/lit/ - Literature

Cannery Row by Steinbeck
Lots of Alice Munro's stories
Maybe Little, Big as well.

>>7384026
The Father Brown Mysteries are my favorite comfy reading. The Man Who Was Thursday is pretty great as well.

>>7382635
>>7382764

Gass just came out with another collection if novellas, pretty insane to be publishing at 91.

As for McElroy, his piece on 'Water' has been gestating for like 12 years now, it better be amazing.

Anyone have any recs on where to start with Vollman? I've got Imperial, Dying Grass, and Europe Central all sitting unread. I've read Kissing the Mask and loved it.

The Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow reading groups seemed to work well. I think one for the Recognitions is in order, or 2666 (or maybe The Savage Detectives).

That's as close to a book club as I want from here, personally.

I like Lonesome Dove and Warlock, like other posters recommended. Lonesome Dove is really good, not as prosaic as the others though. If you can track down the other books in the Warlock series they are pretty damn good as well.

A couple of recommendations I never see in here:

The Beetle Leg by John Hawkes
The Drop Edge of Yonder by Rudolph Wurlitzer

Both are very 'literary' westerns.

I'm a fan of both Gertrude Stein and Hemingway. I'll take this obvious bait, to just say that the person who posted this needs to do a closer read of both texts. Hemingway deals crippled masculinity as much as he does the glorified masculinity stuff.

As for Stein, comparing her style to Hemingway is pretty interesting. She was much more involved in experimental form than Papa was, and really only Three Lives resembles any of the literary techniques he uses.

>>7351519
Do you think Agape, Agape took too heavily from Bernhard?

>>7352935
The feeling of finishing the Recognitions is pretty damn good. Not exactly cathartic, but close.

>>7352854
http://biblioklept.org/2014/07/28/a-fugue-william-h-gass/

"A Fugue" by William H. Gass, which is a section from his book the Tunnel

>>7352839
Right in the wiki under "Need help finding books?"

You are incorrect in this particular instance. I am damn near blind though.

>>7352777

Read the sticky next time.

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/foreignfiction/index.php?s=revenant+punke&f_lang=0&f_columns=0&f_ext=0

As for other recommendations on revenge books, Moby Dick is the best answer. Count of Monte Cristo is probably the most narratively satisfying, or any books loosely based on it (Stars My Destination being one of them).

A number of Shakespearean plays deal with it, like Hamlet or Titus Andronicus.

Also, the Odyssey/Iliad is full of revenge stories, either involving Achilles or Odysseus.

>>7352810

It is almost entirely dialogue, and you really have to pay attention to when it clues you into scene/time/character changes. If you haven't read any Gaddis before, or any authors like him, it may be difficult to get used to.

That said, it's very funny at times and has some really beautiful prose.

>>7352116
I read an excerpt and it seems this was written for children.

Pic related. Don't see a lot of Bernhard on here.

>>7349393
>Scrivener
I've just downloaded a trial, seems pretty neat. Can you post some screenshots of your work? I've been keeping separate word documents and sort of hand-annotating the pdfs I have, this seems much more convenient.

Granta is pretty good. I like the NYRB, but they have a lot of political stuff that I don't enjoy. Tin House and the New Yorker are big cultural staples, and I think Tin House has better quality stories usually.

The Paris Review and London Review are both pretty good, with the Paris review probably being better.

If you want just literary magazines, checkout the Pushcart ratings to see what options are out there. There are magazines for all kinds of stuff, and also probably some local ones you can help support. I get one that is just wildlife and nature short stories from people in my area, it's quite nice.

For other magazines, there is everything from The Economist to The Nation.

>>7349779
Very comfy.

Personally, I like to read some old murder mysteries and drink tea during winter. Favorites are Chesterton's Father Brown Mysteries, Georges Simenon's Maigret series, and maybe even some Sherlock Holmes. If I'm feeling like revisiting my childhood, I'll read some of the old Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs or the Conan Chronicles.

The Sorrows of Young Werther
Stoner
East of Eden
Too Loud a Solitude

>>7347458
>>7347940

Glad you are enjoying it! I think the first 50 pages easily rival DeLillo's Underworld for best intro to a 900 page book, it that is a category.

After seeing Gaddis pop up in a few threads, thought we could have a general talk about our favorite works of his. I've read The Recognitions, J. R., Agape Agape, and I've got Carpenter's Gothic in the mail.

Personally, I think Agape Agape is his most challenging work out of what I've read, and is definitely my favorite. It also was great to read right after reading Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard.

Has anyone read all of his work, and can provide some insight or thoughts on their favorites? I've not read A Frolic of His Own yet.

And just to get some guaranteed replies, the Recognitions is better than Infinite Jest.

I think it's better to start with Lookout Cartridge, personally.

Continuing, even if we disregard the postmodernist or experimental writers, we've produced and entire generation of writers of immense talent and skill. Included below are a list loosely organized by association or artistic style:

John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, John O'Hara
Norman Mailer
Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud
John Updike and Philip Roth
James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston
John Cheever
Raymond Carver
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald
Truman Capote and Harper Lee
Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf
Not to mention the entire Beat Generation or the Black Mountain poets or any of that.

These aren't obscure names. Anyone who is reasonably well read will have encountered these works, and most likely enjoyed them. These authors are studied and discusses all over the world in the same as when we discuss Breton or Queneau when we discuss surrealism here.

America is one of the fronts for experimental literature. People like Gaddis, Hawkes, McElroy, Gass and others have done more to push literary boundaries in new directions than anything I can name from from Europe.

Also, don't discount American publishing. Some of the biggest literary fiction consumers rely on American publishing to get the books at all, since we have the luxury of having thousands of quality publishers.

>>7339523
>>7339831

The time has come, now that reading groups have gone through two of the previous trilogy we need to evolve.

OP, I recommend Women and Men or Zettel's Traum when it finally gets translated to English.

>>7337581
Be nice to gertie
>>7337637
She was a modernist writer, loved as an expat and was intimately involved with all kinds of literature and art. Picasso painted her and Hemingway encouraged her to publish The Making of Americans, which Ford Maddox Ford eventually did (and regretted). It got picked up by Dalkey Archive a few years ago.

Unfortunately most of her stuff is unbearably pretentious and some of the worst parts of modernism. I myself don't know why I enjoy reading her writing; something about the reptitive nature of her sentence structure is very aesthetically pleasing to read. Pick up Autobiography or read some of her published letters to see what I'm talking about.

>>7337102
>>7337121
Say what you want about the gal, the Making of Americans is a beautiful tragedy. It is one of the few books that I enjoy that is an artistic failure but somehow immensely satisfying to read.

>>7337384
You can read Hawkes chronologically, that's how I started. The Cannibal is a good starting place. If not, The Lime Twig or Beetle Leg. Save Blood Oranges for when you are more familiar with his prose.