Those who read her books, what are your honest thoughts on them? I know her works are famous for being foidshit , still that doesn't mean they aren't well written.

!bookworms

Chapter excerpt at the Paris Review

Last week a new memoir with the simple title of Molly got a five-star review in the Telegraph and a rave in the Los Angeles Times. Unusually for a literary memoir published by a small press, Molly also got the aggregation treatment from the New York Post and the British tabloid the Daily Mail. “Famous poet Molly Brodak had a secret life as a ‘serial cheater' who had affair with a student days after her wedding to author husband—and he only found out while preparing slideshow for her funeral after her suicide,” went the typically bloated, tell-it-all Mail headline.

...

I get why postmortem publication of these kinds of secrets might give some people pause, but the book is so vital, so full of force, it's a memorial most people would be happy to leave behind—the “bad” parts included. Molly guts the cliché description of someone with mental illness—“She was troubled”—right down its belly, showing exactly how that trouble presented, its sound and smell and taste, how it grew and receded and grew, how it left Molly profoundly isolated from her family, her friends, her husband, everything she loved. (“She seemed more alone than anyone I had ever met,” Butler writes.) It doesn't pretend to know anything definitive about Molly at all—not-knowing is, in fact, part of its point. Butler is shattered at how he never really knew her. But he nonetheless describes her mind, and her ways of being, with such devoted attention that the book feels almost worshipful.

But soon after her death, Butler discovered that his wife had hooked up with one of her students just weeks after their wedding.

He was looking through her phone for photos to include in a slideshow at her funeral. That's when he learned she had cheated on him with numerous men.

He found troves of photos of her posing in lingerie and with s*x toys, along with videos of her pleasuring herself and saying the names of other men in a baby voice

archive link for poorcels

I've noticed more and more traditionally published fiction with "content warnings" at the start, especially those "romcoms" with cartoon pastel covers and titles like "Felicity Sloane Shits Her Pants." Fair enough, if you don't want to be challenged in any way whatsoever you might as well know when a book contains triggers such as ableism, albinism, or parental neglect (discussed).

I wrote a r*pe scene of my main character years ago. I've read it again today and it still works. It actually makes me cry reading it but it's necessary to the story.

This scene, honestly, no one sees it coming. None of the supporting characters or the main one. I don't know how I would put a trigger warning on it. How do you prepare the reader for this?

However, this OP sounds like she's writing something a little more literary. Anyone who reads "serious" fiction knows part of the experience is hitting the completely unforeshadowed incestuous r*pe scene on page 284 right when you were about to recommend the book to a normal human being.

The comments at least tell the OP not to drop a trigger warning in the middle of the text, but most seem to favor one at the beginning.

Any good author who cares about their readers will include a trigger warning for this subject matter. I've even seen authors include resources for survivors at the end of their books.

I didn't know what to do about getting r*ped until I hit the end of the self-published Kindle erotica.

The one thing I will say is make 100% your SA is not used as a plot device.

Instead, make sure that it serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever and could be cut without changing anything.

I'm always a little unclear on what people mean when they use "plot device" as a pejorative. What elevates something (assuming that's what you're recommending) beyond a plot device?

Conspicuously unanswered. Writoids eventually start to forget that their characters aren't real and things happen to them for plot or thematic reasons, then bully each other for killing off the MC's wife's boyfriend "unnecessarily"

Do trigger warnings actually work, genuinely asking

It's a curteous thing to provide for readers. It shows integrity. If someone is unable to handle reading something that graphic, they're going to stop reading when they get to that scene anyway. We don't want to waste someone's time just because we want people to read our book.

As a writer it's important that as few people risk engaging with my book as possible.

So many authors forget the second and by far most valuable person in the equation: the fricking reader. If I read a scene that feels anything short of transcendental which overwrites the gratuitous emotional cheapshots at deep topics (domestic violence, self harm, sexual assault, etc) it feels like a cheap gimmick to make me feel more than I'm actually reading. It's lazy writing or clumsy at best.

And don't even get me started on the dog dying!

I'm struggling to imagine a context where a blanket content warning before a work could possibly cause undue artistic harm to the work itself. State mandated ratings systems exist in a variety of media formats from video games to movies to TV and I've never once heard a critic in those fields voice discontent that those content warnings spoil events.

MPAA ratings are just state-mandated trigger warnings

Lots of books have an author's note at the front with a content advisory. Some authors also have a page on their website with that information, and include the URL in the book. For example, here is the author's content warnings page for the novel Wilder Girls.

(The animals are not pupperinos.)

