Lars Iyer has written two books on the philosophy...

Lars Iyer has written two books on the philosophy of Maurice Blanchot, a book about legendary avant-folk musician Jandek, and two novels. I intend to read one or both of those novels this year. Maybe you would enjoy them, too?

writersnoonereads:

Have you found it possible to make a living by writing the sort of thing you want to, without other work? Do you think there is a place in our current economic system and climate for literature as a profession?

Making a living by my writing? No! I have a job, and the writing I do is a sideline, a hobby. I use this belittling word on purpose. My literary endeavours bring in no more than pocket money… In some ways, I deserve to be mocked, not because I carry on writing literature without understand its posthumousness, but because I go on regardless of the very real material proof of its posthumousness!

There is something glorious about Kafka’s night-time writing in his room in his parents’ flat. Something wonderful about his obscurity, about the fact that he published so little when his friends published so much. We can read his diaries and letters and think: there’s a man of integrity! That’s what it means, really means, to be a writer! But our impression is dependent on Kafka’s eventual success, and on a culture, his culture, where there was a potential audience for his work all along.

There is, by contrast, something pathetic about my obscurity. The blog, Writers No One Reads, celebrates forgotten writers whose work is barely known in the English-speaking world. But I’m already a Writer No One Reads, whose work didn’t register sufficiently in general culture to be forgotten. I say this without self-pity, rather with a certain amusement. Nevertheless, it is pitiful in some strong sense. I really am wasting my time... Why bother?, I ask myself. But the challenge is to pose that question in the work itself.

On being a Writer No One Reads: Lars Iyer, author of Spurious, interview at Full Stop.

Check out this praise:

“A tiny marvel of comically repetitive gloomery…. [A] wonderfully monstrous creation.”
—Steven Poole, The Guardian

“Viciously funny.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“What could be more fun than laughing at intellectuals? This, Lars Iyer’s first book, sprang from his blog, Spurious, which sprang from his career as a philosophy lecturer at Newcastle University. I’m still laughing, and it’s days later. But who, exactly, am I laughing at?”
—The Los Angeles Times

“Ought to be unreadable, but manages to be intelligent, wildly entertaining, and unexpectedly moving instead.”
—The Millions

“Who should buy this book? Intellectuals who face intellectual troubles in their own lives. There’s a lot of biting satire about the shortcomings and general foolishness of the so-called life of the mind. This is graduate student wit, which is fearsomely funny.”
—The Washington Post

“[A] hilarious and eminently quotable debut novel.”
—Modern Painters

“A tragic mein… undercuts the sheer hilarity of Lars Iyer’s Spurious….A narrative My Dinner With Andre turned on end…. To read Spurious is to discuss Kafka’s The Castle and farts in one exacting sentence—all the while reeking of gin.”
—NYLON Magazine

“Evoking literary duos like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Othello and Iago, Iyer’s portrait of two insufferable academics fumbling for enlightenment illustrates what the author comically calls the most honorable cruelty: friendship….Solipsistic and chatty, Spurious is a comedy in the vein of Bernhard’s The Loser or Beckett’s The Unnameable. Echoes of “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” haunt every scene.”
—Bookforum

”Spurious is an amusing take on intellectual frustration and anomie, its two characters going through the motions in a world where it’s unclear what the right motions are any longer.”
—The Complete Review

“Few writers can make personal gloom, the pervasive amorality of capitalism, cataclysmic climate change and the apocalypse comical, but Lars Iyer is one. Yet his lightness is deceptive. While Spurious may seem like Laurel & Hardy at the End of Times, it is also a profound philosophical rhapsody playing out the culmination of the religious narratives of East and West.”
—Stephen Mitchelmore

“Iyer’s playfully cerebral debut [is]… piquant, often hilarious, and gutsy.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“There’s always Spurious, a new comic novel by Lars Iyer, a lecturer in philosophy at Newcastle University. Official plot summary: ‘Two yammering intellectuals ponder life and the fungus taking over one of their homes.’”
—The New York Times Book Review