NOTE: Ann Sterzinger is a personal friend of mine, and this article represents my personal opinions on the merit of her work.
Self-publishing has been one of the greatest innovations of the last decade and one of its greatest curses. Sure, the freedom to release your life’s work without having to grovel to some executive with his head shoved up his rectum is great. So is the ability to actually keep the majority of your book’s earnings (most mainstream authors earn at most ten percent royalties, which they usually have to split with their agent).
Unfortunately, self-publishing also means self-promotion: without the resources of a major publishing house behind you, you’re left to hock your own wares. This advantages self-help writers—most of whom already have marketing techniques down pat—at the expense of everyone else. The reading public also gravitates towards self-help books, with fiction and memoirs being a far harder sell. The end result is that while today’s novelists may have the freedom to publish whatever they want, the hurdle of self-promotion means that most of them will languish in obscurity.
Take my friend and Taki’s Magazine colleague Ann Sterzinger. When I asked her how many books she and her confederate Andy Nowicki were selling via her Hopeless Books label, she chuckled and said, “Um… I think I owe Andy enough to buy a hamburger?”
It’s a shame, seeing as Sterzinger and Nowicki are by far the best young fiction writers out there today (yes, being middle-aged counts as “young” in the world of literature). Some may say that using my ROK bully pulpit to promote a personal friend is borderline unethical, but had I never bought and reviewed Sterzinger’s novel NVSQVAM (Nowhere), we’d have never become friends to begin with. I also know I’m going to catch flak from the permavirgin crowd for praising a woman writer, but I doubt they read books anyway.
Indeed, if you scrubbed her name off NVSQVAM and The Talkative Corpse (we’ll ignore her freshman novel, the entertaining misfire Girl Detectives), you’d have a hard time even telling Sterzinger is a woman. Not only is her prose crisp and funny, her subject material is a complete 180 from the whiny navel-gazing that most female writers puke out.
Sterzinger’s oeuvre sits at the crossroads of generational angst and male alienation, tales of losers struggling against a world that holds them in contempt. She arguably captures the experience of being a man better than many male writers do. With her recent hiring as Takimag’s editor, replacing the departing Jim Goad, hopefully Sterzinger will start getting some of the attention she deserves.
A Brief History Of Beautiful Losers
Ann Sterzinger and Andy Nowicki’s brand of “loser-lit” has a pedigree going back nearly a hundred years. All roads converge with Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the original self-made pariah of Western fiction. His 1931 novel Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit in the original French) introduced the world to Ferdinand Bardamu, Céline’s misfit alter ego, bringing with it a new prose style that mimicked the nature of human memory itself.
Journey and its successor novels succeeded because they blended misanthropy, humor, and above all, self-awareness. Any teenage emo idiot can talk about how everyone else is a piece of shit: it takes courage to mock yourself. Céline’s sophomore effort Mort à crédit (translated as Death on the Installment Plan) was a glorious monument to self-abasement, in which he depicts his literary surrogate as a fap-addicted oddball with an aversion to wiping his ass.
Despite attempts by politically correct leftists to erase Céline from history (he was a fascist who authored anti-Semitic pamphlets and supported the Vichy regime during World War II), he’s remained one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Virtually every great writer who came after Céline, from mid-century novelists like Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs to modern ones like Michel Houellebecq and John Dolan, owes him a considerable debt. A few hacks have also ripped Céline off: for example, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is an artless imitation of Journey to the End of the Night, lacking that novel’s rhythm or frankness.
Sterzinger also lays claim to the legacy of another group of 20th century literary misfits: the Angry Young Men. Rising to prominence in the 1950’s, the Angry Young Men were a reaction to the suffocating Beigeism of post-war Britain, a society that praised mediocrity and elevated fools like James Joyce to prominence in the arts. Writers such as Kingsley Amis and John Osbourne lambasted the British establishment with novels such as Lucky Jim that defied the literary conventions of the era. Sterzinger has named Amis as one of her influences, even telling me in an interview that NVSQVAM (Nowhere)’s protagonist Lester Reichartsen is partially based on him.
