Results for “best fiction”

291 found

Linn Ullmann, Unquiet: A Novel.

Guzel Yakhina, Zuleikha.

Aladdin, a new translation by Yasmine Seale.

Broken Stars: Contemporary Science Fiction in Translation, edited and translated by Ken Liu.

Sally Rooney, Normal People: A Novel.

I did try many of the more famous recommended novels of the year, and mostly didn’t like them.  Still, I don’t feel this list is coming very close to capturing the year’s best fiction — I think I’ll have a better sense in two or three years and then I will report back.  In the meantime, what do you recommend?

An MR reader emails me:

Reading: what is your decision model for choosing fiction?

Here is a description, these are not necessarily recommendations for you:

1. If a woman as smart (or smarter) as I am tells me to read a particular work of fiction, it is likely I do so.  If a smarter man tells me to read a particular work of fiction, odds are I will ignore it.

2. I am least likely to read American fiction.  The 1850s, Faulkner, and Pynchon aside, American fiction seems more superficial to me than say European or Latin American fiction.  American fiction is also very popular in…America, which leads to an excessively loose selection mechanism for those residing in this country and reading its media.  Whereas if a novel from El Salvador (Castellanos Moya) makes its way in front of your eyes, it may be quite good.

3. In genre fiction, I am most likely to read American fiction.  Superficiality is less of a problem, and vitality is more likely to be relevant.

4. I track fiction reviews in the NYT, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Financial Times, the WSJ and WaPo, BookForum, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and on-line, and I buy what seems interesting to me.  I read the blog Literary Saloon which covers fiction in translation.  I will randomly sample other sources as well, sometimes the Guardian too or the London Times.  I will click on “best of” lists relating to fiction.

5. If I am in a German- or Spanish-speaking country, I’ll buy a few titles from the front tables and also ask an intelligent-seeming clerk what I ought to be reading.  I don’t always get around to actually reading those, noting that the final equilibrium has not yet arrived.

6. I used to scan the “New Arrivals” section of the local public libraries for fiction titles, but in recent years I have cut back on my fiction consumption and this practice has fallen by the wayside.  It was not leading to a high hit rate in any case (too many second- or third-tier books by writers I already like but who are past their peak years).

7. I will periodically reread old classics, on a more or less random basis, mostly correlated with how long ago I last read them.

That is the new book by M.A. Orthofer, out soon this April.  If you measure book quality by the actual marginal product of the text, this is one of the best books written, ever.  Reading the manuscript in draft form induced me to a) write an enthusiastic blurb, and b) order about forty items through Amazon, mostly used of course.  The book is basically a comprehensive guide to what is valuable and interesting in recently translated world literature, a meta-book so to speak, with extensive coverage of most of the countries you might want.

Here is the book’s home page.  Here is a superb New Yorker profile of Orthofer, who writes the blog Literary Saloon.  Highly recommended to avid readers of fiction.

Yes it is "Underrated Week" and our next genre is science fiction.

But – sorry guys — I don’t think there is much underrated science fiction.  You might think the genre as a whole is underrated, but within the genre there are so many sad desperate souls (I know, I am one of them) who will clutch at straws and elevate the mediocre into the worthwhile and the worthwhile into the superlative.

Science fiction has been treading water since the 1960s.  Since that time its most glorious achievements have been on the screen, not on the printed page.  There are some excellent individual books, such as Eon or Hyperion, but the genre is mostly retreads.  Nor do I think much of attempts to cross science fiction with "serious fiction," whether it is coming from Philip K. Dick or Doris Lessing.  Yes the idea is cool but the execution is usually quite flawed.

Still we all must have our picks, so here are mine:

1. Sphere, from Michael Crichton.  Forget the last few books.  He is the best science fiction writer in contemporary times, though his publisher works very hard to make sure that label does not stick.

2. Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon.  Read Stapleton if you fervently believe that British Hegelianism is the missing element in most science fiction.  Yet this is probably my favorite science fiction novel of all time, who else can credibly skip over 20,000 years in a single breath?  "Civilizations rose and fell, yet now we must move on," or something like that.  Honorable mentions go to Stapledon’s Odd John and especially Sirius.

3. Jonathan Lethem, Gun with Occasional Music.  This is marketed as contemporary literature, which keeps away the science fiction fans.

It is hard to call Joe Haldeman underrated but still there are fans who don’t know he is one of the best science fiction writers, period.

I guess there is some underrated science fiction after all.

Crying Uncle: OK people, I retract the claim "Science fiction has been treading water since the 1960s."  Card and Butler are the most convincing counterexamples.

Ezra Klein asks me:

What do you think the best fiction books are for understanding economics?  Left and right?  From my perspective on the spectrum, I’d go with Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, but I’d be interested to hear your favorites…

Some will cite Harrison Bergeron, the Vonnegut anti-egalitarian short story.  Others would nominate Ayn Rand, anarcho-capitalist science fiction, and of course there are the fictional-economic creations of Russ Roberts.  But what are the Western classics that — policy polemics aside — teach one how to think like an economist?

My attention is usually drawn to 1660-1775 in British fiction, starting with Defoe and continuing through Swift, Boswell, and just about everyone else.  To my eye they all thought like rational choice economists, albeit strange ones with a focus on approbation, self-deception, and the perverse social consequences of individual action (see my In Praise of Commercial Culture, the chapter on literature, for more detail).  They are the true roots of Smith’s TMS.  Dickens and Balzac are contenders, but I find them a bit too one-note, as is Harriet Martineau.  Nonetheless the eighteenth century works remain ahead of their time and they certainly don’t teach basic economics or help one think much about policy.

What are your picks?

The average number of weeks that a new No. 1
bestseller stayed top of the hardback fiction section of the New York
Times Bestseller List has fallen from 5.5 in the 1990s, 14 in the 1970s
and 22 in the 1960s to barely a fortnight last year — according to the
study of the half-century from 1956-2005.

In the 1960s, fewer than three novels reached No. 1 in an average year; last year, 23 did.

Here is the link, the pointer was from Alex. To repeat my standard mantra, the evidence shows we are moving away from a winner-take-all society, not toward it.