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Getsuya posted:What kind of kidlit are you looking for? I read a lot since I’m trying to write in that market. Most modern stuff I’ve read is great. It’s actually a really amazing market these days full of diverse authors. Getsuya posted:Ahh sadly you’re not going to find any modern kidlit written like pre-1950s books so I can’t really think of anything to recommend. The stuff you mentioned (a good kidlit voice and good pacing) is standard these days. Sounds like you should just stick to old stuff.
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May 12, 2020 01:10
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Sham bam bamina! posted:These posts are depressing. Very. Where's the thread for snobs who hate mass market lit I thought this was it?
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May 12, 2020 01:11
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Amethyst, you might want to look into Walter Moers.
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May 12, 2020 01:13
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Try Serafina and the Black Cloak. I don’t know how interested you are in non-fantasy but The Candymakers is the new Holes and it’s good. Green Glass House is good too. If you’re okay with horror try Lockwood and Co If any of those end up working out let me know and I can use those as a base for some more. Fake edit: oh and if you have any interest in superheroes the Squirrel Girl novels are great.
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May 12, 2020 01:14
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Looks cool, thanks. Roald Dahl books have been good. He puts in poems and actually makes jokes. Modern "kidlit" seems completely devoid of humor.
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May 12, 2020 01:15
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There's always the Shel Silverstein books
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May 12, 2020 01:17
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Amethyst posted:Roald Dahl books have been good. He puts in poems and actually makes jokes. Modern "kidlit" seems completely devoid of humor.
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May 12, 2020 01:17
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Amethyst posted:Looks cool, thanks. I haven’t found this to be the case. Throw The Mysterious Benedict Society on the recommendation pile. Edit: I should start a thread titled ‘Quit Trying to be a loving Adult and Enjoy Good Kidlit’ Getsuya fucked around with this message at 01:25 on May 12, 2020 |
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May 12, 2020 01:21
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Getsuya posted:Kidlit
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May 12, 2020 01:49
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That thread exists, by the way, but I feel that it would probably have the same reaction.
Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 01:55 on May 12, 2020 |
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May 12, 2020 01:51
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According to courtesy books, chaucer was read to children in the 15th century. So read your child the miller's tale
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May 12, 2020 03:21
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Getsuya posted:Edit: Also I don't know if these phrases were actually coined in this translation of this particular book but if they were it's fun knowing where 'by Jove' and 'bite the dust' came from. no dude none of them were coined with whatever translation you're reading, also loosen your death grip on the "character arc" concept J_RBG posted:According to courtesy books, chaucer was read to children in the 15th century. So read your child the miller's tale the knight's if you want to put them to sleep
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May 12, 2020 04:17
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I mean I'm not married to it but as a true newb of literature open to learning how to approach this beast may I ask why? I would assume any dynamic character has some kind of change over the course of a work that could be described as an 'arc'.
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May 12, 2020 04:33
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Gulliver's Travels?
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May 12, 2020 04:36
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Getsuya posted:I mean I'm not married to it but as a true newb of literature open to learning how to approach this beast may I ask why? I would assume any dynamic character has some kind of change over the course of a work that could be described as an 'arc'.
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May 12, 2020 04:40
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THis conversation reminded me of this cool passage from a blog post I read recentlyquote:Books for children tend to be free of all the tedious conventions of the bourgeois novel. They’ve inherited the legacy of the myth, the epic, and the tale. As Walter Benjamin pointed out, psychological realism will never come as close to the meat of human subjectivity as a good, radically indeterminate fairy-tale metaphor. See how he rails against ‘the dreadful cobbling-together of disparate elements that loosely make for characters in novels of an inferior sort,’ thrown together with ‘the repulsive crust of the psychologically palpable completing the mannequin.’ Children’s stories, and tales more generally, knew how to present things ‘dry, so to speak, drained of all psychological motivation,’ and ‘they lost nothing as a result.’ That second bit about how modern children's literature is just YA literature really hit home for me, and was the reason I came in here asking for recs.
