M. John Harrison Wins Booker Prize for The End of Everything

 M. John Harrison Wins Booker Prize for The End of Everything

    Stunning news today in the world of literary fiction!  The End of Everything, M. John Harrison's late career masterpiece, won the Booker Prize!   Harrison is the first ACTUAL genre science fiction author to win (as supposed to writers of literary fiction like Margrate Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro who dabble in science fiction).  This is a capstone of the fairly recent phenomenon of seeing Atwood/Ishiguro type sci-fi influenced titles making it deep into the content.  See, for example, Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, which featured several what they call science fiction "elements" in a book that was anything but science fiction.

  After my listen to the Audiobook, I went through Harrison's bibliography to look for hints of this particular kind of weird lit influenced sci fi and came up empty, despite over a half century of continuous publication.  It makes this win even more extraordinary, though I can't help the thought that the Booker committee was not particularly familiar with the work of Jeff VanDerMeer or QNTM.  I think, if you've read the Southern Reach series and There is No Antimetrics Division, Harrison's achievement is less extraordinary, though he ALSO brings a Sebaldian sense of place that both VanDerMeer and QNTM lack.  I'm not saying that the Southern Reach series lacks a sense of place, only that it is not a Sebaldian sense of place.

  Really a stunning result for the issues that concern this blog, specifically the intersection of genre fiction and literary fiction. 

The End of Everything(2026) by M. John Harrison

 Audiobook Review

The End of Everything (2026)

by M. John Harrison

  I had my eye on The End of Everything when it made the Booker Longlist.  The Booker has shown an appreciation for sci fi/lit fic crossover that I appreciate, though I don't always love the books they pick.  Most of the writing I've seen about The End of Everything is written from the perspective of a reader of literary fiction, so I've mostly read about being confused about the plot and, what, if anything is actually going on.

  Mostly, The End of Everything seems like a book influenced by Jeff VanDerMeer and his Southern Reach series as well as the internet phenomenon QNTM and his book, There is No Antimetrics Division. I think it is fair to suggest direct influence, since Harrison has been publishing since the late 1960's, and there is little in his prior bibliography that would foreshadow a book as odd as The End of Everything.   There was also an element of Kazuo Ishiguro and his work in The Buried Giant and When We Were Orphans.  These references should give a prospective reader a better sense of what they are in for then "two people wander around a post-apocolyptic southeastern England."  

  A more substantial plot description doesn't help:  Aliens (the iGhetti) have arrived, though no one knows from where or what they want.  They have purposely? accidentally? destroyed human civilization but left humanity behind to cope with the consequences.   At times, the characters behave like they are in a reverse W.G. Sebald book, wandering the described landscape of southeastern England with a nary a coherent thought.

  The End of Everything is basically everything I'm looking for in a book, and kudos to M. John Harrison for coming up with such an interesting shift in tone so late in his career. Readers looking for satisfying conclusions are best steered elsewhere.

The Killing Ground (1982) by Mary Lee Settle

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Killing Ground (1982)

by Mary Lee Settle

Canona, West Virginia

West Virginia: 3/10

 Author Mary Lee Settle is an interesting lady- she won the National Book Award in 1978 for Blood Tie and she helped to found the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1980.  The Killing Ground is the last novel in her blend of historical and family based auto-fiction, The Beulah Quintet.  The five volumes traverse thousands of miles and hundreds of years, from the state sanctioned murder of religious dissenters in 17th century England, through the settling of this corner of West Virginia by white people, to the present of the mid 1970's, when the author stand-in returns home to her coal-mining family to unravel the mystery of what is called in the description of the book the "murder" of her brother, though FWIW what happens to her brother, who dies hitting his head on the metal toilet of the local lock up after getting sucker punched by a drunken hillbilly (and distant relative) is, at best, manslaughter, murder requiring intent. 

  I can't find any discussion of The Killing Ground as auto-fiction but it read that way to me.  An early chapter features the author character describing her previous Beulah Quintet works in front of an audience of locals, and the description she gives of rich kid boho life in the late 50's, early 60's sounds pretty familiar. 

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake (1983) by Breece D’J Pancake

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake (1983) 

by Breece D’J Pancake 

Milton, West Virginia

West Virginia: 2/10

   This is the only book by West Virginia author Breece D'J Pancake (he acquired the apostrophe when a copy editor at The Atlantic made a typographical error and he decided it looked cool that way), who killed himself (or maybe accidentally shot himself while he was drunk.)  He was 27 when he died, putting him in the literary annex to rock and roll's 27 club.  That kind of gives you an idea of the Breece Pancake vibe- bad boys and bad girls skulking around burned out derelict West Virginia river towns.  In one particularly vivid story, a river-rat-tugboat worker staying in a decrepit SRO for New Year's picks up an underage prostitute. beds her and then has to call the cops when he finds her with her wrists slit in an alley behind the only bar in town.  That is the scene, man.   Generally speaking I'm relieved to encounter any book in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America written by a male author who isn't a coastal elite or a professor of lit at a university in some random part of the United States and Pancake here fits the bill.   Dying before he could write a novel, that's the real tragedy here. 

