Mauro Javier Cárdenas
@IneluctableQuak
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Catalogued as high modernist for expediency’s sake. AMERICAN ABDUCTIONS (@dalkey_archive) APHASIA (@fsgbooks) REVOLUTIONARIES TRY AGAIN (@Coffee_House_).
Joined March 2010
An incredible review of AMERICAN ABDUCTIONS in NY Times. By Gina Apostol. “Reminds us surrealism also had a social ethos, to destabilize ruinous order through art. Similarly this is what AMERICAN ABDUCTIONS offers: the art-polemic as a defiant befitting medium for our dire times”
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Good morning children. Today we will learn how to identify writers bankrolled by the CIA.
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I’ve been saying this for a while, even wrote a lecture about it — to which mostly non-USA people showed up — ha! — and I think Viet Thanh Nguyen summarizes it very well here. One day I will write about why aesthetically inclined USA writers seem to abhor this perspective.
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Do novelists still learn how to write mostly by reading other novelists or are they reading mostly theory now?.
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Some of the short novels I’ve loved before
does anybody have good recommendations for SHORT NOVELS.
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“The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system.”
What’s the most boomer complaint you have?.
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Anyone who has read ~100 novels can tell you in 5 minutes or less whether a novel is literature or for profit garbage.
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Hi, BookTok researcher here - TikTok readers have helped usher in some of the best post-post-modernist publishing sales years in recent memory. I know it doesn’t fit with social media moral panic narratives to attribute an increase in youth reading to social media but here we are
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Criterion recommendations from a guy from Ecuador who loves postpostpostpostmodernist fiction
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- The Art of Death by Edwidge Danticat.- Loitering by Charles D’Ambrosio.- La Captive by Christine Smallwood.- Madness, Rackness, Honey by Mary Ruefle.- Essays I & II by Lydia Davis.- A Million Windows by Gerald Murnane.- Opacities by Sofia Samatar.
what are your must-read essay collections? i'm in a lull and about to travel. it's an emergency.
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I ❤️ boxsets
Back when Quality Paperback Bookclub did some cool box sets, like this Italo Calvino set.
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For those of you who, like me, are staying in on this Friday night to catch up on your reading, here’s a photo of my modest collection of boxsets & first editions.
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To celebrate 4th of July, post your favorite novel that touches — directly or indirectly — on American interventions around the world. I’ll start: BY NIGHT IN CHILE by Roberto Bolaño. The novel ends with an elegant party that takes place above a CIA torture chamber.
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A young writer recently asked me for a list of foundational books and I included this one.
Up next as a part of my Bolaño read through, By Night in Chile.
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These are Frederic Jameson’s picks for best 21st century novelists hahahahahahahahahahahahahshsahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahmutingallofyoutheoryheadsyoumustalwayhahahahastoricizehahahahahahahahahahahahahahajajahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahajajajajajajajahahajssjajajjajaj
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The two essays on writing I have recommended the most are. The Sentence is a Lonely Place by Garielle Lutz . &. Doing Without by Brian Evenson
@IneluctableQuak Love this essay. I'm addicted to pieces that dig in and analyze prose. Do you happen to have any other recommendations along this line, other than say Gass?.
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One of the scariest passages of fiction I’ve read recently is when Alicia Western explains why it’s not a good idea to commit suicide by drowning. ☹️.
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Every writer I admire has a personal library that looks at least like this (partial view, obviously)
ever since i met someone at a new york party who said she "doesn't like to read but loves to write" and learned that almost every litmag has more submitters than readers i've been skeptical of the value of making my voice heard. the world needs listeners.
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I’ve known Tomas Pynchon since 1986, when I was hired by his publisher to teach him español. We became close — or, as he liked to say, muchas cercas — even before we knew about our shared love of limericks. I can confirm he’s not dead. Or, as he likes to say, kaputti hoy ño.
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Ah, yes, James Joyce. Famous for not reading excessively.
@IneluctableQuak “Did Joyce learn to write stream-of-consciousness by reading novels or by reading theory?” He invented it, bro. If you’re noticeably influenced by existing novels or literary theory, you aren’t worth reading.
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Americans should stop teaching Catcher in the Rye & Slaughterhouse 5 in high school so when they read them as adults they can see they’re both fine novels.
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I think your relationship to literature changes once you’re old enough to understand how rare it is for someone who has just suffered a pulmonary infection to agree to travel anywhere for the purpose of sifting & sorting the papers of a childhood friend who has ended his own life.
