“Another man, also lonely and exiled and of Spanish origin… ‘I seek, all in all, to console myself for my exile, for my exile from eternity, for that unearthing (destierro) which I am fond of referring to as my unheavening… At present, I think that the best way to write this novel is to tell how it should be written. It is the novel of the novel, the creation of creation. Or God of God, Deus de Deo.’” Page 296.

Googling yields nothing but stupid ai overviews that are useless.

First time posting here, figured I’d find some Thomas Wolfe readers. One of the most acclaimed American authors in his time, it seems like his literary reputation has dissipated since. Read just a few pages of Look Homeward, Angel and you’ll find prose unmatched. Sensory, emotional, every word perfectly chosen. He was revered by Faulkner and Kerouac and Thompson. (He also had the same editor as Fitzgerald and Hemingway) I guess he doesn’t really have the ‘image’ these authors have, and he died much younger than all of them. But, all these writers are still quite popular but somehow Wolfe really isn’t. Love to hear any thoughts.

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Pleased with this haul. Where do I start?

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Unfortunately, another RSB favorite that I wasn’t fond of. I think I need funny books to be more wry and sparse if they’re gonna do the nonstop punchline thing (see: Hangman). There were definitely bits I enjoyed, but Ignatius stopped being funny to me very shortly after he was introduced, and the entire thing felt ham-fisted and annoying to me by the end. I’m gonna keep looking for a florid comedic book that I like since I really enjoy things that fall into either camp.

Be Not Content by William Craddock

I was totally enamored with this for the first half or so, and then Craddock gets too fried from all the acid, and it becomes annoying. Maybe the second most precipitous drop in a book I’ve ever personally read, not sharing the first out of politeness. Highly recommend with the caveat that you make up for his editor’s failure by just quitting whenever he starts to piss you off. You’re not missing anything.

Heard about it on the Apology podcast, which I also highly recommend. I've basically structured my entire adult life around trying to have the kinds of conversations Pearson has on that show. 

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

I was really impressed with how smart this book was the second time around. This was Baker’s second go at writing a lesbian novel; the one before stirred up a lot of opprobrium. Routing the romantic component through the twin dynamic, having the entire thing basically be about two nesting insular units–Cassandra and Jude within their family, their family within their town–while keeping the frame primarily around the family itself was genius. I have very southern sensibilities when it comes to sexuality, so I’m highly attuned to anything remotely yucky. (My girlfriend and I look like sisters, but she doesn’t look like my sister.)

 It honestly didn’t feel incestuous at all, and after rereading, I don’t even feel like Baker was trying to disguise anything inappropriate. It’s such a masterful exercise in atmosphere.

CATW also includes a bit of dishonesty re: the pyloric valve, which was very funny to me.

The Complications by Emmett Rensin 

I picked this up because of a review Rensin did in LARB, which I thought was incredibly smart and beautiful. 

The first chapter was a bit podcast-y to me, but it really picks up in quality. I found his anti “striver” bit quite grating, but that’s probably just cultural. I come from a prototypical “twice as hard, half as much” upbringing, which is one of a very, very small number of things about my childhood I’m grateful for. The anti-ambition tendency comes up a lot in leftist works, especially in the last decade or so. I think it’s important to delineate between ambition as an expedient or even amoral force and ambition merely as endeavor. 

His reactionary/liberal dichotomy is pretty broad and muddy. There’s a real dearth of specificity and clarity throughout all the sociopolitical sections, though I wonder if Rensin’s history with public political engagement has something to do with the vagueness. 

Speaking of. He makes no mention of the multiple accusations of rape/SA against him, not even obliquely. I wasn’t aware of them until after I finished the book and looked him up more extensively. There are many times in the book where he is open about harming or frightening other people, but this aspect isn’t addressed at all. I don’t really know how to feel about that. Besides sad. The entire situation is sad and befuddling. 

Hangman by Maya Binyam 

Another reread; I loved it the first time around. Liked it even more on the second go since I could totally revel in the style without having to really process the plot. I have a lot of affection for this book even though I can’t say too much about it without rubbing the magic off. Might be a top 20/30 for me. 

Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh

A bunch of repulsively overwritten paragraphs that terminate with some sort of memetic phrase. I do not ever want to see the sentence “Sir this is an Arby’s” anywhere, but it’s unforgivable to see it in print. This one was a little bit my fault because I didn’t do enough digging before reserving it; I was anticipating something a lot more grounded. 

Immediacy is like if you put a bunch of the most repetitive assertions about contemporary slickness (or ‘lack of friction’ as it’s been called most recently), digital oversharing, the academy, etc. in a centrifuge and spun out everything lucid or tangible. I have a lot of tolerance for academic writing when it’s beautiful/functional/interesting/innovative, but Immediacy failed on each of those fronts. 

Marigold and Rose by Louise Glück 

Short and sweet. I’m partial to Glück , so this was just a little intermezzo since I didn’t read any poetry until the month was almost over. Not a must-read by any means, and I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’ve read some of her more popular work already. 

Black Reason by Achille Mbembe

Glad I read it very shortly after I finished Hangman; sections on how Africa is rendered in Western thought were a great accompaniment to the novel. I didn’t agree with most of his assertions in the intro/first couple chapters, but I found they required real mastication and I appreciate that. Unfortunately, he quickly descends into bullshit. I’m reaching a point where terrible gender analysis in theory is starting to taint the work completely. It’s literally a 50/50 split, so if you can’t properly account for women, you’ve missed a full half of the picture. 

The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O’Connor

Loved this,  my favorite O’Connor by far. As I write these monthly wrap-ups, it’s becoming clear that atmosphere is the primary determinant of how much I'll enjoy fiction. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by FOC that I felt was impressively coherent plotwise, but I can never shake her despite being able to identify weakness in her work.

Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor

See: the plot thing I said above. Wasn’t crazy about this one at all until the last few stories, but they honestly carried, so. 

Mao II by Dan DeLillo

Liked it more than White Noise, still didn’t land. I don’t think DeLillo is for me. I don’t find him especially perspicacious, and his novels kinda hinge on that. He’s certainly not wanting for acclaim, so my aversion isn’t hurting anything. 

In Defense of Barbarism by Louisa Yousfi

I really wanted to like this based on the premise, but she lost me. Ironically reads as extremely French, though that may be due to translation. I don’t understand why Yousfi opted for terrible 60s-style supplication to misogyny in the name of intraracial harmony. It’s literally the gender based version of cooning. The rap chapters were kind of insane for a few reasons, but primarily because Francophone Arabs and Africans don’t have any more of a claim over hip hop than their white counterparts lmfao.

Cleanup on Aisle Five by Ann Larson

I worked at a grocery chain as a teenager after I dropped out of high school and can attest to Larson’s accounts of the interpersonal complexities in retail and how demoralizing grocery jobs are. I’m a labor researcher/grad student, so the analysis wasn’t anything I haven’t heard before. The prose is far from artful, but Larson has managed to put together an easily digestible introduction that doesn’t read as didactic or radical. It’s a short, sweet, personable book–my biggest takeaway is that the massive personality gulf between wonks and organizers is real.
Not necessarily for me, but I’m really glad it’s out there. 

I can't remember the exact phrasing.

it was a super interesting question.

I wanted to ask the OP why she maintained 2666 might be one such book.

Edit: Hypotheses/candidates so far:

Yeats, Hugo, Doestoieveski, Hemingway, Plato, John Green, Dazai, Bolaño(?)

