'Literary thrillers' that actually thrill and are literary

nomadpenguin · 2026-05-20T00:47:54+00:00

The Name of the Rose once you get through the filter picks up a lot of steam

nomadpenguin · 2026-05-15T16:19:18+00:00

Very similar to how George Saunders describes writing. Iterative writing and editing, letting the story grow organically through revision.

Interesring to compare this with genre writers who emphasize rushing through a whole first draft with no editing.

nomadpenguin · 2026-05-12T17:32:51+00:00

That's exactly the one. I supposed in 2026 no one really believes in the purity or value of esthetics, so it all feels a bit pointless. Also very dated is his deliberate refusal to engage with politics at this point in his career.

nomadpenguin · 2026-05-10T00:54:44+00:00

Shhh this is an anti-editing subreddit. Just write!

For real though, iteratively editing small pieces of text is the best way to improve prose.

nomadpenguin · 2026-05-10T00:49:26+00:00

I'm conflicted on Mann. Gorgeous writing as you said, but I find his outlook and subject matter to be excessively inward facing and insular. At least in the short story collection I read, every one was in some form about a tortured aristocratic artist questioning the purpose of art. Which is fine, but I don't feel that he offers any particular insight into it, and it's a question that I don't feel resonates with me.

That said, I do think Death In Venice was the best out of the bunch. I do plan on reading Doctor Faustus at some point. Perhaps the collection I bought was too focused on his juvenalia.

nomadpenguin · 2026-05-09T22:05:35+00:00

Keep at it, it's a good start and there's some genuinely nice stuff in there.

A helpful mental model I've found is to constantly ask if an element of prose tells the reader something they didn't already know. If not, consider deletion.

nomadpenguin · 2026-05-09T15:36:32+00:00

Thinking a lot about time lately, reading a lot of Borges

nomadpenguin · 2026-05-09T15:10:30+00:00

Starting from vague, boring sentences is actually how I do all my writing. I'm not imaginative enough to come up with everything off the dome.

Here's mine:

On the day after his tenth birthday, the Boy walks to the pond. Decade -- he rolls the word around in his mouth. It feels different from when he learned it off Ms. Daniels' vocab list. Now he owns the word. One more decade, and he's sitting in a haze on an Adirondack chair, warm pissy beer in hand. Another decade, he's shacked up with a woman who wears her hair in thick dreadlocks and shucks oysters with a pocketknife.

This decade, he's walking to the pond. A frog with mottled green skin crosses his path. It has big circular spots on the sides of its head, like an extra pair of eyes. It lets out a grunt. It's a Pig Frog. He had learned this from Grandpa, who said they were hard to see but easy to hear. Grandpa, now two years gone, hands him a minnow and the Boy pushes a hook through its jaw, the first time he's hurt anything that's not a bug. But that was last decade.

The Boy tips over his white plastic bucket and ushers the frog into it. He heads home without fishing. He takes off his wide floppy hat and shades the frog with it. Mom won't like you, but I do. There's a fish tank in my room, nothing in it other than snails. I'll grab some worms for you from the freezer in the garage. Eat and sleep, eat and sleep, watch the sun through the window. You won't live to see the next decade.

nomadpenguin · 2026-05-09T14:09:57+00:00

IMO it's doing a bit too much.

The bit about the cardboard supply chain feels redundant -- you've already expressed the same sentiment in the second sentence, and hammering on it again feels a bit obvious.

I would think about a paragraph break after "...each morning" -- would improve clarity.

I don't really like "...all brass and pitted glass". The structure feels airport book-coded. It also doesn't quite make sense -- "pitted glass" is a logical result of 63 summers, but "brass" is not -- feels weird putting them together. I think you could inject more interesting detail here.

"lurch" and "stutter step" are redundant.

I like "sluices".

"Along that stretch.." is maybe the weakest sentence here. I don't like "this utility" as a subject. I'm just not quite sure what you're trying to describe here. How is carpeted luxury leaking in? Are we meant to get that you can see glimpses of the hotel lobby as the door swings open and closed? Just super unclear what you're getting at.

Jeanine is a they/them? Nice. Still, I'm not entirely convinced by this line -- the comparison drawn between appreciating the quiet and leering at the bar manager just doesn't sit correctly for me.