Not a fan of TW in general, but I can appreciate this approach. Don't put actual warnings in the book where somebody who doesn't want to see them will stumble on them, but put in a URL (or maybe even just point them to a page at the end of the book or something) and say "yo, if you're interested in TW go here" (-99 )

literally no one should be bothered by a content warning. if you're upset that there's a content warning, you have other problems you need to deal with

if a content warning is a spoiler, people have a right to be upset because it ruins the reading experience especially in genres like horror or thriller or crime. Not to mention that at this point, some people require ridiculous warnings for things like spiders, etc. Get real. Not to mention that actual triggers look different for everyone, for many people their trauma isn't triggered by description of something but other things such as scents, locations, etc. There's a huge debate in psychology about trigger warnings and whether they actually work or if they have a negative impact on healing.

saying "content warning: x theme, y theme, z theme" is not a spoiler. it's not like they're saying "content warning: character A does x thing and readers may be uncomfortable because of that."

also what's more important: mental health or a single event in a story

I get that there's such thing as doing a scene for lazy shock value. But honestly doing a "TW: SA " makes it look like you think the scene is just for lazy shock value and isn't a necessary part of the story. Do the scene or cut it. There might be cases where people would create informal resources for avoiding certain sensitive topics, but it shouldn't be writoids themselves preemptively deciding to spoil every mildly upsetting thing that happens in their entire book on the off-chance that someone might drag them on Twitter.

!writecel !bookworms How did you feel when you hit the incestuous r*pe scene on page 284?

OP posts a longpost but it basically says "you should read books if you want to write".

Post is fairly new, but 9/10 of top-level comments are YOU DONT NEED TO READ TO WRITE WHAT IF SOMEONE CANT AFFORD BOOKS

Not summarising

BTW guys did you know that Starship Troopers was a very subtle and ingenious deconstruction of fascism? I bet you didn't, it's so subtle only a real scholar could pick up on it (you should watch my 12 hour video essay to fully grasp it). The author was actually laughing at the likes of you!

To discuss chapters XVI-XIX of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

!bookworms

Next week discussion will cover chapters XX-XXIII, I'm currently 100 pages behind as I'm procrastinating too much at home after arriving from work, hope you guys are enjoying it.

Out of the Silent Planet is an early space adventure story that happens to be set in a Christian(ish) universe. The sequel, Perelandra, is a polemical religious fiction book that happens to be set on the planet Venus.

Venus is an oceanic planet with an ever-shifting archipelago of floating islands made of plants, which exists in a pre-Fall state. Ransom meets a sweet but extremely naive Eve-like figure referred to as the Queen (who is naked and green and has big titties but IT'S NOT SEXUAL, OKAY?). But when the devil's agent shows up to tempt the Queen into breaking a seemingly nonsensical divine command, Ransom must do whatever it takes to save her from humanity's fate. And sometimes, an argument just isn't enough...

While Perelandra is well-written, I ended up missing the varied world, crazy alien creatures, and sense of adventure of the first volume when the second book became straight up Bible fanfic. It's closer to something like "The Screwtape Letters" or "The Great Divorce" than anything else. Lewis is good at writing debates and mental action while retaining a sense of humor. But I can't help but thinking more Christoid artists should create general interest stories that just reflect their worldview, instead of tossing themselves into the ghetto of religious fiction.

A couple fun quotes:

Lewis guest posts on @sirpingsalot's blog

The energy of hating, never before felt without some guilt, without some dim knowledge that he was failing fully to distinguish the sinner from the sin, rose into his arms and legs till he felt that they were pillars of burning blood. What was before him appeared no longer a creature of corrupted will. It was corruption itself to which will was attached only as an instrument. Ages ago it had been a person: but the ruins of personality now survived in it only as weapons at the disposal of a furious self-exiled negation. It is perhaps difficult to understand why this filled Ransom not with horror but with a kind of joy. The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for. As a boy with an ax rejoices on finding a tree, or a boy with a box of colored chalks rejoices on finding a pile of perfectly white paper, so he rejoiced in the perfect congruity between his emotion and its object.

Lewis btfos transphobes decades before you were born

Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than s*x. S*x is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female s*x is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity. All this Ransom saw, as it were, with his own eyes. The two white creatures were sexless. But he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female).

!bookworms !christians

Bottom text

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.

!bookworms

I have a decent backlog of things that don't particularly interest me should be read so you can look down on people who haven't read them and scoff at how they aren't even familiar with the classics. It's time to start ticking more off of that list and none of them sound particularly enjoyable, so I'm crowdsourcing this to !bookworms and other homosexuals.

What first? This is by no means an exhaustive list but I've narrowed it down to what seems least unappealing.