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May 12, 2020 04:43
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That post is behind the times. What you want is Middle Grade. Middle Grade is the market between chapter books (which comes after picture books) and YA. I called it kidlit because not everyone knows what I mean if I say middle grade, but if you search for middle grade you’ll see that children’s lit is thriving and full of really great stuff. There’s a freedom and wonder you’ll find in MG that can’t be found in other markets. YA and adult fiction is full of cynicism and irony. MG doesn’t have any of that. It’s a market for pure adventure and feeling.
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May 12, 2020 04:50
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God, shut up.
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May 12, 2020 04:50
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Amethyst posted:THis conversation reminded me of this cool passage from a blog post I read recently Literally read a blog post by the same person this evening. I didn't read the post you quoted, but another one and the Mfalé thing stuck out. The one I read was about "adult" fiction. quote:All this is particularly strange when you consider that “Cat Person” was written in a very particular ritual dialect called Mfalé, which emerged out of the temple complexes in Norwich and Iowa City, and is short for MFA Literary English. But the thing about Mfalé is that it tries to make itself invisible: it’s the style of no style; simple, unadorned, correct realist writing. This is how it became a vernacular; this is why Mfalé literature is so easily read as something other than literature. But for all that, it’s still a set of conventions, as basically artificial as any other. Edit: It might as well have come from this thread with the reference to dragons. https://samkriss.com/2019/05/22/how-to-disdain-your-dragon/
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May 12, 2020 04:53
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Getsuya posted:That post is behind the times. What you want is Middle Grade. Middle Grade is the market between chapter books (which comes after picture books) and YA. I called it kidlit because not everyone knows what I mean if I say middle grade, but if you search for middle grade you’ll see that children’s lit is thriving and full of really great stuff. There’s a freedom and wonder you’ll find in MG that can’t be found in other markets. YA and adult fiction is full of cynicism and irony. MG doesn’t have any of that. It’s a market for pure adventure and feeling. Age appropriate reading is the worst thing you can throw at a child. Pin them to the kid's section until they bother the librarian enough to get a card for the adult section.
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May 12, 2020 04:55
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Getsuya posted:That post is behind the times. What you want is Middle Grade. Middle Grade is the market between chapter books (which comes after picture books) and YA. I called it kidlit because not everyone knows what I mean if I say middle grade, but if you search for middle grade you’ll see that children’s lit is thriving and full of really great stuff. There’s a freedom and wonder you’ll find in MG that can’t be found in other markets. YA and adult fiction is full of cynicism and irony. MG doesn’t have any of that. It’s a market for pure adventure and feeling. I think the freedom and wonder is limited when you organize your stories into blocks with names like "middle grade" as if they are car tyres.
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May 12, 2020 04:58
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Mrenda posted:Literally read a blog post by the same person this evening. I didn't read the post you quoted, but another one and the Mfalé thing stuck out. The one I read was about "adult" fiction. He's very good. RIP dead ken
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May 12, 2020 04:59
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Amethyst posted:I think the freedom and wonder is limited when you organize your stories into blocks with names like "middle grade" as if they are car tyres. —Not Patrick Bateman
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May 12, 2020 05:00
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Getsuya posted:I mean I'm not married to it but as a true newb of literature open to learning how to approach this beast may I ask why? I would assume any dynamic character has some kind of change over the course of a work that could be described as an 'arc'. This is a tautology; of course a dynamic character changes. Also you should finish the poem before you discuss it like this.