The Marginal Men
Both NVSQVAM (Nowhere) and The Talkative Corpse feature male marginalization as their subject matter, notable not just because it’s an underserved market in modern literature, but because of who wrote them. Sterzinger deliberately bucks the trend of novelists who can only write about their own milquetoast lives; she told me in the aforementioned interview that autobiographical fiction “bores the shit” out of her. She also bucks the trend of onanistic writers who can’t imagine what life is like outside their Manhattan cocoons, as her male protagonists are just as believably loserish as anything Amis or Céline put out.
In particular, NVSQVAM probes both modern male alienation and the existential nausea of Generation X. The novel’s protagonist Lester is a punk rock washout brought low by bad luck and his own foolishness. Relegated to grad school after an accidental pregnancy and shotgun marriage, Lester spends the bulk of the novel at the whim of everyone around him, from his ball-busting wife, his bratty Oskar Schell-esque son Martin (whose name is an allusion to Kingsley Amis’ own no-talent progeny), to a brainless co-ed who seduces him:
He looked up at Jenneth, who was waiting like a puppy for him to say something devastatingly witty yet easy to understand about the Incas. She wants her drink to shoot out her nose. Not much else to strive for, has she? Noblesse oblige was dead, and self-fulfillment was middle-class. The only decent things to want were good drugs and long mornings and weird Incan professors staring into your cleavage while you wandered around in your underwear in December in Minnesota during an oil shortage which would never affect you. To expect anyone to use leisure productively, in short, was pathetic. “You and your German work ethic, old boob,” he muttered.
Lester’s life and ambitions are crushed not only between the twin poles of family life and post-sixties hedonism, but between the machinations of the generations that surround him. Generation X exists between two groups of malignant narcissists: the Baby Boomers, with their vanity and willful destruction of societal norms, and the Millennials, who pursue mechanistic self-gratification to compensate for their inability to form normal relationships. Raised during the dismantling of the old America, GenX was never able to adapt to the world around them, an alienation that can be found in every bit of art they created, from Less Than Zero to In Utero.
The Talkative Corpse probes the same themes with an extra dash of ebullient rage. The book is presented as the diary of John Jaggo, a marginally employed 40-year-old dweeb, as interpreted eons in the future (the novel is set in early 2010’s Chicago). Aside from an amusing commentary on how society bases its impressions of long-extinct civilizations on the few texts that survive the centuries, The Talkative Corpse is a bleak portrait of life at the bottom of American society:
Her name was Kat. I want to stomp on little Kat’s hauntingly beautiful face. I want to smash her fucking skull in to end all the dismissive thoughts she now has about me that make a mockery of the spontaneous poetry that used to come out of her mouth. I won’t tell you what she said, because I was a shameful fool for believing such rot. Such lying scum rot. I want to shove her pretty nose back into her brain and crush her arm bones slowly and tie her to the railroad tracks, to throw her in the river and heave her in a quarry and strap her to a bomb and fill her drink with cyanide and giggle as the maggots crawl from the exploded dead bags of what once were her creamy perfect breasts.
Tying together the dejected men of NVSQVAM and Corpse is the mirthful misanthropy at the heart of Sterzinger’s work. She formally subscribes to the philosophy of antinatalism, the idea that human beings should blot themselves out of existence as a moral imperative, but she doesn’t hammer you over the head with it like most modern writers. Instead, she paints the world as it is for the average man: loveless and emasculated, discarded by a broken economy, life is nothing but a train of comic miseries.
