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The Novelist: A Novel

by Jordan Castro

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661402,679 (3)1
Brisk and shockingly witty, exuberantly scatological as well as deeply wise, The Novelist is a delight. Jordan Castro is a rare new talent: an author highly attuned to the traditions he is working within while also offering a refreshingly fun sendup of life beset by the endless scroll. --Mary South, author of You Will Never Be Forgotten In Jordan Castro's inventive, funny, and surprisingly tender first novel, we follow a young man over the course of a single morning as he tries and fails to write an autobiographical novel, finding himself instead drawn into the infinite spaces of Twitter, quotidian rituals, and his own mind.   The act of making coffee prompts a reflection on the limits of self-knowledge; an editor's embarrassing tweet sparks rage at the literary establishment; a meditation on first person versus third examines choice and action; an Instagram post about the ethics of having children triggers mimetic rivalry; the act of doing the dishes is at once ordinary and profound: one of the many small commitments that make up a life of stability.   The Novelist: A Novel pays tribute to Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine and Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters, but in the end is a wholly original novel about language and consciousness, the internet and social media, and addiction and recovery.… (more)
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I don't care how much dark money Random House is giving to Anna Khachiyan to signal otherwise, alt lit isn't coming back and we're all better off for it. The book is a monologue about Twitter,"scene politics," and the nature of millennial narcissism in the social media age, interrupted by an eternal digression about shitting and emailing Tao Lin. It begs the reader to understand it as "Bernhardian" but it's not repetitive or demanding or rewarding enough to accomplish that. If you, a major publisher struggling to understand what 25-year-olds are up to these days, want to shoot for the "premature internet nostalgia" market, why not just make a bound copy containing every surviving Hipster Runoff post, supplement the posts with critical essays, and call it a day? You're not making the internet better, you're just making books worse.
  slimeboy | Jan 3, 2023 |
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Brisk and shockingly witty, exuberantly scatological as well as deeply wise, The Novelist is a delight. Jordan Castro is a rare new talent: an author highly attuned to the traditions he is working within while also offering a refreshingly fun sendup of life beset by the endless scroll. --Mary South, author of You Will Never Be Forgotten In Jordan Castro's inventive, funny, and surprisingly tender first novel, we follow a young man over the course of a single morning as he tries and fails to write an autobiographical novel, finding himself instead drawn into the infinite spaces of Twitter, quotidian rituals, and his own mind.   The act of making coffee prompts a reflection on the limits of self-knowledge; an editor's embarrassing tweet sparks rage at the literary establishment; a meditation on first person versus third examines choice and action; an Instagram post about the ethics of having children triggers mimetic rivalry; the act of doing the dishes is at once ordinary and profound: one of the many small commitments that make up a life of stability.   The Novelist: A Novel pays tribute to Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine and Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters, but in the end is a wholly original novel about language and consciousness, the internet and social media, and addiction and recovery.

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