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

[Mark Kohut]

I'm looking forward to your disagreements if you read any of my
suggestions. I missed most of the great Le Guin and may but yes to all f'in
genre talk as Emily Wison says about the
"epic" classification in her intro to *the Odyssey. *Homer did not know
what an epic *was*, as Philip Roth told Terri Gross as she called him
post-modern. Genre labels reduce and only matter later when some wilfully
write against genre. Not Le Guin, who was just herself.
All literary classification started with Aristotle who played those plays
as they lay naturally and just lifted them a little into abstract
labelings. Like tagging an animal.

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.
> --
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>