Where to Start With Post-Postmodern Literature 

It's coming soon ^^! Thanks for the awesome comment :)

Did you like Infinite Jest?

Bleeding Edge argues exactly that - do read that one, it's utterly beautiful. And I agree 100% with your point of view.

Hope you'll like Oscar Wao :) let me know how it goes!!

Always great to read comments like yours! So glad I could be of help :) that review's coming soon ;)

That would be just modern though. The hero’s journey is very cyclical.

Days Between Stations is on my to-read list ;) I know it because it's one of those few novels Pynchon openly spoke up to praise!

Zone One is still my favorite Whitehead. Just brilliant. But I must say I haven't read _Apex Heals the Hurt_ or _John Henry Days_ yet.

Thanks! 2666 will have its day someday, whereas I'm still not sure about The Goldfinch even though tons of people have suggested it!

Do you think House of Leaves is post-postmodern?

Not many at all! If we're talking about fiction (excluding essays and academic texts), I very rarely read more than 2 hours a day, and usually less than 1. The exceptions are during the summer (especially in August) and when I'm reading texts I have to research academically, or things that require specific dedication (like Pynchon's novels). In that case I can get sometimes reach 4 or 5 hours a day, but rarely much more than that.

Oh, thanks for the reply. Good to know :) I just wonder there are thousands of books and how are we ever going to get our hands on most of them, if not all!

:D

I have no fucking clue! Once I'd have told you Infinite Jest tries to be a PPM masterpiece, but I now see too much of a trap and joke in it for it to be that far away from actual postmodernism. It's more of a liminal text to me than a PPM text proper. As for your question, I was about to tell you it'd have to be extremely self-conscious of its generic roots and extremely explicit in its web of references and self-consciously about the literary experience without foregrounding its metafictional discourses, but I realized I'm just describing the kind of stuff I write, and I'm probably just too full of myself. Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is probably the closest we have to a quintessentially PPM masterpiece in literature; Richard Wright's Cornetto Trilogy is the equivalent in cinema. If these works look a bit low-key and not as ambitious as Ulysses/GR, it probably only underlines their PPM instistence on entertainment. Who knows though!

@@TheBookchemist Why do you now view Infinite Jest as an elongated joke? Don't you think Wallace meant for it to be and made it much deeper than that? Also did you take down the video "why i no longer like infinite jest" or whatever it was called, and if so why?

Isn't it the best? You'll love Watchmen too I'm sure ;)

They tried!

@@TheBookchemist I was under the impression they were the same, do you have any references supporting their differences?

Can you link that article? Can’t find it on google

Totally agree, I think it works especially well with people who'd like to become writers or are fascinated with creative writing in general! Cheers :)

Sure, though I've never read anything of his! He's always scared me a little bit - I've heard he's a pretty cryptic/disturbing/upsetting writer, and most of his books tend to be gigantic. I've seen his name associated to this whole current though, sure - especially to early representatives of it like David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers. Cheers :)

The Bookchemist, here to tell people how the stuff they already liked is even better than they thought 8)

I still haven't read it because it kinda scares me - I've heard it's quite disturbing in some of its parts, and also pretty tough and pretty endless! But I'll have to read it sometime soon, maybe next year or later in 2016. I've loved what little of Bolano I've read so far, so I'm kinda looking forward to the experience. When I read it I'll defitely film a review of it ;)

If you could handle DFW's eye eating cockroaches , i'm pretty sure you can handle anything in 2666.

I tried audiobooks twice in the past. Didn't work out for me. I believe there are thousands of situations in which audiobooks are great and I got nothing against people who listen to them, and in some cases they can even actually be pretty awesome!, but part of me believes they are fucking Satan and that they're not a good thing for literature in general. Literature students (and "professional" readers like such) should avoid them like the plague, common readers can have fun with them. Didn't know about Yiddish!, I might review it soon since I actually never did (and I worked on it a lot recently).

