The best-written recent literary fiction

Plus the latest pick from our subscribers' submissions

Our first pick from recent releases in literary fiction was chosen by the Guardian as a Book of the Day, and described there as 'Unexpectedly hilarious and very beautiful… a sort of maritime Blood Meridian… I'd be hard pressed to think of higher praise'. Read on here…

Our next pick has been called 'Unsettling and beautiful, admirably unabashed' by the Los Angeles Review of Books and 'Written with edge and urgency in a voice that is both vulnerable and in full command' by Colm Tóibín, while Rachel Kushner labelled the book’s voice as 'Camusian, comic, stark, relentless and totally hypnotic'. Read on here...

And lastly we have an extraordinary new submission from one of our subscribers. ‘Buckass naked in hot, hand-boiled bathtub suds, playing with his tin New York dairy truck and some Spur Cola bottles, he heard old Rooney’s brakes set to squelching’: Read on here to discover one of the very best stylists on Substack...

Look out too for the author’s upcoming discussion of prose technique.

At the above links you’ll find:

• The opening pages of our picks. Make up your own mind about the quality of the prose.

• The full list of the books we considered.

• Information about submitting to Auraist. If we publish your work, we’ll invite you to answer our questions on prose style. Your answers will be considered for inclusion in the published collection of these answers by many of the world’s best writers.

Complete our reader survey or restack this post and we’ll send you a complimentary paid subscription to Auraist.

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The paywall has been removed on the posts below.

The best-written British novel of the century (and hardly anyone's read it)

Perhaps the best-written novel of the century, and the funniest

THERE IS NO LIMIT to the ways we can imagine the divisions of time. The swell and crash of a wave; the disappearance and return of an axial rotation, an orbit’s centripetal curve; the ripening and rotting of a fruit; arboreal concentric rings, radiating outward in alternating shades; the crossing of an invisible meridian; the transit of an eclipse into and out of totality; sedimentary layers of rock, striated by subtle gradations of color; a pattern of stitches, knit and purl together creating a rhythm of textures; the opening and closing of a shutter, darkness falling to isolate one moment from the next; the cresting and descent of pitch as a sound dopplers past; separate celluloid frames merging into continuity as they pass by at the rate of so many per second; manifold and crease, pulse and echo, call and response, downbeat and upbeat, systole and diastole, ones and zeroes; even, if we prefer, the unmarked flow, the continuous stream of duration impossible to cut or mark. And among them, the chapter: that artifact of the book, giving us an image of time as a series of ordered linear segments. Intelligible units, these chapters, each one tagged or numbered and neatly sequential. Puzzling ones as well, somehow speaking to us of both the feeling of being in a unit and of transitioning to the next—the enclosed space and the wall promising an obverse side, the organ and the membrane attaching it to another.

The best-written book of criticism of the century; and of the year

Coming soon we have more best-written recent releases in literary fiction, and more authors answer our questions on prose technique. Plus more selections from our subscribers’ submissions.

Our archive has dozens of author articles on prose style, hundreds of picks from recent releases and prize shortlists, and the best-written books of the century. A paid subscription gives you full access to this archive.

Thanks for reading Auraist and helping to support fine writing.

Sean McNulty