The operative word in that last sentence is “comic.” Sterzinger leavens her characters’ pratfalls with a healthy dose of empathy, the secret ingredient in the Célinean stew. Whining about how man is a piece of work is fine when you’re sixteen, but even the most serious goth eventually dumps the Black No. 1 and grows up. Even in the darkest corners of NVSQVAM (Nowhere) and The Talkative Corpse, there remains a lone ray of hope that hey, we can still make this thing work. As John Jaggo puts it:
Love may be bullshit. But without love, it’s all bullshit.
It’s ultimately this blend of empathy, comedy and honesty that makes for great writing. The world may suck, humans may be glorified shaved apes, and there’s probably no point to existence, but you persevere anyway because you have to. Because you can’t simply lay down and die. Because you’d rather struggle to make something of yourself—no matter how futile that struggle—then give up. Or as George Grant said: “When a man truly despairs, he does not write; he commits suicide.”
Indeed, the mostly-hopeless questing ethos of Ann Sterzinger’s characters mirrors her own struggle—as well as that of other modern writers—to get noticed. With the collapse of traditional publishing and the ongoing revolt against social justice warrior inanity, here’s hoping she, Nowicki, and their contemporaries get the recognition they’ve earned.
Read More: Inside The Mind Of The Social Justice Wanker
I haven’t read Ann Sterzinger but two other women writers worth praising are Esther Vilar (“The Manipulated Man”) and Helen Smith (“Men on Strike”).
Any others?
Shelley (Frankenstein).
Not entirely. Percy helped out a lot.
LOL- english B shows chicks no quarter 🙂
indeed, but what about her mother wollstonecraft – since its often cited as an early work of feminism does William Godwin bear any guilt? I doubt it somehow
Lol she wasn’t a good example of a good woman either. She was the “other woman” I believe….
yeah, youre right. I believe her mom went lesbian for a spell, until the money ran out (dont flame me ladies, look it up).
Her daughter’s book is still required reading in my opinion…
didn’t know that. These feminists eh
Ayn Rand.
I’ll pass on that one but I hear good things about Camille Paglia.
I heard Atlas Shrugged is painful to read but her philosophy is a useful talking point, even if just to just end up refuting it.
Serves as a good reference to the extreme right.
You have to read Atlas Shrugged just so you can say you read it. I found it entertaining through most of the book, but, of course, terribly preachy with a rather simple point (that took over 1000 pages to make); if you make society where nobody can fail you also make a society where nobody can succeed. People, when faced with those conditions, simply drop out and stop “playing” the games required to keep the system functioning (MGTOW, for example).
You can read Atlas much more easily if you just skip through the hijacked radio broadcast near the end. It’s about 50 or 100 pages, I can’t remember, but you really only need to read the first few pages of the broadcast and the skip to the next chapter.
The most fun thing about Atlas, for me, was seeing the sick and depraved leftists get mocked and killed by Ayn, after their sick ideas were carried out of course.
She’s awesome. So smart, all the while pop culturally very astute. Her book about “The Birds” (the Hitchcock film) is a great introduction.
Not even close. “Make a society where nobody can fail?” Please explain, because that sounds like a completely different book.
But Rand should be the red pill man’s true heroine as she professed her love for men and even added that she “worshipped” men. She went out of her way to attack feminist dogma by declaring that real women enjoyed being sexual objects. Like Paglia, she saw feminism for the Marxist crap that it is.
Anyway she was a great writer, not the greatest, had some splendid ideas, but could also be a little off.
Like most of us.
Marjane Satrapi (comic books might not be everyone’s cup of tea), she’s not “red-pill” or anything like that, but she writes entertaining stories.
Astrid Lindgren and Tove Jansson were also good authors, but their books are for children (and they were a big part of my childhood).
Margaret Yourcenar
I read a good chunk of esthar villars the manipulated man. It was legit. It reads like a female version “the theory and practice of oligarchical collectivism”
I sort of enjoyed “The Bell Jar” (Plath) and really loved “The Good Earth” (Buck).
