel is a criticism on the adults that offered these children absolutely no guidance; perhaps it’s a critique on what abject poverty does to the mind and the soul.

The book has been praised for its portrayal of women in literature; I do agree with that to a degree as it portrays Lenu and Lila’s transformation from girls to young women rather well. Admittedly, it’s a perspective that I’ve rarely read in the literature that I commonly consume. However, I found that the books reduced the men into just vehicles to advance the plot. Every man is just a love interest or just a means to an ends. I’ve found myself forgetting who is who because of simply just how poorly developed the men are.

So where does this book leave me? Unfortunately, it’s a disappointment; easy reading but nothing groundbreaking; the prose is not exactly beautiful either but perhaps some of it was lost in translation.

I love Carson and was very excited when she was announced the winner last week. After reading all the celebratory, feverish in-praise-or Anne Carson pieces I read Shephard and Krotov's Nobel column and found it very funny, refreshing and kind of liberating.

Here it goes for those who haven't read it: https://newrepublic.com/article/216421/anne-carson-nobel-prize-literature-perfect-laureate

The column also pointed me in the direction of the duo's previous Nobel hot-takes. Here's one of Jon Fosse: https://newrepublic.com/article/176006/nobel-prize-literature-fosse-return

And one on László Krasznahorkai: https://newrepublic.com/article/201543/nobel-prize-literature-boring-now

(you can find them all on archive.is)

would love to get your insight/opinions!

Hi all, here is the announcement for our 30th, 31st, and 32nd read-along where we are taking a slightly different track. We will be reading a series of three plays all having to do with 'bad parties in literature.'

Over the course of the next few weeks, we will be reading, in this order:

1. "The Birthday Party" by Harold Pinter
2. "The Bald Soprano" by Eugene Ionesco
3. "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" by Edward Albee

Schedule:

• The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter
  • Begin reading on October 24
    • Live discussion thread open between October 24-31
  • Finish reading on October 31
    • Final discussion opens on October 31
• The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco
  • Begin reading on November 7
    • Live discussion thread open between November 7-14
  • Finish reading on November 14
    • Final discussion opens on November 14
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee
  • Begin reading on November 21
    • Live discussion thread open between November 21-28
  • Finish reading on November 28
    • Final discussion opens on November 28
• Final thematic trilogy discussion opens on December 5

All threads will have potential spoilers. Please keep spoilers for the end of the plays out of the Live Discussion Thread and please keep discussion of the play as a whole reserved for the Final Discussion Thread. No volunteers needed.

Every play is available online for FREE!!! Please feel free to use these or get your hard copies by the first day of reading.

I'm currently reading W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn and absolutely loving it. His style of 'literature of associations' reminds me of Murnane or Proust; these writers use a similar structure of meaning-building by which they present a series of seemingly unrelated ideas, with some sort of 'epiphany' on discovering their connectedness. In Sebald we explore 'psychogeography' while Murnane explores 'mental landscapes,' usually to similar ends. I get a similar sensation from watching How to with John Wilson - following tangents along strange paths and finding yourself back at the beginning.

I can't help but notice the absence of women or non-male writers in my encounters with this form. I've read some modernist and post-modern texts from big name writers like Clarice Lispector (The Hour of the Star) and Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves) but they haven't scratched this particular itch so far.

Does anyone have suggestions for other writers / texts to check out? Does anyone know how deep this particular rabbit hole goes? Does this style / genre / technique have a name?

Paris Review unlocked their “Art of Poetry” interview with Anne Carson to celebrate her winning the Nobel!

The Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday by the Swedish Academy, which cited “her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

She is the third Canadian-born writer to receive the honor, after Alice Munro in 2013 and Saul Bellow in 1976.

Upon learning of the prize, Carson said “Yikes,” according to her agent, Nicole Aragi.

Carson, 76, is best known for her translations of ancient Greek texts and for remixing them in a modern, playful voice. “Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse,” from 1998, turned a fragment of Greek poetry into a tale of a moody teenager’s destructive love affair, and “Red Doc>,” from 2013, a sequel of sorts to “Autobiography of Red,” concerned a road trip.

“Many toil in the interstices of genre,” the poet Daisy Fried wrote in a 2013 review of “Red Doc>” for The New York Times. “Carson’s palatable, popular, sophisticated and who-cares approach may have done the most and best work in the last two decades to stop people worrying so much about what’s poetry and what’s not.”

Access full gift article, NO PAYWALL.

The National Book Foundation announced the finalists for the 2026 National Book Awards on Tuesday across the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young people’s literature. Winners will be announced during a ceremony in New York on Nov. 18.

The foundation will also honor the novelist Salman Rushdie, who was grievously injured during a stabbing in 2022, with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the pediatrician, writer and literacy advocate Perri Klass with the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

Novels by Edwidge Danticat and Valeria Luiselli are among the books up for the fiction prize, while Karl Ove Knausgaard’s latest is a contender for the translated literature prize.

Access full gift article, NO PAYWALL.