Had to fly across the country and I can’t sleep on planes which allowed me to crush Happening, The Other Girl, The Magic Christian, Pedro Paramo, existentialism and human emotions and The Mezzanine over the course of two 6 hour flights

Some thoughts:

Falling man: Delillo is one of my all time faves. This was pretty bad. Def the worst of his I’ve read. Soulless and not very observant and just poorly executed

Sula: I fucking love toni Morrison. Song of Solomon is a top 5 all time book for me. I adore Jazz. Tar Baby is insanely beautiful and underrated in her body of work. Beloved is the great American novel. Bluest eye is one of the best debuts ever. Love is a great late period effort. This one just didn’t really tickle me like that. It was certainly beautiful as always and I quite liked it but it didn’t punch like the rest for me. I think the repeated very graphic / shocking scenes with very minimal foreshadowing became a bit tiring for me. It shined in its dialogue (as she always does), esp the convo between hannah and Eva asking her about whether or not she ever loved the kids

The great American novel: Roth is probably my actual all time fave. I’ve read all of his books except about 5, and this was one of them. I can’t believe he did this for 400pgs lol. Insanely unnecessary but funny and a fun footnote for a big fan. Wouldn’t rec unless you love PR or baseball

Rubicon beach: I guess I was just reading all my fave authors this month…goated as always. Reagan era Faulkner; the myth maker of a disintegrating hellscape, poet of a dying world. He writes with fervor and contempt and love in equal measure. A beautiful triptych of a book written in typical SE fashion: characters appear and die and reappear as apparitions or shades, American dreams and nightmares personified into visages of avarice and seduction and endless self searching. Native American connection rended to LA hyper capitalism, the diaspora and mirth of America 1 and America 2. “He was born, after all, in a country that forgotten the dream of which it was born: rare was that, once having forgotten it, he had come to remember it again”

X: the worst book I’ve read in a VERY long time. Absolute dog shit. Learned no lessons from its forebearers (cooper, delany, Schumann, etc) and is the most lifeless sexless bloodless riskless thing I’ve ever read. I almost never hate books; I love to read so much that usually the worst i feel about a given novel is just nonplussed. This incited truly negative feelings in me. Hate hate hate hated it

Paradise rot: see above about that nonplussed feeling. Fine

Their eyes were watching god: not at all what i expected tbh. I expected something a lot grimmer and maybe more like baroque but this thing is teeming with life. Didn’t like absolutely LOVE it but very good

The walk book: best book I’ve read that came out this year. I have not read fuccboi because it was repulsive to me. Got this bc it was like $5. Absolutely adored it. Tender and hyper observant and funny and rarely annoying imo. Great contemporary fiction

Rat bohemia: sarah schulman my goat…the usual. Love her down. First part kinda dragged but once we moved to David this thing soared as always.

Pedro paramo: kinda kicked my ass. I struggle sometimes w the dense Latin American magical realist stuff. Will try again soon.

Both Ernaux’s: wow!!!!!! My first time reading her. So freaking awesome. Reminded me of Roth in its unrelenting sense for a search of self and the line between fiction and reality. Happening was downright amazing.

Less than Zero: my first BEE. Not as provocative as I expected. See above nonplussed feeling. I do think this suffers a bit from the Beatles / Seinfeld thing where this style has just been ripped of 1000000 times at this point and it feels tired to read now. I’m sure it was much more exciting upon publication

Song of Solomon: the greatest book ever maybe. One of my absolute all time faves. Terribly moving and smart and funny and lived in. The great American quest for identity, the myth of self actualization. There’s something very fascinating to me about the relationship between this book, Beloved, Suttree, and Blood Meridian.

I've only had the chance to read/start reading a few of these, but cool finds nonetheless. All were found in person and most cost me a great deal less than what they're worth:

• Richard Avedon - Evidence - First edition, 1994, cost $27
• Robert Caro - The Power Broker - First edition, 1974, cost $50 (very uncommon to find a first with no tears on the DJ given its size and age!)
• Billy Corgan - Blinking with Fists - Signed, 2nd printing, 2004, cost $30
• Charles Cross - Heavier Than Heaven - Signed first edition, 2001, cost $25
• Joan Didion - The Last Thing He Wanted - Signed ARC, wrappers in slipcase, 1996, cost $13 (seller didn't know what this was and mispriced it, when it's really worth 20-30x what I paid)
• P.D. James - The Children of Men - Signed first American edition, 1993, cost $45
• Denise Levertov - The Poet in the World - Signed, 1974, cost $8 (heavily marked with pen throughout)
• Bert Stern - The Last Sitting - First edition, 1982, cost $35 (infamous, frankly a must-read to get an idea of Monroe at the end of her life)
• Tiffany & Co. - The Blue Book - 2008, cost $8 (recession-era catalogue given to big spenders)
• Twiggy - Twiggy - First edition, 1968, cost $25

Anyone here read Bryusov’s The Fiery Angel? Finally got round to it earlier this year and it’s one of the most fascinating books I’ve read. It’s basically about a love triangle between a knight, a young woman and an “angel” that appeared to her in a mystical vision when she was a child, set during the reformation.

I think it’s well known amongst occult wierdos but hasn’t got much attention as a work of literature. Renata, the young woman, is the closest female analogue to Hamlet I’ve found, in the sense that Bryusov portrays her with complete moral and psychological ambiguity. I’ve thought about her a tonne since finishing the book and have never been able to settle on one interpretation of her character. She could be a saint, a witch, or just psychotic and the book balances all these interpretations perfectly. Just hoping someone else has read it so I can talk about it lol

Would highly recommend, especially if you like any kind of gothic or dark romantic literature (it’s very much in the same ballpark as Poe/Baudelaire). Also my edition has an afterword by the guitarist from Blondie for some reason and it’s actually pretty good

Was at the beach for over 2 weeks and was really able to get through some incredible reading before the school year starts. Here are some very brief thoughts:

East of Eden - magnificent! Biblical! Heartbreaking! Lee! Thou Mayest! Couldn’t believe this book would exceed the hype but it did!

The Wide Wide Sea - really fun read. Got to learn about the birth of the sandwich. Hampton writes great dad books - middlebrow history at its finest.

Benito Cereno - Melville - king of the digression. This one wasn’t for me.

Rejection - what the fuck! Shout out to the entrepreneur guy.

Transcription - I was ready to hate this book after the first 15 pages and then it really worked its magic! Loved the references to the Hunger Artist.

Things Fall Apart - Absolutely insane ending!

Beloved - listened to Morrison’s beautiful reading on audible while I was on a bus ride and read the rest in a day and a half. It inhaled me. I cried four times. I’ve read a lot about “oppression” and nothing captures the emotionality of it like this. Haven’t read any Morrison since Song of Solomon in high school. I’ll be reading more soon! Sethe! Denver! Got a tear in my eye just thinking about it.

History and Obstinacy by Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt

Beneath the Wage by Annie McClanahan

John Berger: From Life by Tom Overton

Art and Revolution by John Berger

Jumped around between books and read a lot of short form stuff this month. Made a pretty big dent in the last volume of Bloch’s Principle of Hope (which I really didn’t expect to finish when I started the first volume this summer) and Negt and Kluge’s other book on the public sphere

Also had a deadline for a review of Overton’s Berger bio mid-month + getting that written ate up so much more time than I would’ve expected. Have never tried to discuss a biography at length and it’s actually….so much harder than I would’ve expected to do it in a way that feels substantial. From Life was great though — if you’re into Berger at all (or if you’re interested in picking him up for the first time), the book’s worth keeping an eye out for when it drops next month. Really, really cool blend of intimate portrait + intellectual bio/career retrospective — Overton cataloged JB’s archive and they became pretty close while they worked on the project. Overton knows his shit inside and out + the collection process for the archive is a pretty cool story in itself. Neat perspective. Really, really good insight into/lots of attention toward into Berger’s early/late periods where most people tend to only want to talk about G. and Ways of Seeing (which were toward the middle in 1972).

Had to cut a ton from my review due to spatial constraints but I probably have another two articles worth of stuff written that I’m hoping to put to work elsewhere…lots on the Into their Labours trilogy + Michael Silverblatt misreading it so badly that it made Berger’s soul leave his body…NYRB is re-releasing all three books as a single volume early next year so I might have at least one way to put some of my cuts to use

Art and Revolution is very, very 60’s Berger….but also a pretty odd little book. The first half is a lot of what Berger does best — really rock solid intro to Lukacs’s distinction between realism and naturalism (turned toward visual art) for non-specialist readers/non-expert/lay readers in the same way the first ep of Ways of Seeing is an accessible primer on Benjamin. [as an aside I think it was in this sub, but I saw someone respond to a thread about not feeling like Ways of Seeing really hit by comparing it to it watered down Benjamin…which I guess isn’t necessarily wrong but it’s also kind of a deeply silly (to the point of being pretty dumb to point out) thing to bother bringing up. He cites Benjamin at the end and a lot of what made the entire project special was more for its pedagogical value than any kind of original theoretical work on Berger’s part. Really impressive how effectively he communicated/illustrated WB’s ideas to a huge audience by taking full advantage of all of the means at his disposal on network TV…writing it off as “newleftslop” kind of just sounds like an angry Marvel fan trying to protect Deadpool from the normies who only know him from the movies or something) Reminded me a bunch of his 60’s book on cubism as aThe second part, which gets into Ernst Neizvestny’s sculptures, is kind of split between a so-so art-crit monograph and a biographical speed run. His treatment of the Neizvestny’s work is a little thin (but wouldn’t be bad for like…a gallery review in a periodical) and the bio is fun but also too brief. Apparently he wrote it at Neizvestny’s request (according to Overton) and admits that he only saw the work in photos (in his preface). Owen Hatherley recently said something about him being unqualified for the subject and I think he might be kinda right…at least about the back half of the book, which sorta felt like a weaker version of Berger’s Picasso book from around the same time. (I also think the Hatherley piece is way too hard on Berger’s late work but 🤷🏻‍♂️).

Second pass on McClanahan’s book on alternate forms of payment structure to the traditional wage (I’m supposed to be writing something on it and dragging my feet). Very cool blend of sociology+ economic history w/ lit crit. —
Tip work, piece rate payment, and gig work each get a chapter length study that opens with a history of each payment structure (usually starting toward the beginning of the 19th century) and closes with a look at how each form of work has been represented in film/tv/lit. Really solid closer on deskilling in the university (for both students and teachers) as well.

and God damn I’m fucking smitten with Negt and Kluge. Picked up both History and Obstinacy as well as The Public Sphere and Experience after reading Fredric Jameson’s seminar on postwar German thought, where he devotes two full classes to N+K and kind of gets…idk, endearingly (?) excited about how much he loves their work. Super interesting read on how labor constitutes consciousness + any connection to/sense of collectivity that reminded me of Sartre in Critique of Dialectical Reason (H&O is still pretty challenging but it’s way more accessible than CofDR). Great stuff on how the accumulated history of dead labor as a totality and how much of that goes into conditioning the way we experience the world without noticing it + some really cool passages comparing the social totality to biological self-regulation processes. Really good follow up to Bloch and kind of seems like what would happen if you smashed Principle of Hope together with A Thousand Plateaus.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/30/books/review/the-disappearers-marlon-james.html

What do people make of this? Honestly the book sounds incredibly unappealing to me based on the review

Would anybody be interested in a doing a sub read-along of A Table for Fortune? I was thinking ~60 pages a week over the course of a year, beginning either Dec 2026 or Jan 2027. I'd be happy to come up with a schedule and post discussion threads but obviously with the length of the thing, there might not be enough interest to justify it.

In his review today (archive link) in the NYT, Dwight Garner hailed Marlon James' "The Disappearers" as "the novel of the decade, if not the century", compared it to "Absalom, Absalom", and asserted that "[The Disappearers] places [James] near the front of the line, a decade or two from now, for the Nobel Prize."

I don't think I've ever seen such over-the-top praise from such a veteran reviewer, and certainly not from Dwight Garner, so when I started reading The Disappearers, I was prepared for something really transcendent...