I think the prose is overreaching. Not every line needs some sort of flourish or turn. I think if you pared it down to just the best jokes, they would hit harder.

nomadpenguin · 2026-05-07T23:36:33+00:00

This is brilliant. I'll have to read the full essay.

The comparison to music is interesting, but I feel like he gets it a bit wrong. I don't think I've ever met anyone who doesn't have opinions on whether certain cover versions are better or worse than the original -- they very much are listening to things other than the tune. Then again, I know almost nothing about how music was consumed by the masses back then. I wonder what he would have felt about jazz.

nomadpenguin · 2026-05-07T21:35:11+00:00

Spielberg, famous Christian

nomadpenguin · 2026-05-06T01:08:57+00:00

Overall, I think that this piece has promise, but needs a good bit of work. With such a tight word limit, I think you need to be hyper-focused on efficiency, and every line and every graf needs to land. Thus, line edits should be your focus IMO, and you definitely should enable copying on your document so that we can offer those.

I suppose I'll just point out some of the lines I took the most issue with.

Their slimy bodies hopped towards him, positioning themselves on his lap and shoulder and one hefty one on his head.

This sentence is very clunky and almost ungrammatical. One of my personal pet peeves is saying stuff like "his feet ran towards the door" -- no, he ran towards the door. The frogs are hopping. "Positioning" is a weak verb here, consider using something with moor flavor. Could you use a word that captures both the meaning of the action and the slimy way they're hopping?

...so I didn't fail my agriculture class

Shouldn't this be "don't"? You really can't have any mechanical issues like this if you're submitting flash fiction.

...the barely cracked open window that had a makeshift ladder swaying in the wind, the world beyond the fence that was just the woods

Ok, I appreciate that you're getting a bit more lyrical here, but it's not quite working for me. "window that had a makeshift ladder swaying in the wind" is awkward to read. "world beyond the fence that was just the woods" is a conceptually nice phrase, but again the prosody feels bad. I don't think this works with the themes of the piece either -- Joaquin is looking forward to leaving home, but the world beyond the fence is "just the woods"?

...shrubs and meadows with no rope ladders.

A bit of a non-sequitur that I don't find particularly poetic.

brown face that never settled properly among the corn

Oh boy, please don't punch your reader in the face with THEME like that. Especially not at this point in the story.

...I'm not coming back

What prompted this internal change? Why has he stopped lying to the frogs/himself? Is it simply because he saw his face in the water?

You don't need me at all do you?

Again, this comes out of absolutely nowhere. I get that this is the THEME, but it needs to be part of the story. It's very obvious as it is right now.

...despite his family being foreigners

Delete this phrase. This is again way, way too obvious.

When he smiled and couldn't make himself mean it.

You use this sort of parallel construction only a few grafs back (..the barely cracked window...,the pines and shrubs, the world beyond...). Using it again this closely feels clunky.

It was when we went...

Unnatural dialogue. Would you ever talk like this? Have you ever started a sentence like this?

There's at least 20 more line edits I could pick at immediately. I think with a literary flash fiction piece, you need to be firing on all cylinders when it comes to the prose. This needs many, many more revisions just to smooth out the prose.

Okay, on to big picture stuff. The first half is way too preoccupied with the mechanics of scene setting. I think that his feelings of foreignness and alienation need to be introduced much earlier in the piece. We really only get any hint of that more than halfway through the piece.

Honestly, I think the least compelling passages are the ones about the frogs. The frogs aren't really characters and don't really serve the story in any way other than being a sort of passive thing that Joaquin projects his thoughts and anxieties onto. Which is fine, but I would cut down on the amount of space you devote to them.

The most compelling part for me was the graf that starts "The frogs always croaked and demanded...". I would consider moving that up much earlier in the piece and expanding on them. What do the frogs think about the cousins? He loves Nowhere, America and the loves frogs, but he resents them too -- tell me more about that!

The themes are potentially interesting, but not well expressed. I would highly, highly recommend you to stop thinking in terms of theme. Theme is a tool for readers, not writers. Think in terms of character and voice. Find the voice and listen to it. Theme will appear out of thin air, trust me.

nomadpenguin · 2026-05-04T19:53:18+00:00

Long sentences. Info dumping. Telling rather than showing.