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May 12, 2020 06:52
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Getsuya posted:I mean I'm not married to it but as a true newb of literature open to learning how to approach this beast may I ask why? I would assume any dynamic character has some kind of change over the course of a work that could be described as an 'arc'. The Iliad is a three thousand year old epic poem, and approaching it by looking at things that all narratives in general are thought to share is not massively helpful. It's very different from almost everything else ever written. Achilles has an arc but he, like all of the Greeks, is a robotic monster whose story doesn't really provide a "payoff" for the whole work. It's a composite work of key historical and religious significance, the beauty is in the details
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May 12, 2020 08:13
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Apparently Lampie by Annet Schaap is really good, recent children's literature OP
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May 12, 2020 08:58
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Getsuya posted:I mean I'm not married to it but as a true newb of literature open to learning how to approach this beast may I ask why? I would assume any dynamic character has some kind of change over the course of a work that could be described as an 'arc'. the concept of character arcs is relatively recent and is only a convention of certain types of fiction. for example, one of the main features of the picaresque is that the characters don't generally change much over the course of the work, they remain static. lots of modernist fiction doesn't have strict arcs in the sense you're talking about either, probably because it also doesn't have much of an emphasis on plot. A human heart fucked around with this message at 12:59 on May 12, 2020 |
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May 12, 2020 12:55
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It is in fact an especially irrelevant notion in epic poetry, where characters are inexorably driven by their essential nature towards their triumph or, more frequently, destruction. Indicating the (unchanging) essence of the characters, peoples, gods, etc. is one of the most important uses of epithets in the form
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May 12, 2020 13:35
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lost in postation posted:It is in fact an especially irrelevant notion in epic poetry, where characters are inexorably driven by their essential nature towards their triumph or, more frequently, destruction. Indicating the (unchanging) essence of the characters, peoples, gods, etc. is one of the most important uses of epithets in the form yeah I recalled them being more archetypes than people but its been a long time since I last read it
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May 12, 2020 15:27
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Clanging my pot and yelling at you all to read Erich Auerbach's Mimesis again:quote:...nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed. With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even passion does not disturb, Homer's personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others, they speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it. Much that is terrible takes place in the Homeric poems, but it seldom takes place wordlessly ... their relationships––their temporal, local, causal, final, consecutive, comparative, concessive, antithetical, and conditional limitations––are brought to light in perfect fullness; so that a continuous rhythmic procession of phenomena passes by, and never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths.
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May 12, 2020 17:35
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speaking of really dumb ways to read Homer https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/3-lessons-from-homers-odyssey/
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May 12, 2020 20:06
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I love opening every book I find so I can look for coaching talking points and lifehacks
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May 12, 2020 20:07
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that url is triggering me jesus christ
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May 12, 2020 20:42
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I have no idea what the thread has been talking about the last few pages but I am positive I hate it
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May 12, 2020 21:02
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TOPIC SWERV i am reading The Part About Amalfitano and now i want to hang a book on a wire off my deck
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May 12, 2020 21:05
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ulvir posted:speaking of really dumb ways to read Homer https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/3-lessons-from-homers-odyssey/ Ancient Greeks practised "manly hospitality" you say?
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May 12, 2020 23:40
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Tbh it's very funny to imagine subliterate "traditionalists" suffering through a lovely 19th c. translation of the Anabasis or whatever so they can extract self-help lessons about masculinity
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May 12, 2020 23:43
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My children's literature hot take: every kid should read The Phantom Tollbooth. If they already have, they should read it again.
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May 13, 2020 07:14
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forgive the vice link but this book is good and you should read it. feels like it was ahead of the curve in how it deploys fragmented semi-hallucinatory dreamlike dispatches, very prescient in predicting the information hyperloop we find ourselves in today https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/5gkn8a/underappreciated-masterpieces-mary-robisons-why-did-i-ever-010
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May 13, 2020 20:04
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gh0stpinballa posted:forgive the vice link but this book is good and you should read it. feels like it was ahead of the curve in how it deploys fragmented semi-hallucinatory dreamlike dispatches, very prescient in predicting the information hyperloop we find ourselves in today This sounds cool and it did remind me of something I thought this thread could answer. 21st century literature by women. Who are the top names/works? maybe it's a dumb question but I rarely see woman writers mentioned by the literati in the last twenty years. I'm probably out of the loop in general though
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May 13, 2020 20:29
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