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Comment by thebooktocome | Hacker News Reader

The reason you don’t see that style anymore is, more or less, because publishers stopped marketing it in favor of novels that appeal to the lowest common denominator and every passing fad. The English-speaking book world is controlled by four or five massive publishers who are inherently profit-seeking, and only incidentally art-seeking.

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Have you read Piranesi by Susannah Clark (2020)? Categorized as a fantasy novel, but with even the smallest insight, one can see it is not a fantasy novel but a metaphor.

Have an upvote. Great book.

Yes, according to my journal I gave it a three of five. I recall it being a pedestrian (heh) unreliable narrator story driven by a Borges trope setting.

Seconded!

Well, it can't be a fantasy novel, because Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is the only fantasy novel ever written. Everything else is a Tolkien pastiche.

If you like low-reading-level fiction in YA-style (multi-genre—romance, sci-fi, fantasy, fiction), romance, or a couple crime-related genres, there's probably never been a better time to be a reader.

Outside that... it's rather spottier.

I’m not sure about that. The sci-fi and fantasy books I’ve been reading from the past decade are pretty damn solid, or at least plenty of them are. When I was younger I went through the “great novels” in sci-fi—I was even methodically going through the Hugo and Nebula winners at one point—so I think I have a decent point of reference. Quotes around “great novels” because I don’t want to equate greatness with awards.

Literary fiction is really just genre fiction that people pretend is not genre fiction. Kind of like how saying “I’m not into politics” is, itself, political in nature.

But what is the "genre" of literary fiction? It's far too broad compared recognized genres like science fiction. That being said, there is an annoying trend of literary authors writing science fiction books (McCarthy's "The Road", most of Margaret Atwood's books) and they and the literary establishment vocally denying that they are SF because they are Very Serious Works by Important Authors.

> But what is the "genre" of literary fiction? It's far too broad compared recognized genres like science fiction.

How are you measuring “broadness” here?

My experience with literary fiction is that it is as much a genre as sci-fi, mystery, or romance. It has its own clichés, as well as novels that avoid or deconstruct those clichés. The only thing I can think of as being substantially different is the cultural attitudes towards literary fiction, and the curious insistence that some people have that literary fiction is not a genre. I don’t see any justification for calling it “not a genre” other than argument which specifically defines “genre” in a way to exclude literary fiction.

I think if we sat down and tried to come up with a definition of “genre” that includes sci-fi, mystery, romance, and western, but excludes literary fiction, I would find a problem with the definition.

Kazuo Ishiguro won a Nobel for writing an SF novel. Although the New Yorker did try to claim it wasn't SF, I think most of the other reviews accepted it.

Same with music, cinema, theater, and fine art! Yes, fine art, too.

Cinema's doing great. I can't even keep up with the rate of release of likely-to-be-worth-a-watch movies, and I'm pretty sure I watch more movies than the average American.

There is a drought of funding for movies which are not either adaptations of existing IP, or horror movies. If this is your bag, you're in luck. Otherwise, you have somewhat limited viewing options compared to even ten years ago, forget about 30. The original comment was talking about "high brow" fare, remember.

Hahaha, I expected the criticism of my comment to be that too much of what I was counting as good is "high brow", in fact. Too artsy-fartsy. Leaning too much toward "The Green Knight" and not enough toward "Jaws".

[EDIT] Here, lemme just list the 2022 movies that I think were worth a watch if you're at all into the kind of thing they were doing:

    Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    Glass Onion
    Top Gun: Maverick
    Bullet Train
    All Quiet on the Western Front
    Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio
    Crimes of the Future
    Death on the Nile
    Everything Everywhere All at Once
    White Noise
    Nope
    Prey
    The Sadness
    You Won't Be Alone
    Dual
    The Northman
    The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (arguably just a less-exciting RRR, but hey, it makes up for it by also being shorter and non-horror comedy *is* a bit weak lately, so it gets in)
    Watcher
    Dashcam (one of the most interesting movies I've seen in a long time—you may hate it, but you'll feel *something*, damnit!)
    The Banshees of Inisherin

This is just ones I've seen (I usually manage, like, 1/2 of the films in a year that I want to watch, at best) and excluding a few that did in fact suck or that I didn't think quite merited inclusion (e.g. The Menu) or that are good for what they are but are pretty narrow in appeal (Violent Night). Like, I hear Cyrano is great, Emily the Criminal, Bodies Bodies Bodies, The Whale, and a bunch of others, but haven't made it to them yet (and, inevitably, I'll end up never watching some of them).

"Quite a few of those are sequels, remakes, or adaptations! White Noise was a book! Death on the Nile! One of those is a marvel movie!" yeah, I know—good luck finding an era in Hollywood when a ton of the films, and even a ton of the good films, weren't such. I reject that as, specifically, a complaint about this moment in cinema (it has more merit as a criticism of cinema in general)

The funding landscape for movies is radically different, that’s for sure.

We’ve somehow squeezed everything out of the middle. What’s left is the blockbusters at the top (Avatar, Marvel, Star Wars, Jurassic World), the low-budget indie movies at the bottom (within reach for funding by individuals, rather than studios) and in the middle, as far as I can tell, there’s just A24.

A24 is doing really well, but I think we’re missing the pipelines and economic incentives that brought us a bunch of our favorite movies from the 2000s and earlier.

A24 is great, but we’d be in a far healthier place, culturally, if there were ten A24’s funding and developing the next generation of writers, directors, and cinematographers. A little like Hollywood in the pre-war era, for example.

These days to do something original you have to be one of the ten established directors whose movies are proven ROI (e.g., Cameron, Villeneuve) or develop a subculture following (e.g, Peele, GDT). Being randomly struck by lightning works as well, of course (The Daniels).

Yes, exactly. A24 is successful but everyone else has been squeezed out, and there’s a lot less diversity in the middle between blockbusters and independent filmmakers.

My mileage varies, I feel independent cinema is practically non-existent while Marvel, Fast and Furious, Star Wars and other franchise properties are sucking the oxygen out out theaters and streamers.

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