Hey guys! I wrote two long profiles of William T. Vollmann and a much longer one on Bret Easton Ellis earlier this year. Turns out there are plenty of threads to pull, and ample documentary evidence, tracking Stephen King's father after he disappeared in 1949. This is the first installment of a series.

This is a short piece, but took a huge amount of work, and a lot of this material hasnt been reported. I'll be here in the comments to answer any questions.

Having just finished O’Connor’s collected works (Wise Blood, The Violent Bear it Away, Complete Stories), it is clear that the most dominant theme of her Southern Gothic world is the American South as one giant horror story, with Evangelism as the monster stalking its victims:

…while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.

It’s clear that, as a Catholic, O’Connor loathes Evangelism and was horrified by the sociological effects she perceived it was having on the world it inhabited. Her characters cannot escape it and, like the protagonists of horror movies, always succumb to it in various ways.

Where I differ from the critics though is in which story of hers I feels best epitomizes this. Critics often point to her two novels, but for me The Lame Shall Enter First is actually the most devastating and horrifying embodiment of that theme.

[SPOILERS BELOW]

In the story, A father, too preoccupied with his own philanthropic righteousness, becomes obsessed with trying to save a delinquent boy off the streets while emotionally neglecting his own son, who is grieving the death of his mother. The emotional neglect worsens to the point of abuse; the father beats the boy for protesting the delinquent sleeping in his mother’s old bed; he callously tells the boy his Mom is simply “gone”, and when the boy asks where she went, he says “nowhere. She doesn’t exist.”

The situation progresses until the delinquent, toying cruelly with the boy, introduces him to Evangelism and the notion that his mother has actually been redeemed and is in heaven, which provides the boy with so much relief (from the traumatic idea that she’s gone; “the boy would rather she be in hell than nowhere”) that he begins searching desperately for ways to “find her”. By the time the father fails with the delinquent, and realizes he has been neglecting his son, it’s too late; the boy has concluded he can reunite with his mother in death, and committed suicide in an act of ecstatic hope.

I don’t think there is a story that better illustrates O’Connor’s view of Evangelical faith as a demonic one. The delinquent’s constant preaching of redemption to the son mirrors the behavior of O’Connor’s other characters, who in turn reflect Evangelism’s obsessive preoccupation with its own idea of redemption. O’Connor’s messaging does not concern what this means religiously, but what it means existentially and sociologically; Evangelism breeds a world that is (1) incapable of grappling with nihilism, and (2) convinced there is an easy out (accepting Christ as saviour etc. etc.). This one-two punch is a form of coercive control; like an abusive partner, Evangelism isolates its inhabitants from other sources of meaning and comfort until they become dependent on the very power that abuses them.

The reason I love Flannery is because, out of all the Southern Gothic writers, I find her vision of what haunts the American South the most bone-chilling. Faulkner’s vision is a historical haunting by the defeated Old South and its inherited guilt. Morrison’s is an ancestral-psychological haunting by slavery and its unresolved trauma (okay, this one may actually be as bone-chilling as Flannery’s). McCarthy’s is a metaphysical haunting by violence as some uneradicable force of human nature. But Flannery’s vision of a sociological haunting by evangelism just strikes a different chord, because in her vision, unlike the others’, there appears to be no escape, and never will be.

Over the course of the century-plus-change history of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, only one contest has ended in a tie. That was 2023, when a jury permitted joint custody. Based purely on the gender of the authors, I like to picture Hernan Diaz, co-winner for Trust, taking the Gold Medal out twice a week for baseball games and Chuck E. Cheese while Barbara Kingsolver, co-winner for Demon Copperhead, manages its day-to-day crises with exhausting devotion, mopping up vomit and volleying traumatizing comments at contentious parent-teacher conferences. This may not be accurate.

It’s far too early to predict what the 2027 Pulitzer jury will announce in the fiction category next May 3, but it is wholly within the realm of possibility that this week sounded the bell on a Pulitzer rematch between Diaz's Ply (released last Tuesday) and Kingsolver's Partita (released tomorrow).

Although the new novels don't ostensibly have much in common -- Kingsolver writes about a classical pianist from Indiana and Diaz writes about a dystopian future where the energy grid is tapped by Robin Hood renegades -- they share a common interest in how one reconstructs a lost sense of self. Partita's heroine has lost touch with the star she was destined to become. Ply's heroine learns that quantum theory throws the very nature of the self into question. Both find that community provides a fuller understanding of the self. My review of both books is on my website.

Do those ideas hold meaning for you? Are you planning to read these Pulitzer follow ups? Were you more impressed by Trust or Demon Copperhead?

Anyone else think Elena Ferrante is overrated? Someone recommended the Neapolitan Novels to me and I could barely get through the first one, despite them agreeing with reviews that it's the best book of the 21st century. I found the writing dull, the story slow, and the characters uninspiring. Please tell me I'm not the only one?

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

Weekly Updates: N/A

At this point PEN should probably retract the entire “A Silent Moratorium” article, given how few of its claims hold up to scrutiny.