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Also... sexuality is handled with the delicacy of gonzo porn. 'Such opportune timing Mr. Graves...', essentially elbowing the reader in the ribs. The constant references to her thin legs and black lace underwear, the catchings of oneself in the mirror. These passages in particular came across as...

Ben Lerner certainly. I thought of Lin too when I read it, but there was something in Lin, a vibrant grey. Whereas LaCava's prose just feels lacklustre and careless and if it doesn't feel like that it feels smug. Also - the premise of the book takes a backseat, so much of the foci are around the...

Have you picked up the Carole Angier biography Speak, SIlence: In Search of W. G. Sebald? It's fascinating but clunky. Sebald's home town, particularly at that time, and his peers'—writers, artists, etc— progressive, class of 68 reaction to that atmosphere are evoked well. The forensic analysis...

This Is Memorial Device is chock full of stories within stories, all 2nd or 3rd hand rumour, legend and hearsay.

Christopher Priest! A few of his novels play with dream narratives, imagined worlds. Particularly The Affirmation. Insidious novel. D.M Thomas's The White Hotel too. These are not clearly mise en abyme or hypodiegetic a la 'and I met a man who said "when I was a boy I..."' The border, the...

W.G Sebald goes through a few layers too.

A narrative within a narrative. Many horror stories are stories told to a character. A man (and it is often a man in classic horror) finds an old acquaintance... 'and this is what he told me'.... then the story takes up the bulk of the book. Stepping through the narrative frames, being informed...

Hypodiegesis is a horror trope.... think Frankenstein etc

Place down the road from me is full of Fitzcarraldo Editions. I'll keep an eye out for this. Support the local :) Picked up Mario Vargas Llosa's Death in the Andes last night. Recommended up thread.

LaCava's I Fear My Pain Interests You did not get much better. The narrator, Margot, is uninteresting, uninterested in her own life, and cool with those around her. The french word ressasser is used 4, maybe 5, times. It felt pretentious and lazy. She fakes a bad essay to avoid going to Brown...

There's always been an element of heavy simplification in Curtis' work. Definite articles 'the managers', 'the bankers', etc... But, having watched the first episode last night, the move to remove commentary has only emphasised this aspect. I think the reductionism is more forgivable when parsed...

@catalog - you should give Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe a read. I finished it a while back and the question of monsters—and how complicit we are in their development—has haunted me since I put it down. It is a novel with superb voice, but it's also a very resonant exploration of society's...

In the sense that rewarding physical activity is useful for keeping an animal moving to find foods, mix the gene pool, etc. Today, these are not reliant on physical movement because food is so available (in most of the world, certainly the 'west') - and because of that surplus physical activity...

I can hear a sniffly Slovenian invoking 'lack'. I can also see that ultra violent 80s satire novel being brought up. But facetiousness aside... this is one of Hari's arguments... that addition forms in a vacuum, a poverty where other needs are not met. I've not seen season 2 of Industry. I...

A nice run or swim is probably one of the few things that helped survival and still helps survival.

I don't think it requires the intervention of something like 'social' media to render our reward neurology useless for survival. It's been useless for survival for a long time. Our wants were outdated long before the silicon chip. See sugar etc. What's interesting is how business continues to...

Okay. I didn't mean well-being in a psychological sense at all. I meant it more as being healthy and functioning well enough to survive. Pandering to out-dated reward protocols doesn't help with that. OCD works along a reward protocol of positive reinforcement (like phobia cultivation) but it...

Could you expand?

There is a sniffy slovenian take. Rewards are arbitrary - coke, sex, praise, it doesn't matter. But why are we burdened with a reward neuro-protocol that puts reward first and our own well-being second? Pre-programmed self destruct. Death haunts pleasure. Reward is addictive, but not all...