Ply (2026) by Hernan Diaz

 Audiobook Review

Ply (2026)

by Hernan Diaz

   Hernan Diaz returns after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his last novel, Trust (2022). I read Trust in the because it made the Booker prize Longlist.  At the time I said, "I quite enjoyed Trust, though I'm not sure it's a (booker prize) short lister- it might be a National Book Award and/or Pulitzer Nominee- vibe-wise Trust reminds me of Richard Powers- a recent winner and author of a book- Gain, that really reminds me of Trust, in that it attempts to convey an economic narrative in a novel."

  Thus, when I read the negative review in the New York Times calling Ply a dud and specifically calling out his Ballardian cyberpunk future as Dead on Arrival, I wasn't particularly dissuaded.  I got a bump to the top of the Libby borrowing list and blazed through my seven-day rental window at 2.25 speed- faster than I prefer but fine for Ply, which, at 15 hours isn't shockingly long but IS at times tedious.  I largely agree with the New York Times review of Dwight Garner.  Ply, like Trust, again stuck me as resembling the technique of Richard Powers- introducing subject matter from science (here it is physics) and melding that with elements of both genre and literary fiction.  Garner critiques the lack of specificity in Diaz's description of this dystopian future but I think that was a very specific choice by Diaz to keep from alienating his potential audience, he wanted something familiar enough to a literary fiction audience to not be off-putting. 

  I thought the most interesting facet of Ply, and something Garner didn't mention in his review, is the depiction of social life within the dystopian future.  Diaz goes further in describing this part of his world than any other dystopian/literary fiction cross-over that I can remember.   The human relationship at the center of Ply, between a girl electricity thief called "the pincher" and a kooky mad scientist who needs her help, was interesting, to me.  Overall, though, yeah, hard to see an Audience responding to Ply. 

  An independent critical observation I want to lay out in brief is that Diaz depicts a world where living beyond 40 or 50 is unusual.  This appears to be based on a fundamental misapprehension about human demography before modern medicine lowered infant mortality from almost half to essentially zero.   This often takes the form of depicting these times as being almost devoid of old people and having characters muse on how few people live beyond their mid 30's or 40's.  That is not how shit worked.  The fact is that if someone lived beyond year 5, they had a reasonable chance of living to a "normal" old age- 60 or 70, and that there were plenty of old people around back in the day. 

  Not an issue that would bother me normally, but Diaz does include pages and pages of his mad scientist character discussing particle physics, and his mad scientist character is the only human over 50 in the book, and Diaz' Pincher constantly talks about how, as a 20 something, she only has a few more years left before she can expect to die.

The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories (2026) by Ken Liu

 Audiobook Review

The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories (2026)

by Ken Liu

   I'm a Ken Liu fan, if only because my guy doesn't respect high/low genre boundaries and he is committed to putting out work. I'm firmly ANTI the romantic ideal of the artist/visionary who can only produce under the influence of inspiration.  I'd rather take someone who puts out new product on a regular basis, even if that means working in areas that are more product than art.  I also like that Liu, unlike many writers of literary fiction has actually done something in his life besides write and teach. It's a subject that is rarely addressed in the world of literary fiction but screams out every week from the pages of the New York Times Review- for most writers of literary fiction, their biggest real-life achievement is either getting a full-time teaching position or a graduate degree... in creative writing.

  Specifically, I like this work in the field of "hard" science fiction. Regrettably, this collection sees him dabbling in genres like magical realism (the title story) and steampunk.  Part of the issue with this part of Liu's bibliography is that I never read his four-volume set, The Dandelion Dynasty- I just can't with the world-building fantasy. Like any collection of genre short fiction, there are hits and misses.  I thought the best stories in here were the two that had a cosmic point of view.  There is no theme more interesting to me in the realm of hard science fiction as the nature of time. Timekeeper's Symphony- which is just about time with no plot or characters, and Cosmic Spring, about a sentient spaceship living through the end of the universe, were the stand-out stories for me. 

The Hawkline Monster (1974) by Richard Brautigan

 Audiobook Review

The Hawkline Monster (1974)

by Richard Brautigan

       Richard Brautigan's literary career is a real rags-to-riches-to-drinking yourself to death 20th century tale.  Brautigan started out as a Bay Area poet publishing at the end of the 1950's to little critical or commercial acclaim. He struck mass-market and critical success at the exact same time with his back-to-back novels, Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar in 1967 and 1968.  Brautigan was well positioned to capitalize on the aftermath of the summer of love with an already established publishing history (and publisher).  Unfortunately, the zeitgeist moved on and Brautigan, like many of the artists who achieved popular success in the 60's and post-60's era, faced questions of authenticity and relevance, and his commercial success guaranteed that critics would abound.  His two hits set him up, but he never stopped publishing.