Gillian Flynn. She’s very redpill, especially with “Gone Girl.” One of her main reasons for writing that book was to portray a female villain. Not a villain that happens to have a vagina, but a female villain. Her books are also impossible to put down.
true
Both of those women are great but I think you’re stretching the conversation a lot here. This is literary fiction. Those two books are social critique. Different worlds.
Hannah Tinti. Straight storytelling without any ‘female’ this or that. Just a storyteller. At least what I’ve read. I hope she doesn’t change.
Katherine Porter
Dorothy Parker did some good work, actually.
“She also bucks the trend of onanistic writers who can’t imagine what life is like outside their Manhattan cocoons”
Nice!
“Therefore, I’ve decided to practice what I preach and reveal the biggest secret behind this blog: I am the man who used to write as ‘Ferdinand Bardamu.’”
~Matt Forney, in http://mattforney.com/2013/04/21/a-champagne-year-with-sober-months/
The few female novelists I have read have been great at depicting how women actually feel about men. In other words, I once read a book where throughout the novel these female scientists were dismissive of a rather ignorant but aggressive male. In the end though they wound up sucking his dick (literally). There were also very broody but in denial.
Female depictions by male authors can often be very masculine (i.e. in Sci-Fi or Fantasy) and just as physically strong as the men. Ridiculous. Sometimes I think men should get women to write the female parts.
” Sometimes I think men should get women to write the female parts.”
You don’t say.
There is nothing wrong with this article because you were upfront and open about your biases, even the reasons for them.
I actually thought it was refreshing.
The problem starts when some two faced slut goes around banging various reporters and authors and then the incestuous little freaks start promoting each other using their media platforms while pretending to be objective.
Ouch.
“I also know I’m going to catch flak from the permavirgin crowd for praising a woman writer”
Made me laugh. I think the problem is less with permavirginity per se than with men responding emotionally to an invasion of male space, which to me is …. womanly. The cultivation / preservation of male space is a response to its being permanently under attack. In other words it’s a strategic response, albeit one that recognises the inherent value of spaces that remain free from women (other than the bedroom). Beyond the strategic there is no value or virtue in a ‘gender cleansing’ approach. I generally prefer literature by men, but have certainly enjoyed books by women, typically detective novels – detecting male villainy, being an extension of what they do in the ordinary course of the day anyway. I happen to think the manosphere or whatever you want to call it is maturing rapidly. Inevitably that will involve debates about the direction its taking, whether its selling out, what sort of alliances are being made etc. I say this is the right direction….but guardedly so. Ultimately this book is either good or it isn’t
She must be a good writer, she looks crazy. 😀
GenX should have some good writers or well-known writers by now, but perhaps too much is spent on contempt for where it came from and being appalled at where it’s going.
Matt,
I’m assuming this Ann Sterzinger chick gives you one hell of a blowjob….after it’s been in her ass no less. But even then, this spam article is unforgivable. I don’t support team cunt ever… especially financially!
Banned. Disrespect towards writers will not be tolerated.
Youngexecutive deserved to be banned but can you confirm whether or not you ban so swiftly some of the women who have commented on recent articles lately? I have not seen any evidense of that despite it being against this sites rules.
We do our best in the circumstances. Most of us have day jobs and cannot police the comments section with an electron microscope.
Comments that merit quick banning are ones that: gratuitously abuse a writer, or ones that promote overt race-baiting.
People are not banned for differences of opinion. It is obvious when someone crosses the line.
But the authors themselves can troll and write race-baiting articles, yes? Forney gets off on shit-stirring and riling people up. Why not have a word with him instead of gratuitously banning people?
And it begins…. Even ROK has to become PC at some point
Way to sell out…. fag. Writers on here need to be challenged. I can’t help if you don’t like sarcasm or differing opinions.
There is no such thing as a part time fag. You are just moody! You let self admitted feminist trolls run amok, delusional women comment in buckets…. and then you get a wild hair up your ass and ban me. Really? Way to go fag!
