I picked this up at a bookstore in Bangkok because I liked the cover. It ended up being one of the best books I've read all year (out of 53 books read in 2026). If you haven't read it, I recommend it. And if you have read it, I'd like to discuss it. >The large, high-forheaded, sometimes-bearded, forever James Joyce-loving author may enjoy talking about the splendour of smut, but in the Thai garden of letters full of weeds and outgrowth, he's arguably the owner of the most beautiful prose in our contemporary literature. His high-style sentences are often lengthy, elegantly shaky, powered by descriptive lucidity and stately metaphor (the neck of an angry viper is "an arrow stretched to the limit of its bow"). The pages don't usually have many paragraph breaks, or sometimes none. Stylistically, he's a devout apostle of the Western modernists; thematically, he bears the torch of Latin American magical realism as folk belief and spiritual fables find their aesthetic incarnations. Venom, for instance, is the story of a king cobra that coils itself around a crippled boy as the villagers are too steeped in superstition to rescue him.https://www.bangkokpost.com/life/arts-and-entertainment/441081/out-of-the-shadowThe author is well-regarded in Thailand and considered one of their best authors, and I have to say that the translator of The Understory did a bang-up job. The mutual hunt between man and tiger is one of the most vivid scenes I've ever read in literature.
>>25357772I'll fall for a shill post. Sure. Thanks for the rec, anon. Got any others?
>>25357772First of all, thanks for the rec. I'll check it out. Now I have a doubt, how do you keep such minutious track of how many books you've read?
>>25357779I'm shilling for this book but I'm not a paid shill. I checked the website for the publisher of this book, because it's a high quality printing, but most of what they print is just women-centric genderslop. Stories about an Afghani woman poet learning how to milk the european welfare state and becoming empowered in the process, etc.>Got any others?Well now I feel put on the spot, but some other books/novellas/short stories I've recently enjoyed:The Machine Stops by E.M. ForsterBartleby, the Scrivener by MelvilleThe Hair-Carpet Weavers by Andreas EschbachTrafalgar by Angelica Gorodischer
>>25357795I keep track in a spreadsheet. I include reading dates and a brief blurb about my thoughts on the book
>>25357772>>25357797Sounds neat. Not sure he'll be up your alley, but I came across Denis Johnson recently and really enjoyed the novels of his I'd read (now I'm on a collection of his poetry). I started with Train Dreams from him.
>>25358315I actually just read Train Dreams a couple weeks ago, and it totally landed for me. Which other novels of his do you recommend?
>>25357772>sangsuk deep>translated by muh poopooThis jeet shit I shan't read.
>>25357772post an excerpt
>>25358353Besides that one I read>Jesus' Son>Angels>The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories>The Resuscitation of a Hanged Manand foremost I'd probably recommended Angels and Resuscitation. Now I'm reading the Throne of the Third Heaven [etc.], which seems to be a complete collection of his poetry. Enjoying that too, though not to the same degree as his prose.Also just read Middle C by Gass, which was great, though I was already a fan of Gass. Good if you want indulgent prose done well.
>>25357797The only one on that list I've read is the Melville one. Can you talk a little bit about why you enjoyed the others?
>>25357772sounds interesting, is it on AA
>>25359449yes I found both this and the novella 'Venom' by the same author on AA. Venom is quite good too but I liked Understory better.>>25358378This isn't a spoiler, but early on in the book the narrator tells of how he came across his mother being eaten by a tiger when he was a boy:>As I looked up, I saw her graceful arm dangling down, saw her long, comely fingers tensed into a claw, saw her smooth gold ring bouncing light in the declining sun, saw her long, black tresses, saw her face drained of life, and I saw the terror in Mae Duangbulan’s eyes as her body lay on its back, her head hanging down, her mouth frozen agape. Above her body, hovering conspicuously between the fruit-studded branches of the fig tree’s fork, was the enormous face of a tiger, its fangs and teeth covered in blood, its mouth covered in blood, its white whiskers covered in blood and vomit and fanned out into a sneer, its eyes sleepy and serene from satiation.
>>25358475Thanks for the recommendations, I'll check those out. Middle C sounds interesting too, I've never read Gass before.>>25358840The Machine Stops - could be called very early sci-fi or dystopia, it was published in 1909. I've heard that We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is the first dystopia novel, but The Machine Stops has it beat by a decade. Although Forster couldn't have known it, the story reads like an allegory of a society addicted to phones and it feels very relevant to today.The Hair Carpet Weavers - mysterious and epic in scope, it reminded me of Dune. It's a bit of a space opera in terms of the scope of the story (tens of thousands of planets whose primary output is weaving carpets out of human hair. For me it was a page-turner.Trafalgar - it's a series of sci-fi-ish vignettes, related by the narrator as they're told to her by her friend Trafalgar over immense amounts of coffee in cafes in Rosario, Argentina. I don't know if the book itself can be called sci-fi or not, because the reader never knows if Trafalgar is a teller of tall tales or not, and except for Trafalgar, it seems like everyone else's world is extremely grounded in reality. It's almost like SF magical realism. I enjoyed this one immensely. In a similar vein, Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad is also great.
We need more book recommendation threads like this.
>>25361190Agreed, I’d love to see more recommendations of things that aren’t part of the canon or books that everyone has on their list.
>>25357797Have you read picrel? Guy follows a hawk around the English countryside for ~150 pages. It's beautifully, beautifully written. Your recently enjoyed list makes me think you'll like him
>>25362401I have not but thanks for the recommendation, I will check this one out too. I really enjoy these sorts of pastoral ruminations. Another book I recently enjoyed was A Month in the Country by JL Carr
