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Short Little Difficult Books - by Lincoln Michel

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A reminder that my novel Metallic Realms is available at a bookstore near you. Reviews call it “brilliant” (Esquire), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). Maybe the perfect holiday gift for the booklover in your life? More info here. László Krasznahorkai’s recent Nobel Prize win reignited the perpetual debates about “difficult literature.” Krasznahorkai, if you don’t know, is famous for writing lengthy, dense books with extremely long—as in sometimes hundreds of pages long—sentences. The kind of books that a certain type of reader takes up as a challenge and another type of reader (or at least social media poster who identifies as a reader) considers fundamentally fraudulent because books are supposed to be fun and the world is so awful why would you want to suffer and anyone who would read such a book must be pretentious, phony brodernist snob! Obviously, I think the latter position is silly. Challenging

Short Little Difficult Books Novels that challenge with style, story, or form that you can read in a day. Lincoln Michel Nov 18, 2025 552 92 128 Share A reminder that my novel Metallic Realms is available at a bookstore near you. Reviews call it “brilliant” ( Esquire ), “a total blast” ( Chicago Tribune ), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” ( Locus ), and “just plain wonderful” ( Booklist ). Maybe the perfect holiday gift for the booklover in your life? More info here. László Krasznahorkai’s recent Nobel Prize win reignited the perpetual debates about “difficult literature.” Krasznahorkai, if

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