The writers of this site need to get a thicker skin if my comment is considered abuse.
They are becoming pigs from animal farm… even changed the about section on ROK like it’s a barn wall. The word sluts is now removed.
This site has turned from ROK to FAG really fast. I guess it’s back to the chateau for me.
no such thing as a writer any more…. much less a musician…. just a lot of dreamers, fakes, sellouts and wannabees…
bah. there’s still good music out there. check out:
dead meadow
god is an astronaut
redshift
autumn’s grey solace (so call me beta, i like them)
Is it really so unreasonable to question whether or not Forney’s endorsement of a female writer on RoK is based on special favours?
Her writing actually does look interesting… but it does kind of beg the question…
He wasn’t questioning anything. He was making an assertion that I feel strongly is loose cannon horseshit.
Who the fuck are you fag? Are you a new?
See unlike you, Clark Kent can read. My sarcastic comment was full of questions…
Wow, did the first-to-die bully from a poorly written teen horror film stumble in here?
Here is your list of deep, philosophical questions:
“I’m assuming this Ann Sterzinger chick gives you one hell of a blowjob….after it’s been in her ass no less. But even then, this spam article is unforgivable. I don’t support team cunt ever… especially financially!”
I know you only speak FAG, but another smart (Clark Kent) reader explained it for you.
“Is it really so unreasonable to question whether or not Forney’s endorsement of a female writer on RoK is based on special favours?”
Got it fag?
Well, you stupid, dipshit motherfucker, let me remind you once again what YOU wrote, pussy:
“I’m assuming”
“this spam article is unforgivable.”
Those aren’t questions, cunt. The only reason Clark Kent tried to repackage the puddle of toxic bile you left here is because he values your ass as a sad replacement for the pussy he can’t get. But I’d never mention that here, because I’m a sophisticated man.
I know that since I didn’t write my comment in FAG that it’s difficult for you to understand. But it’s really very easy to comprehend…
See.
“Is it really so unreasonable to question whether or not Forney’s
endorsement of a female writer on RoK is based on special favours?”
And Clark’s from Canada.
“And Clark’s from Canada.”
Oh, I see, that’s code for he’s on bottom? Sorry. I wish you two the best in your alternative love experiment.
Who is a fan of Alex Jones no less…
Who is?
In other words…. this site is now a fag site… patrolled by a hyper sensitive fag on a power trip. Loose the armor. You don’t deserve it.
I don’t know what it is for sure, but Matt Forney despite his talent sets off my B.S. detector like nobody else here. Although he’s made some important contributions, I smell something foul, the stench of false status, the odor of an invented life. I sense that Forney is willing to do anything to make a buck- he’d beat up his own momma so to speak. Roosh is quite obviously a businessman looking to make a buck out of this whole manosphere thing, but Forney just rubs me the wrong way and I feel dirtier after reading his thoughts even when they are very good thoughts, while I still respect Roosh. I guess I sense that Roosh is genuine and Forney is not.
I don’t know if that is disrespect and will get me banned, but I don’t really care.
there are no pure movements. Variations from ‘tradition’ occur as a movement gets older, and starts to appeal beyond its traditional catchment area. When that happens there will always be some sense that something is changing, is being lost etc. Ultimately its a choice: remain a ‘pure’ traditional voice of the manosphere, or look to the compromises and the wider audiences that may actually make a difference: ultimately everything is about selling a product isn’t it? This isn’t about Matt Forney, its about the price of getting leverage
Forney can help expand the audience base without trolling people.
Stop trying to justify PC faggotry.
ah, the man who shoots from the hip…with an RPG.
Whatever you say PC faggot.
you mean like people who passionately hate ‘team cunt’?
well it certainly got a reaction
Thanks not being such a PC fag.
Stupid remark that deserved the ban. Unless she is a raging feminist and all indicators point that she isn’t, why wouldn’t you buy her book? That’s un-necessary gender hatred which doesn’t help either side.
I don’t get that either. I hate feminism, but love women.
PC fag. You deserve to have your dick banned… since you don’t need it.
“gender hatred”???
You suck a lot of dick don’t ya?
Yeah, I think you’re wrong. I’ve been following her work at Taki’s and started reading one of her novels. So far, she seems highly deserving of praise–if for nothing else than the fact that she’s a woman who doesn’t buy into the air headed “feminism” that nearly every American female writer has. But I think there are many other reasons to give her attention. When trying to create an a truly alternative movement in literature, the appearance of nepotism and petty score settling is inevitable. We’ll see, time will tell, all that… but dismissing all things “team cunt” is really your position? Are you real? Or are you a troll? Because you sound like a caricature that some actual feminist cunt would make up to parody readers of this page.
Taki is a retard. Libertarianism won’t work as long as crony capitalism exists. And you can’t discuss crony capitalism without being “politically offensive”. If she is a serious writer she wouldn’t be on that site.
It’s a huge political tent at Taki’s. You don’t know that, because you just like to talk shit whether you know what you’re talking about or not. The issue of crony capitalism is discussed there, and nothing is considered “politically offensive” at Taki’s.
Let’s see – amongst the most recent postings on Taki’s are articles by Steve Sailer and Pat Buchanan, noted non-confrontationalists. There’s also a recent article entitled “Ezra Levant Takes on the Thought Police” in which “Ezra Levant” makes no mention of those ultimately behind cultural marxism.
I see you’re posting at Prison Planet, the site of noted Zionist shill Alex Jones (he of the jewish wife, jewish sponsorship, the “nazi bogeyman” fable and who is repeatedly called out for his bullshit in the comment section).
So who’s the one talking shit buddy? Enjoy your Purple Pill.
Wow, you’re an even bigger moron than I suspected. Pat Buchanan is a libertarian? REALLY?! Steve Sailor is a non-confrontationalist? You’re an ignorant and pathetic clown.
Then you attack me for posting at a site you don’t respect–and back your position up by referencing… ta da: people who post on that site. Any more dipshit fallacies you want to throw at me? Bring it on, child.
Fuck off with your pills and other cliches. Learn to actually think.
It’s hardly spam if the guy qualifies his connection from the get-go. Feel free to connect your brain and crawl out out of that dark hole.
Being “upfront” does not disqualify something as spam you dumb fuck.
A few days ago I wrote that “maybe its time for an alternative literary prize, based purely on merit and which would be about continuing the canon of the great literature rather than destroying it.”
I think one person thought I meant it would be limited to men, but in fact what I actually had in mind was the exact opposite of the orange prize, now the Bailey’s prize – which was designed to promote women’s literature – something I’ve always thought was derisory – a literary prize just for women. As with any other kind of ‘affirmative action’ all it means is that in future people will write off the winners as wimmin writers. If on the other hand the focus is on merit and values, perhaps some strategic value, then the justice – the evaluation – must be blind so to speak. Otherwise we simply mirror feminism
Yeah they set up all kinds of prizes, funding, university majors for ‘women writers’ then when Wikipedia has the gall to have a ‘women’s writer’s’ category, the feminists shit themselves all over the place. Have your cake and eat it too feminists? By any chance? Simultaneous triumphalism and victimhood—that’s feminism.
“Her name was Kat. I want to stomp on little Kat’s hauntingly beautiful
face. I want to smash her fucking skull in to end all the dismissive
thoughts she now has about me that make a mockery of the spontaneous
poetry that used to come out of her mouth. I won’t tell you what she
said, because I was a shameful fool for believing such rot. Such lying
scum rot. I want to shove her pretty nose back into her brain and crush
her arm bones slowly and tie her to the railroad tracks, to throw her in
the river and heave her in a quarry and strap her to a bomb and fill
her drink with cyanide and giggle as the maggots crawl from the exploded
dead bags of what once were her creamy perfect breasts.”