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If you like plain prose and learning facts, which can be easily digested even when hungover, I highly recommend.
Anybody read these? The guy who works at the antiques store in town recommended them, and his opinion is always spot-on.
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Unlike Bolaño, who’s easy to read, Krasznahorkai will never be published by a Big 5 no matter how many international prizes he wins because the sentences are too long for USA people.
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Sometimes I do buy a book cause of the cover
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What do you think literature is for?. To feel less alone seems too sentimental. To ax the inner ice not realistic. For aesthetic pleasure too vague & limited. To pass the time engagingly before we die too cynical.
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Hello new followers here’s a photo of some of my most precious possessions
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For 2/3 of my feed this is what dudes night out looks like lol
Why don’t straight men read novels? | @dazed
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Very nice hardcover of 2666 at Dog Eared Books on Valencia
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A few more under 200 pages. Can’t find my copy of Shyness and Dignity by Dag Solstad. Organs of Sense doesn’t get enough love.
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Since many of you asked here’s the foundational books I handed to the young writer. Foundational to me means I like to believe they’ve had an impact on my own fiction*. I’ve reread these many times, and most of these are quoted in my own novels. What’s to be learn from them? 🧵
A young writer recently asked me for a list of foundational books and I included this one.
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So you want to publish a list of Best Books of the 21st Century but you don’t want to be called a Provincial American. No problem! Here’s a starter kit for you:. If you’re in a rush, just add the future nobels: Antunes, Krasznahorkai, Murnane, Cartarescu. If you have more time:
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I think I’ve asked this question before:. How is it that judges for fiction in translation consistently select compelling titles but judges for USA fiction consistently do not?
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My hot take is that Bolaño wrote BY NIGHT IN CHILE in a high style — the only one of his novels written this way! — to troll us. As if to say: don’t you love the high style of this Pinochet collaborator? Isn’t it wonderful how we can separate culture from politics?
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Bought this one because I liked its first page. Never heard of it. Anyone read it?
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55% tariff on short sentences in fiction. 65% if you went to Yale.
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Sure! I’ll contribute to MFA discourse!. The best novel about writing workshops is DISTANT STAR by Bolaño. It tracks the fate of students & instructors before & after the USA backed 1973 coup. Some of them are executed, some of them have to flee, and 1 of them = Evil in the 🌍
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50s - Beckett’s Trilogy & Pedro Paramo.60s - Miss MacIntosh My Darling & Hopscotch .70s - Correction & JR & Kiss Spider Woman .80s - Wittgenstein’s Mistress & Mezzanine .90s - Melancholy of Resistance .00s - Inquisitors Manual & Austerlitz & Last Samurai.10s - Solenoide & Sellout.
50s - Beckett’s Trilogy.60s - Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.70s - JR.80s - Women and Men.90s - The Tunnel.00s - Against the Day.10s - Zone (translation pub date).
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Don’t despair, kids. You can write this bad and still be longlisted for the Booker prize. 🥹.
Is this what you Americans like to call “phoning it in?”
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I saw someone ask what is the best film of all time but a better question is what film is missing from my Best Of
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Since I live in San Francisco & I’m surrounded by tech retrogrades who hold Gallagher’s asinine view. I’ve had to explain this over & over:. If you think of your mind as a landscape. Non-fiction populates it with information . Whereas literature widens the size of the landscape.
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My partial list of Comfort Rereads:. - Wall by Jenn Craig .- The Longcut by Emily Hall.- Fancy by Jeremy Davies.- Shyness & Dignity by Dag Solstad.- To the Lighthouse by Woolf.- Inherited Disorders by Adam Ehrlich Sachs.
I should start a shelf for my convenience that’s just Comfort Rereads. One of the criteria would be the fluidity of the style and this one by Dag Solstad would be in it.
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- To the Lighthouse .- By Night in Chile & Distant Star.- Correction.- Fever Dream.- The Longcut.- I Am Not Sydney Poitier.- Pedro Paramo.- Austerlitz.- Mrs. Caliban.- Inquisitors Manual.
Can we talk about perfect books? Is this a thing for you? What are your favorite perfect books? I’ll go first: Mrs. Dalloway.
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This is the way.
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This is what it looks like either some bonus content lol
@IneluctableQuak What’s the front cover of that 2666? I’m 200 pages from the end of it and - after so many eons with the book - have come to deeply associate the miasma of the Moreau detail on the cover with it, so I’m curious.