I'm halfway through (around the point Dwight said the Nobel crossed his mind) and I just don't get it. Can anyone shed some light on this for me? Can anyone explain the rapturous praise? Maybe I'm missing something. Or maybe it's just not "for" me (although I don't think Dwight Garner is any better acquainted with the gay Jamaican experience than I am)

It’s like every other page there’s a diamond turn of phrase, even the workmanlike stuff gets turned into something energetic and playful, “the elevator sucked my skyward”, listen to this

“I came down the steps and into the street. Above, all was ocean brightness: against the flat blue sky the clouds had been sketched by an impressively swift and confident hand. What talent. I like the sky and often wonder where I’d be without it. I know: I’d be in England, where we don’t have one. Through some physiological fluke – poison and body-chemistry doing a deal in their smoke-filled room – I felt fine, I felt good. Manhattan twanged in its spring ozone, girding itself for the fires of July and the riot heat of August. Let’s walk it, I thought, and started off across town.”

Open to all, we are a recently started book club with a focus on online discussion for those not in Edinburgh and optional monthly in-person meetups.

Join us on Discord (DM me if this has expired and I forgot to update it): https://discord.gg/X4JrdQxbWM

Reading Schedule

2nd Nov - 30th Nov: The Magus by John Fowles

Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman adrift after Oxford and a failed love affair, takes a teaching post on the Greek island of Phraxos. What begins as escape soon becomes a far more unsettling encounter. At Bourani, a villa on the island, Nicholas meets Maurice Conchis, a cultivated and enigmatic recluse. Through stories, performances, seductions and staged mysteries, Conchis draws him into a psychological ordeal in which reality and illusion are almost impossible to separate. The island gives Nicholas the drama he has been half-wishing for, then strips away the safety of being merely amused by it. In Fowles’s hands, this literary mystery becomes a disturbing study of performance, desire and the stories people tell in order to avoid themselves.

5th Oct - 2nd Nov: The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

Here is the story of the inimitable twelve-year-old Frankie, who is utterly, hopelessly bored with life until she hears about her older brother's wedding. Bolstered by lively conversations with her house servant, Berenice, and her six-year-old male cousin—not to mention her own unbridled imagination—Frankie takes on an overly active role in the wedding, hoping even to go, uninvited, on the honeymoon, so deep is her desire to be the member of something larger, more accepting than herself.

7th Sept - 5th Oct: Independence Day by Richard Ford

Frank Bascombe, in the aftermath of his divorce and the ruin of his career, has entered an 'Existence Period' - selling real estate in New Jersey and mastering the high-wire act of normalcy. But over one Fourth of July weekend, Frank is called into sudden, bewildering engagement with life. Independence Day is a moving, peerlessly funny odyssey through America and through the layered consciousness of one of its most compelling literary incarnations, conducted by a novelist of extraordinary empathy and perception.

Best books:

Light in August and Atonement

Still reading:

Story of a Life still has a bit left. It's a huge book but so worth it. I picked it up because an influencer I like is also reading it and I kept seeing his stories on Instagram and got curious and it's so worth it man. I already love Soviet history and stuff. It's like a must read for everyone who is interested in USSR. Also so beautiful writing at times. Incredible translation. Kinda sad that the translator won't translate the next volume.

Stand out:

The island of doctor Moreau (such a fucking insane book no wonder Borges was obsessed with it. Weirdly biblical too. I think Andrzej Żuławski would have made a great adaptation of this book)

Surprise:

Civilwarland In Bad decline

Re-read:

Metamorphosis

Hi, I've been an avid reader forever, and over the past few years have been reading more theory + criticism (broadly defined - both NYRB review + essays and more academic criticism from U presses)

I have a goal of learning how to write it for myself but am at a bit of a loss for learning how to go about doing so. Like yeah - I can write short close readings of passages or poems, or can integrate theory I read to analyze work via those theoretical perspectives, but am unsure how to actually go from an amateur-ish close reading to a fully formed cohesive thesis and final piece.

I have been thinking a writing group specifically oriented around critical essays would be helpful - does that exist?