‘Writers who don’t obsessively polish their writing must be made to walk the plank. Why are they in this game? They’re lazy, and we’re intolerant of laziness. Literature is like the military: shape up or get out.’ — Rob Doyle
We’ve published articles on prose style by the anglophone world’s greatest stylists in contemporary literary fiction, horror fiction, fantasy, literary criticism, science and history writing, and many other fields.
We have interview-essays coming up by many more of the greatest talents in modern writing, and we’ll also be featuring submissions and interview-essays by the best stylists among Auraist’s subscribers (see below for submission guidelines).
Our series on the best-written books of the century is here. The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco is here. Its blurb:
‘On a surface level Twin Peaks: The Return is the world’s worst-ever TV drama, but when you explore it in some depth, see what its showrunner was really up to, that’s when it gets supernaturally bad.’ So argues nightguard and wrestler Andy Uath, who’s had troubles in his time with bitterness, research chemicals, and the hyperdimensional entities he believes shaped the world and, worse, Twin Peaks: The Return.
In the genre-blurring tradition of Maggie Nelson, Geoff Dyer, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, The Demon Inside David Lynch is a critical novel of verve and urgency about fanaticism, generational hatred, rampant cheesiness, and our post-truth state, whoever’s responsible for it.
Now please read on for the specific problem Auraist tries to solve, and for the criteria we’ll use to select the most stylishly written books…
A good number of books enthused about by mainstream reviewers and nominated for major literary prizes contain prose that at best isn’t very impressive, and at worst could conceivably have been written by AI. Books like this shouldn’t receive nominations for important prizes or appear on prestigious year-end lists and the like, we believe, no matter how accomplished or original their ideas, stories, or characters.
But some lists and reviews feature books clearly written by a human, and occasionally beautifully so. Auraist will identify these books, both fiction and non-fiction, literary fiction and genre fiction, and publish extracts from them to give you an idea of their quality of writing. We’ll also interview authors of these books not on the usual subjects of biography and theme and inspiration, but on what it takes to produce the very best sentences.
Auraist’s main purpose, then: to cherrypick from prize shortlists, end-of-year lists, and major reviews the most stylishly, most humanly written books, and in doing so to help support those who write them. If you’ve found yourself giving up on highly praised books because they’re unimpressively written, then Auraist is for you.
Criteria for our picks
Expect a high tolerance for literary showing-off. Jean Toomer, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, mid-career Cormac McCarthy, Patricia Lockwood, Megan Abbott, James Ellroy, The Red Riding Quartet, The Vorrh Trilogy, William Gibson, Consider the Lobster, The War Against Cliché – none of these seem to us guilty of overwriting. They are in fact the kind of writers and books we’re hoping to discover and share with you here.
You can also expect the picks to feature some mix of inventiveness, virtuosity, energy, authority, clarity, precision, concision, richness, tonal complexity, musicality, and that elusive quality generally known as charm or charisma.
Expect less tolerance for sentences that feel too second-guessed, whose writers seem frightened at the prospect of seeming to show off, or of writing with a strong and clearly human voice. This kind of prose, the Replicant Voice, features frustratingly often in prize-nominated and rave-reviewed publications, but unless there’s a compelling reason for doing otherwise we won’t be featuring them here.
Which is not to say that toned-down writing will never be picked as the best. Joy Williams, Olga Ravn, Flannery O’Connor, Kazuo Ishiguro, Tana French, Thomas Harris, Denis Lehane, Michael Lewis, Mark Fisher, and plenty others have written prose that’s unshowy yet highly accomplished.
A rare kind of writing is that which combines linguistic facility with a quality that’s so unusual there doesn’t seem to be a widely agreed name for it, but which is sometimes called grunge or scuffed. Prose with some degree of give, that’s so assured the writer has the confidence not to keep editing to an ever finer polish, but to do the opposite, to undercut their own polish with faux-sloppiness. This combination of facility and scuffedness can be found in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Riddley Walker, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, Jesus’ Son, The Man Who Walks, House of Leaves, and Kick the Latch. If prizelists or reviews feature publications with this combination, then it’s likely they’ll also feature here.
Note on Fair Dealing/Use in the passages we quote
The Society of Authors advises that limited citations of a work are allowed if used solely for the purpose of critique or review under the following conditions:
Providing the work is publicly available
The source of the work is acknowledged
The quoted material is supplemented by topical discussion or assessment
The extent of material quoted is considered an acceptable amount for the purpose of review
We believe you can’t adequately convey the excellence of prose by quoting single sentences, or even single paragraphs. In accordance with the final point above, then, the passages we quote will be short enough to respect each writer’s copyright, while being long enough to showcase the author’s mastery and so increase sales of the book in question.
So thanks for joining us. If you like what’s happening here, you’re welcome to get involved to whatever extent you wish — in time we’ll be commissioning the best stylists with a paid subscription to write articles for us too.
Paid subscribers can also:
— Access the full archive of picks and masterclasses (free subscribers can only read posts for a week after publication)
— Receive exclusive masterclasses on prose style from the highest-profile writers
— Submit books for review alongside major recent releases in the genre of their choice
— Pitch us ideas for articles on prose style (we pay for commissioned pieces at industry rates).
— Comment on posts
With a Patron+ subscription you will also receive, if you wish, a yearly elite-level, highly detailed prose edit of up to 5k words, and a supportive Zoom follow-up for any clarifications.
Most of all, we hope you’ll help support the writing and writers we’ve picked by buying the books themselves.
Sean McNulty
Auraist. Writing with Style.
Submissions, pitches, and requests to republish our interviews and picks should be sent to auraist@substack.com. The fully illustrated epub of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco is available on request at the same email address.