   I heard about The Hawkline Monster from a random Instagram account which featured a slide show of alt-westerns.  I was intrigued, and became more intrigued when I saw that someone had made an Audiobook for this 1974 novel for the first time in 2016.  Anyway, I listened to the Audiobook via the Libby library app and I liked that the whole run time was four hours (216 pages long in print).  Listening to the Audiobook, it seemed like maybe history (and certainly contemporary critics) had been a little cruel to Brautigan- I went and read the New York Times review for the print edition and it was kill yourself awful.   I can see a real direct connection between the tail end of the hippy period- which was dismissed, as this novel was dismissed, as silly and inconsequential, and some of the thematic preoccupations of postmodernist, who were already well underway in the mid 1970's. 

  There seems to be a parallel to the way that disco music was written out of the history of electronic music because it wasn't cool, even though it was undoubtedly electronic music. 

Clay's Quilt (2001) by Silas House

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Clay's Quilt (2001)

by Silas House

Free Creek, Kentucky

Kentucky: 14/16

  I actually heard about Silas House before I started reading Clay's Quilt- from my girlfriend who keeps in touch with the Tyler Childers led contemporary music scene- House directed a recent Grammy nominated video of a song by Childers I think Silas House was made the official poet of Kentucky or something like that which is cool because he is LGBT and Kentucky is... Kentucky.  I'd actually have to say that Kentucky seems to me, on the basis of the books from this chapter, maybe the most intellectually interesting place on the map since I left New York.  

   

   Clay's Quilt was House's first novel.   Since then, he's kept up an impressive resume both as an academic, where he is a teacher at Berea College, author (five novels and an equal number of collections of poetry) and public intellectual.   He's won some regional prizes but hasn't really broken out nationally, which I guess is why I hadn't known about him.  He's a good example of why the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project makes sense, introducing the reader to authors they may have missed. 

  Clay's Quilt is about Clay, an orphan child of a West Virginia mountain woman who is murdered by her vengeful ex when Clay is an infant.  I expected the quilt to play a bigger role given the name of the book, but it doesn't really work out that way.  Nor, for that matter, is Clay's Quilt about LGBT issues. Rather, it tells the story of Clay, a happy-go-lucky coal miner, who meets and marries a woman who plays a mean fiddle and has a nasty ex-husband.  

The Marrowbone Marble Company (2010) by Glenn Taylor

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Marrowbone Marble Company (2010)

by Glenn Taylor

Huntington, West Virginia

West Virginia: 1/10

    Of all the state thus far in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, West Virginia is a tie for last place in terms of my personal encounters with the state (Alongside Delaware (train ride through only), North Carolina (drove through only), South Carolina (no contact), Alabama (no contact), Kentucky (no contact) and Florida (flight lay over only).  The closest I've ever come was in college, when some friends of mine went to a college football game in West Virginia (driving from Washington DC.) They described a wild time, but it sounded like a pretty standard "big game" in a college town atmosphere to my college self. 

    These days, the only thing West Viriginia is likely to evoke in the national psyche is the lyric from the John Denver song, coal mining and opiate addiction.  Culturally, I'm expecting lots of continuity with the Kentucky chapter and The Marrowbone Marble Company seemed like a book that could have just as easily been set in Kentucky as it was in West Virginia.   I enjoyed the ambition of this book and author Glenn Taylor, about a man who comes back from World War II with questions about the unspoken rules of West Virginia life.  He marries the spinster-adjascent daughter of the owner of the glass factory where he works (Taylor uses the phrase "glass man" about a million times in the 300 pages of this book), reconciles with his long-lost hillbilly relatives who resides in a holler, and goes about building a marble factory.  I'm talking children's marbles here- which is something I didn't fully grasp until I was actually reading the book- I thought it was going to be some kind of quarry operation.

  Conflict comes from the judgments of "outsiders" who dislike the racially mixed, communal aspects of the protagonists' vision. There is also support, and Taylor does a good job situating the action in the national tide of integrationist activity in the1960's.   Certainly, The Marrobone Marble Company made a welcome respite from the standard sad, realist -girl/woman fare centered of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.

Wolf Worm (2026) by T. Kingfisher

 Audiobook Review

Wolf Worm (2026)

by T. Kingfisher

  The 1,001 Novels: A Library of America has me thinking a lot about regional American literature and fiction.   And about genre, and the relationship of genre fiction to literature, the border between those two subjects, and the relationship between that border and the geography/location/psychogeography of books. Clearly, the more specific the place of a work, the more likely that will move away from the world of genre fiction and towards the world of literature.  The presence of place-based details in a plot is a characteristic of literary fiction and less important in genre fiction, where the plot itself always assumes primacy.

  I was thinking about those things as I listened to the Audiobook of Wolf Worm, a work of regional horror (North Carolina woods) set in 1899.   Author T. Kingfisher is a pseudonym for children's author (and webcomic creator) Ursula Vernon.  I can see where she wouldn't want her diehard fans picking up this book, about parasites and the people who study parasites, being picked up by a 13-year-old fan because...yikes.  

  I found Wolf Worm pretty slow through the first two Acts- it's basically a straight up work of historical fiction about a young woman who agrees to be an illustrator for a reclusive entomologist who studies bugs with an emphasis on parasites in the woods of North Carolina.   Things get weird in the third act when the protagonist finds a hidden shed on the property, and of course, she can't leave well enough alone.