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First page of some 21st century novels I’ve enjoyed. (2018)
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Tape these words by Yoko Tawada on your walls if you write in a language you didn’t grow up with:. “If a writer decides to write in a particular language, they are under no obligation to use that language in the same way that the majority of its speakers use it most of the time.”
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I know this type of comment kills on Twitter but boy is this guy wrong. If you’ve spent a lifetime reading in English & you haven’t read Foster Wallace in like 10 years & then you read him again what you’ll likely experience is lexical joy. Or maybe that’s just me.
unfortunately the way david foster wallace wrote infinite jest makes it really only worth reading if you're 19 years old or a recovering drug addict. but those audiences deserve a great book and he delivered it.
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Ah yes, Fall Books. That time of the year when all major publications cover the same 10 books that I’m unlikely to read. Anyway heres’s some books I’m looking forward to this Fall. Let me know — based on the aesthetics of this list — if I missed some.
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One day all of our tech distractions will go dark and the novels of Antonio Lobo Antunes will reign supreme
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Best of the best of the best.
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@diadelesmuertes Con razón que me sonaba el nombre! Les han de pagar con descuento por ser familia!.
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So much to be learned from THESE POSSIBLE LIVES by Fleur Jaeggy . Which is kind like an off kilter Autoportrait by Leve but about Thomas DeQuincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob.
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Preparing bilingual materials for a lecture tentatively titled . Dispatches from the Castle: On (Not) Writing Fiction from the Center of Destruction
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The table of contents for this book on Nabokov’s Signs and Symbols is wild
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W.G. Sebald on Thomas Bernhard. Or a reminder that, as much as I enjoyed the Cusk Trilogy, to claim she invented a new novelistic approach is a bit of an exaggeration.
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Snapshot of the lecture I gave at NYU last week
Preparing bilingual materials for a lecture tentatively titled . Dispatches from the Castle: On (Not) Writing Fiction from the Center of Destruction
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My top pick for most influential novel of the 20th century.
“… but one day I too shall no longer find a way out, everyone is destined, one day at some moment which is the crucial moment, to find no further way out, that's how a man is made. Thinking it over, one's life is both the longest possible and the shortest possible,
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Can someone explain to me why I can reread SWANN’S WAY over & over but whenever I try to read the other volumes I can’t make it past page 20? Is this a common phenomenon? Maybe I just enjoy retracing the sentences in Proust I first read 20 years ago.
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Virginia Woolf.
Who’s an author so foundational you basically won’t listen to anyone who hasn’t read them?.
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A question I often get is what’s the role of a so-called experimental novel like AMERICAN ABDUCTIONS in the context of our bleak reality?. 1) A novel won’t forestall Evil, obviously. At best it can provide a more precise language to speak of these evils.
A book we should all probably start reading immediately.
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GUY AT YOUR MFA: Sometimes people with MFAs are accused of writing technically proficient but boring prose. And people without MFAs are often held up as some sort of shaggy band of true inheritors of the literary tradition. Brilliant experimentalists. ALSO GUY AT YOUR MFA:
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Nooooo we love Eastern European literature 😭
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USA novelists tomorrow morning:. The day the president announced he was sending refugees to Guantanamo, my situationship with Karl took a turn for the worse.
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Ever since I decided to try to be a novelist I’ve dreamt of belonging to the @Dalkey_Archive catalog. From now until Dalkey publishes AMERICAN ABDUCTIONS, my 3rd novel, in 02/24. I’ll be posting my favorite Dalkey titles. Starting with 1 of the most influential American novels 🥳
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THE CRITICS: it is simply untrue that their prose resembles that of a commercial romance; their sentences are spare, exact, and disarming. THE SENTENCES: He looked up at her, directly, with total attention. She knew he was going to kiss her, and he did.
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What I love about writing fiction is the lifestyle: everything I read / see / hear / can alter the course of my next sentence. And one year I get to research architecture, another year oral history theory, another declassified documents. Anyway just bought these @CityLightsBooks
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If I didn’t have a full time job, I would have already written essays about:. - The influence of Cartarescu in Latin America.- Lighthearted digressions as a way of life / Young-Moon Jung.- To have guts / Monica Ojeda.- But how this surrealism?? / Yoko Tawada.
Every year someone writes a compendium essay of some category of so-called literary fiction — autofiction, alt fiction, MFA fiction, edgy Brooklyn fiction — and my reaction to it is always the same: none of it has any relevance to my reading & writing life.
