Favorite fiction of the year so far and request for recommendations.

[Mark Kohut]

if Jane Austen were a Marxist, she might be Sally Rooney, who is, and whose
styleless style and wealth of observation of people in the world is
worth it, I say.

On Sat, Oct 9, 2021 at 8:26 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

>  I just recently went on a binge of stories and novels from Ursula
> Leguin’s extensive Hainish Sci-Fi/galactic anthropology works. What a
> pleasure. There is a collection by Library of America called Hainish Novels
> & Stories Volume 2, which I supplemented with The Dispossessed I was wowed
> to the core by her ability to imagine credible human cultures of tremendous
> diversity and an equal diversity of cultural interactions. Few give more
> thought to the worlds created while bringing us into a complexity of inner
> life and outer experience we easily recognize as our own human dilemmas and
> pleasures.  I felt my imagination being opened , challenged, expanded and
> cleansed and wished I could have thanked her.
>   There is a quote on the back of the book by Zadie Smith saying” Genre
> cannot contain Ursula Leguin: she is a genre in herself."
>
> Looking around for some contemporary reading. Suggestions? Doerr’s Cuckoo
> Land? Whitehead's  Harlem Shuffle?  So much new work, so little to go on.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>