Clunky, overly long sentences with a lack of poetics. Could use a lesson in minimalism and the narrative voice isn’t very strong (rambling instead of concentrated emotion manifested in poetic devices).
The writing in Slyvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” is a thousand times better than this, and she was better looking to boot.
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02469/SylviaPlath_2469087b.jpg
Yeah, I wasn’t too impressed with that passage either though I respect anyone who reads and gets something out of it for themselves. So in an as uncontentious way as possible, I would say that she’s trying way too hard there. That’s rookie bombast to me. The author’s hand is way too visible in forcing the characterization, thoughts, significance.
Yeah, she’s overcompensating for the lack of depth in characterization by using rambling, overstuffed prose. If she could relate to her character in a more genuine way, the writing would be more effortless and succinct.
But then again, she’s a female trying to write from a male point of view. It’s hard enough to do when an established male writer writes from a female point of view (Carver’s “fat” story is a successful example of this).
God, what a depressingly petty exercise in non-writer English Major Lit Crit. Then again, I guess that’s just how it is nowadays, and everybody’s doing it. I’m starting to realize what Chuck Palahniuk really meant when he said the following:
“There hasn’t been an edgy book, like American Psycho, for decades. People don’t want to be associated with something politically incorrect because the backlash is so immediate online. They play safer because of that.”
I thought Sherzingers Lester was a perfect example of a fate that befall a man without a working compass. Easy sex with someone subpar, and eventually a child comes into equation. Then the girlfriend is just as good as someone bit by a zombie: only a matter of time before they turn and try to devour you…… Financially and psychologically.
So the concept of trying to bang a co-ed is a no brainer.
Lester plays his cards right, he can bust out of a slump. And be rolling ball deep like a pimp in the university.
Many men in that situation to not. Simply because the girl will take him to the cleaners. So essentially, Lester is a wolf with his leg caught in a bear trap. He could gnaw his leg off, accept his fate as a socio financial cripple but be banging college chicks OR keep his leg in the trap and just accept his fate out of fear. As his girlfriend gets fatter….. And bitchier…… And money hungry.
Wait. Jim Goad is leaving Taki? Or just stepping down as editor?
He left the editor’s position several months ago after he was hired by Thought Catalog.
Journey to the End of the Night
My favorite book of all time. A must read for all. I have Ann’s book sitting next to my nightstand. I look forward to reading it after this good article!
Hunger is fantastic. Hamsen’s other stuff maybe less so. The book also influenced paul auster
Paul Auster is pretty good. I found the New York Trilogy a good read. Have not read much else by Auster.
Growth of the Soil is no good?
Actually I didn’t even know he wrote that. I’ll have to check it out. I thought Mysteries was OK but lacked the fire of Hunger. New York Trilogy is great – particularly city of glass. Auster also wrote some essays called the Art of Hunger, where he expounds on writing as ‘process’, an idea he derives from Hunger, which if I recall correctly is partly autobiographical
Yea, let me know what you think of Growth of the Soil. I would agree City of Glass is the best of the bunch. I will have to checkout Art of Hunger. Thanks.
Since you mentioned the Angry Young Men I’ll share this talk by Jonathan Bowden for those who want a more energetic introduction to them, and a general overview of post-war European intellectualism;
[audio src="http://d13y73ntae2fiz.cloudfront.net/radio/Bill_Hopkins.mp3" /]
This article is so inspiring. Thank you so much. I have been writing for many years, to get up to standards.My best friend ( male) tells me- do it.You GOOD.I can tell. But Ive been hampered by WHAT. So lots of trying but no inspiration.
I have been thinking about whats been happening to men, and wondering how I can use my talents to further understanding. Im going to get a copy of this.
Sorry, I’m not really turned on by the theme. I also I’m very skeptical of one gender writing in the voice of the other, after one attempt killed Hunter Thompson.