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When I despair at having to write fiction in English, I reread my peers who also write fiction in English. Here’s WALL by Jen Craig
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I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to write a novel as desperately sad as APHASIA again. Don’t read it if you still believe in free will and / or long term relationships.
a tad early but i will get busy this month and i don't think these will change (yes the Solvej Balle made it on and i just picked it up) . favourite reads of the year:
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So many assumptions are made about novelists depending on MFA/No MFA, country of origin, etc. In my experience, the novelists I admire have the following in common:
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3 Streets / Yoko Tawada.La Captive / Christine Smallwood.Longcut / Emily Hall.Appointment / Katrina Volckmer.Taiga Syndrome / Cristina Rivera Garza.Houseguest / Amparo Davila.Panthers & Museum of 🔥/ Jen Craig.7 Samurai Swept Away in a River / Jung Young Moon .Autoportrait / Leve.
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Hope they reprint this remarkable book without the atrocious introduction.
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You guys are insatiable.
@IneluctableQuak Sir can we get more high quality shelf photos I’ve never been so envious.
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I would subscribe to a magazine that mostly reviews books by . @Dalkey_Archive @DeepVellum @open_letter @transitbooks @_contramundum_ @NewDirections @DeepVellum @sublunaryeds @DorothyProject @archipelagobks .@biblioasis. Instead of mostly the books already covered everywhere else
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I obviously believe novelists should write about whatever they want, but if you’re going to write about, say, a Chilean or a Puerto Rican & you’re neither, you have to have the humility to do an EXCESSIVE amount of research.
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Reader they’re mine now 💥
Someone unloaded all their Peter Handke at my neighborhood bookstore.
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4 favorites of the decade
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I like Isabella Hammad’s answer:. “a rare chance for concentrated solitude, to be neither working nor passively consuming the content of a screen but thinking deeply about experiences other than our own using some of the tools of our dream life…”
What do you think literature is for?. To feel less alone seems too sentimental. To ax the inner ice not realistic. For aesthetic pleasure too vague & limited. To pass the time engagingly before we die too cynical.
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Some books to read to be my friend :D
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True story:. During the pandemic, as I was watching Taste of Cherry on my tiny tablet, I said to myself just buy a TV already, so I searched online for Best TV for art films, ordered whatever was rated as Best, and I watched a not insignificant portion of the Citerion Channel 🎥.
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And almost unbelievable history of USA based on declassified USA documents.
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“Bolaño’s work is opposed to radical aestheticism. By Night in Chile, in particular, implies that the absolute separation between the basement and the salon, between politics and culture, between the grossly material and the purely spiritual are condemned to fail eventually.”
Rereading Chris Andrew’s excellent book on Bolaño’s fictions for a lecture in progress. Apparently I liked this passage on overinterpretation the first time I read it in 2014. 😆 . (Overinterpretation happens in my 3rd novel quite a bit!).
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Speaking of intellectualism & emotion, do listen to Mary Gaitskill reading Symbols and Signs by Nabokov
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Me, reviewing your novels:. This is not The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
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There is this funny tendency very popular among "people who have not read a lot of novels" to make fun of “people who have read a lot of novels” for picking as their favorite novels novels that don’t suck.
There is this funny tendency very popular among "high literary" in which the only thing serious writers write is slightly cynical 700 pages books on social realism, everything else is late capitalism slop.
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James reminded me this books exists and I have it and apparently I’ve read it because I underlined it 😆
I am stumbling around the 7 Stories backlist and losing my mind a little bit!! What the fuck do you mean we have a “conversations with WG Sebald” book that nobody has ever heard of? We publish TWELVE books by Ariel Dorfman??.
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Too much Nabokov is bad for a young writer’s development.
too much Cormac McCarthy is bad for a young writer's development.
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Back when I was still capable of drooling I interviewed a little known Hungarian novelist whose novels I loved. I still remember re-reading all of his novels then available, watching Satantango on my laptop, and taking time off from my office job to prepare the questions.
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people in their 20s/30s/40s/50s/60s be like "this is my emotional support experimental novel".
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You guys are insatiable.
Someone should do a thread on the best @nyrbclassics . The only one I have is Marquez 's Clandestine in Chile.
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Another year, another online book list of mostly conglomerate slop I’m unlikely to read. 🤡. Here’s my growing list of 2025 titles I am looking forward to reading.
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Absolute gem 💎.
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