In case you're r-slurred, context is: in 2016ish, the New Yorker published "Cat Person", a short story, and it went viral which is weird for literary fiction. It was about a college student who meets a slightly older guy, texts him a bunch, and then when they actually meet up and bang he's kind of disappointing and awkward. That's about it. I cannot emphasise how viral this story went, if you somehow missed it, and how abnormal it is for short stories to be so famous.

In 2021, some New Yorker literary person writes the linked article in Slate, in which she claims the author of Cat Person somehow ripped off her literal life. She describes how, when she was younger, she dated a much older guy exactly like the character in the short story (although she goes to great pains to establish that he wasn't as pathetic as the character was), and when the story came out she was sure the author -- whom she does not know but has some vague second-hand connection to via a college course -- has ripped off her life. Some of the details are very specific but the story is changed enough that there's reasonable doubt, and she lets it go for a few years until the dude she used to date kills himself.

She makes a big show of the mystery of how the writer knew this story about her to rip it off like this, when it turns out the writer simply knew the guy and had been in contact with him.

The Slate writer manages to finagle an apology out of the author, but she only half-hearted and passively apologises. Twitter drama and controversy erupts. It's in the linked article, I'm not going to summarise, and you can google for the twitter seethe.

To discuss chapters XI-XV of our bookclub choice Never Let Me Go

!bookworms

Next week we'll cover chapters XVI-XIX

This story, from the latest Clarkesworld, is set in a grim dystopian future where recent Asian immigrant parents tolerate this kind of thing. Oh and they remember this while living underwater after the climate apocalypse. The story isn't actually bad but hitting picrel was like biting a bit of extremely funny eggshell.

Today's fiction is often accused of avoiding sincerity, but this isn't strictly true. In order to bypass the fear of cringe or mockery, you must graft your topic to some vaguely currentyear theme. For example, take childhood nostalgia. It's okay to be serious and sentimental about your grandma's ethnic cooking that the other kids in school said smelled bad, while the same kind of treatment of your mayo mom's PB+Js would be considered cheese. If we peel away the vague racecruft connection for this kind of thing, we're left with a very conventional sentimentality (not that this is inherently bad).

This story has a very traditional emotional core, about the protagonist mourning a romantic partner, with a kind of non-literal sci-fi element used to explore those feelings. However, the dead partner is a they-them (different from the character in picrel). I find it hard to believe that this story would have been published without the (completely irrelevant) pronouns of the dead partner, or little throwaways like Shirley's queerplatonic orangutan fricker, because then we would be left with the simple age-old narrative of a widow mourning her husband.

Maybe I should just challenge myself to write the straggiest thing I can think of and see if I get accepted.

!writecel

Here's a better journo calling out Lewis' shameless SBF peepeeriding

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/10/sam-bankman-fried-going-infinite-book-michael-lewis/675609

Archived in case of paywall:

https://archive.is/v38jt

!r-slurs and !bookworms I'll tag both because this book is bad enough to get ridiculed by both.

Choice Lewis Apologia

>Sam dindu nuffin!! He was just a wittle boy who was just misunderstood. All the evil Wall St bros just didn't let him win.

>They didn't have any polycule you guys. They just lived in close quarters.

>If FTX's assets were properly assessed, we would all find the missing amounts. I don't think any of them would ever lie.

>SBFs parents are just big mama and papa taking care of their wittle boy

>SBF is a super savant bro. You just don't get it. He fidgets with board games and plays Vidya during press conferences, wears cargo shorts and flip flops and wears a wrinkly suit when he meets big DC people. He's so humble!!

>When asked whether he'll go to Vegas, he says 60%. OMG! Did you see the nuance? He just sees the world in an absolute quantifiable way!! Woah!!

>"I don't feel anything. Emotions are a hindrance." Woah Sam is so intelligent. (I wonder how emotionless he would be if I broke his arm)

>Effective Altruism totally works bro. You just don't get it. Consider a doctor in Zambia working against malaria. He can only spend 10 months there because he has family to feed. Let's say there are 50 doctors like him. So in total they can spend 500 hours to fight malaria in Zambia. However if I become an billionaire by defrauding investors I can hire doctors who can spend 501 hour there. Therefore it is ethical for me to become a billionaire. Lewis says, no cap, it sounds good in theory.

Fricking BIPOC.

And many more.

Worst book of 2023 by far.

Been meaning to read this one for a while, was wondering if I can read New Testament first, then read Old Testament as a prequel. Would it even make sense or would I need context from the first book?

do you use an e-reader?

!bookworms

!bookworms. To discuss chapters VII-X of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Next week we'll cover chapters XI-XV.

I haven't read anything last week , so I gotta catch up this week.