1) That's a very interesting question but no, I honestly don't! I mean I definitely would like to read more contemporary Italian literature, but just in the same way as I'd like to read more contemporary European lit in general. I have/choose to focus on American stuff for both academic and personal preferences; but the point is that since I was very little all the stuff I loved, from books to comics to music to movies to games, it's always been American (or occasionally British). I don't feel what you mention because, as a reader, I think I'm probably more American than Italian! 2) I definitely have, and I might film a video about it in the future, although I'm afraid it might give the wrong message (I know lots of people love him almost religiously); I'll give you a short answer: the change came over time, and it was influenced most notably by the fact that I wrote my undegraduate thesis on his works. Reading about his life helped me re-dimension my ideas about him as a person. As for his production itself, I honeslty always thought that Infinite Jest was by far his best work, and that his short fiction (and the Broom of the System) weren't anywhere close to its level. I still think IJ is an impressive work, but I honestly believe that it betrays a lot of what it sets out to do by being an addictive and endless loop, kind of a trap-novel - which is weird for someone who allegedly wanted so much to connect with people and be sincere and so forth, right? Let's just say that I was infatuated with the book for a while, but I grew out of that phase. Reading a lot of Pynchon also helped me to see how much DFW rips off Pynchon without any of his narrative chops. But maybe I'll talk more about this in that video I mentioned, who knows! Thanks for the feedback man and hope the answers were decent :)

Yeah her writing Is quite thick , there's no way around that.

Best of luck with your thesis!

no one but your teachers :))

SERIOUSLY MAN THANK YOU, I had no idea Invaders 22 existed and it's exactly the kind of stuff I research for a living. Thank you! I've heard the Vandermeers are awesome as editors too, I'll check the other volume out too ;)

I'm glad it was a helpful recommendation. Another recommendation along similar lines is Benjamin Percy's "Thrill Me:Essays on Fiction." It will be published in October. According to the info. I could find, the title essay is about genre literature being the gateway for many readers who go on to love "literary" fiction writers whose work contains a lot of elements of genre writing. I have yet to read Percy but his novels "Dead Lands" & "Red Moon" are both on my TBR.

I'm reading Gravity's Rainbow and, though I can see many qualities, the book is very unfriendly to the reader. I saw somewhere that it's a book you just can't recommend. People just discover it and start reading due to masochistic tendencies.

I'm reading it at the moment too and I'm definitely loving it ;)

Also, I'm curious, name your favorite Pynchon novels from least to best. I'm a bit curious.

I'll film a video about that when I've read V and Slow Learner too (by the end of the Summer, hopefully?). In the meanwhile I can tell you that my favorite is either Against the Day or Bleeding Edge (if forced to choose, I'd say Bleeding Edge), while my least favorite is definitely Crying of Lot 49.

The_Bookchemist Dang, I love Crying of Lot 49. I'm honestly surprised you would choose Bleeding Edge as your favorite, usually people place that one as one of their least favorite books. I still need to read Bleeding Edge, along with Vineland, Gravity's Rainbow, V., and Against the Day. And since I'm currently working on Mason & Dixon, I would consider that to be my favorite (so far).

The people at Threadless.com should probably pay me a lot of money considering the amount of free advertisement I'm giving them :P

In all honesty, I have no idea - I know very little about British literature, especially contemporary!

To be fair there are lots of alternatives around (ultramodernism! metamodernism! technomodernism! popmodernism!) but none's been too effective so far. I agree with you though!

Such as? (I'm not being smug; I'm genuinely interested! Also, while he's not a writer I hold dear I wouldn't say I dislike him that much)

I have no idea :O

I have never read Gaddis and only know him from studies and monographs, but I'd say he's more of a liminal figure between Modernism and Postmodernism, and often named in studies (especially early studies) of American Postmodernism. Barth is as canonically Postmodern as it gets - so yeah, I don't think they're PPM at all, except that of course these categories tend to be very fluid.

If you ask me, it's not postmodern at all. It's close to the ideas of post-postmodernism (as close as Extremely Loud Incredibly Close), although how close I'm not quite sure.

Short answer, no. Longer: I don't think he's the kind of guy who cares. Even longer: I believe he is definitely more closely related to the classic tradition in American fiction, with all his quirkiness like the sparse punctuation. Some might say that the fact he's moved to write genre (post-apocalytpic) fiction in The Road aligns him with a tendency that's associated, if not part, of post-postmodernism; but I believe that McCarthy has been writing genre fiction all his life, really. Chabon argues this very convincingly in his essay Dark Adventure, claiming how all of McCarthy's stuff is basically gothic, western or adventure.

+The_Bookchemist oh, very interesting, I will totally check out that essay!