Short Little Difficult Books
4 days ago
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- #literature
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- László Krasznahorkai's Nobel Prize win sparked debates about 'difficult literature'.
- Difficult books offer unique aesthetic experiences and different types of stories.
- Short and difficult books provide a manageable yet challenging reading experience.
- Georges Perec's 'The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise' is a single-sentence novel inspired by computer logic.
- Oulipian literature uses constraints to create new forms, like Perec's 'A Void' (written without the letter 'e').
- Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' consists of 55 descriptions of imagined cities with no traditional plot.
- Alejandro Zambra's 'Multiple Choice' is structured as a standardized test.
- Olga Ravn's 'The Employees' is written as employee interview transcripts on a spaceship.
- Thomas Bernhard's 'The Loser' is a short, dense novel of misanthropic monologues.
- Toni Morrison's 'Sula' is a lyrical, brief novel that challenges readers with its prose.
- Cormac McCarthy's 'Child of God' is a short, dense introduction to his maximalist style.
- Surreal and elliptical storytelling in books like Juan Rulfo's 'Pedro Páramo' and Kafka's 'The Trial'.
- Short books with difficult subject matter, like Yukio Mishima's 'Patriotism'.