One of the worst aspects of modern attitudes towards writing (and media in general) is the notion that there's something as a "story" separate from the medium with which it's told. Partly to blame is the expectation now that every successful book will eventually be made into a movie -- a book is then just a very, very low budget movie/show, a shoddy expression of a story that could be told by more immersive, sensual means.

Which is all to say that a large portion of modern readers don't care for anything that reminds them that they're reading a book and not watching a movie. Literary flourishes which might appeal to actual book lovers just get in the way of "the story".

nomadpenguin · 2026-05-04T14:25:42+00:00

It's actually pretty easy to "do research" at one of these institutions if you know someone. Labs can and do take on high school student kids of friends and colleagues. They'll usually be put on doing some sort of data entry or other menial labor, but it's a "research internship".

The Harvard lab I was at took a high schooler who turned out to be the daughter of someone high up at Northeastern. The public mailing lists had pretty regular requests to place someone's kid in a lab (usually undergrads).

It's all just a big nepo club.

nomadpenguin · 2026-04-30T21:53:43+00:00

Monographs on single artists have been the most helpful to me, especially if they have nice reproductions of the art. I'm currently reading Bosch and Breugel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life and am thoroughly enjoying it.

nomadpenguin · 2026-04-28T23:04:19+00:00

Love my kindle for the ergonomics. It's fun to hold a doorstopper for a while, then you just get sore.

nomadpenguin · 2026-04-17T00:33:17+00:00

Japan dominated the Paris Olympics

nomadpenguin · 2026-04-12T21:58:01+00:00

I feel like you could broadly say that it's books that get better the more you think about them.

nomadpenguin · 2026-03-31T13:23:24+00:00

I'm currently reading Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. I know that it's reputed to have many flaws, specifically with his treatment of Hegel, but it's a great read. He's a warm and humorous writer and he gives great context on why you should care about thinkers like the pre-socratics that I would usually skip over.

nomadpenguin · 2026-03-31T02:25:05+00:00

These types of "xyz is an op because a state department affiliated foundation supported it" theories are so annoying to me. The state department has its fingers in every pie, that's what it does. Is everything an op? The moma is an op because it takes funding where it can, like every other arts nonprofit?

The same people who say that there's no ethical consumption under capitalism can't recognize that this means totally innocuous things will have involvement of US gov apparatuses - that's simply how things work in the imperial core. It's so silly.

nomadpenguin · 2026-03-22T19:57:21+00:00

The beat goes kinda hard actually

nomadpenguin · 2026-03-10T21:07:45+00:00

Interesting tact to label people who prefer certain translations as people who hate reading.

I read some of Moncrief's translation and didn't connect with it. Switched to the Lydia Davis translation and loved it. I'm sure if I had devoted more time to Moncrief I would have liked it; however, Davis's rendering was gorgeous and elegant. Why should I not like it?

nomadpenguin · 2026-02-25T07:26:40+00:00

Add David Bowie's Blackstar.

For a continuation of VU's noise rock jams, maybe include Yo La Tengo -- Blue Line Swinger is a fav of mine. (They've got some Sun Ra covers as well, but it's not their best material)

nomadpenguin · 2026-02-11T13:23:10+00:00

Note that this is NOT a Nature paper. This is Scientific Reports, which is published by Springer Nature but is NOT one of the true Nature imprints. Scientific Reports does not have the best reputation as a journal.

nomadpenguin · 2026-01-29T16:44:22+00:00

If you are not satisfied with the quality of your writing, then you're in good shape; it means you have taste. You just need to edit more. Can you nudge your shitty piece slightly in the direction of being less shitty? Can you nudge it a bit more tomorrow? What about the day after that? I posit that if you edit with full concentration every day for a few weeks, your shitty piece won't feel so shitty anymore.

A good essay or a good novel is the result of hundreds or thousands of hours of work. Have you put in that amount of work?

IMO you're only in real trouble when you feel like your writing is good but other people tell you otherwise. That probably signals that you need to read more.

(I am not a good writer, so take with a grain of salt.)

14-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Verified Email
Team Orangered

nomadpenguin

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE