/lit/ - Literature

if they were all buttonfly 501s my man would suffer major carpal tunnel
James Baldwin maybe. The Wu Tang Clan

>>23393374
>gets slaughtered by James Baldwin

>>23390775
"The Greater Good" is subjective to individuals. My loved one's well-being and my own will never be taken for granted. You're a fucking moron that's no better than a wannabe slave if you believe sacrificing everything for no gain is worth it. Instead of speaking to me with dumbass reddit drivel, learn what a good male role model is. Superman, James Baldwin, and Che Guvera are good starts

>>23355566
James Baldwin

51)
Choral singing, much approved of by Fisher, was an important feature of Oundle musical life and I enjoyed it immensely. Every year we sang the Messiah or the Christmas Oratorio or Elijah and two years running everybody plucked up courage and we sang Bach’s B Minor Mass, an extraordinary undertaking which amazed the musical world and caused great critical excitement. The entire school took part. There was an orchestra of, roughly, fifty, strengthened here and there by professionals. The senior mathematics master played, brilliantly, the organ. The choir proper consisted of about 250 boys, and the 350 remaining formed the so-called non-choir. The latter learnt, at the daily practices after Prayers, the important themes of Bach or whichever composer it was, and then, at a given moment, joined their willing if untrained voices to the tenors or basses and just let fly. ‘Everyone suddenly burst out singing’ and the soloists, unprepared for this unbalancing vocal onslaught, nearly jumped out of their skins.

— Arthur Marshall, ‘Life’s Rich Pageant’


52)
“Now, here’s a short story called ‘Rosie’s Temptation,’ by Fosdyke Piggott. It’s rotten. What is a Piggott, anyway?”

“Mr. Piggott,” said the editor, “is a brother of the principal stockholder of the magazine.”

“All’s right with the world — Piggott passes,” said Thacker.

— O. Henry, ‘The Rose Of Dixie’


53)
And this meant that though Norman really wanted to know me, and though I really wanted to know him, I hung back, held fire, danced, and lied. I was not going to come crawling out of my ruined house, all bloody, no, baby, sing no sad songs for *me*.

— James Baldwin, ‘Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son’


54)
Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue,
Keep probability — some say — in view.

— Robert Graves, ‘The Devil's Advice To Story-Tellers’


55)
He had missed his train, and there were two hours to kill. The tide was out so he walked along the shore near Marazion, scared by his own indifference. The day was grey, the seabirds were very white against the slate sea. A couple of brave children were splashing in the surf. I am a thief of the spirit, he thought despondently. Faithless, I am pursuing another man’s convictions. I am trying to warm myself against other people’s fires. He watched the children, and recalled some scrap of poetry from the days when he read it:

To turn as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.

Yes, he thought glumly. That’s me.

— John Le Carré, ‘Smiley’s People’

>>23319847
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

>>23313675
James Baldwin, he wrote Raisin in the Sun, and was vocal during the Civil rights movement. He had a lot of insightful things to say.

>>23313601
James Baldwin might be the greatest American mind of the 20th century. I fail to find anyone more in line with what is true, and with more sympathy for everyone involved. A titan of a man.

>>23312681
George Eliot, Jane Austen, VS Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, Marilynne Robinson, John Keats, Harold Pinter, Tennessee Williams, H.D., John Ashbery, Truman Capote, Jean Rhys, James Baldwin, Arthur Miller, GB Shaw, Michael Longley, Joan Didion, WG Sebald, Ivan Turgenev, Raymond Carver, Ted Hughes, Alice Oswald, Rudyard Kipling, Hart Crane, Gerald Murname, Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, Lord Byron, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Thackeray, and last but not least Henry James.

>>23300433
James Baldwin literally left America to live in France because there he was considered a saint.

>>23300382
>There was no guilt until Americanised leftist activists imported the same narratives from America into a British context. The same is true in all European countries.

Nonsense. The European and British left developed these notions on their own. The CIA didn't create figures like Foucault and people like Bertrand Russell were demonizing the empire before WWI. Many US leftwing figures(like James Baldwin) found a more receptive audience in Europe then they did at home.

What happened is that the European left latched on to the civil rights narrative and began to re-write their history around it.
People who reduce complex cultural, ideological, and social changes to "muh CIA" should be on pol, not lit.

>>23282143
Toni Morrison was invented to prove there could be a worse writer than James Baldwin. Don't waste your time reading black authors.

>>23252323
>In The Swimming-Pool Library, the narrator Will Beckwith recounts his leisured life as a 25 year old gay man in early 1980s London, a period he describes as his ‘belle époque’, a kind of prelapsarian golden age for gay men before it all went wrong.

>The Swimming-Pool Library continues to be regarded as an important text in depicting gay sexuality and desire for men, and is almost treated as a ‘coming-out’ case in itself. But for all the reviews which praise his defiance as a ‘gay writer’ showing ‘gay sex’, what is most exciting about Hollinghurst’s novel is its refusal to sentimentalise his characters, or feel pressured into depicting all gay men either as allies, heroes or victims of a common enemy, that is, the heterosexual world. In fact, there are remarkably few heterosexual characters in it, and nearly no women. What Hollinghurst achieves in shaking-off is what James Baldwin called the burden of representation.

>>23252104
faggot hierarchy
oscar wilde > yukio mishima > james baldwin >>> taking it up the ass > sucking dick >>>>>> OP

>>23239891
Dune Messiah cause I wanna have read them before the movies come out like I did with Dune 1. Also Tell it to the mountain by James Baldwin.

Watched the documentary "I'm not your negro" and the whole thing seemed pretty interesting, plus I had the physical book laying around.

Next will be The divine commedy cause I am in a Catholicuck rampage after holy week.

>>23237508
>novels
Moby Dick
The Sound and the Fury
Blood Meridian
Crime and Punishment
War and Peace

>short stories
A Clean Well Lighted Place
The Rocking-Horse Winner
Young Goodman Brown
Bartleby the Scrivener
The State of Grace (Brodkey)

>novelas
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Train Dreams
Steps
Hadji Murat
Typhoon

>Poems
Ozymandias
Fern Hill
The Magi
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Winter Music

>essays
DH Lawrence’s essay on Moby Dick
Politics and the English Language by Orwell
Inside the Whale by Orwell
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
Superman Comes to the Supermarket by Norman Mailer

>Philosophy Books
Twilight of the Idols
The Antichrist

That’s all I’ve read to be desu
I started The Republic but never finished it
Does Walden count? I started that but never finished it.

>something off your chest
I just wanted to lament that I can’t go to the bookstore without attractive young women pestering me and asking me what books I’m reading.

>>23234976
>>23235875
If you consider any American books in the Western canon then that necessarily includes African Americans, considering they've been there as long as any white person. What do you expect from a people that have been in chains for some 250 years followed by another 100 of social oppression? Probably going to be a good amount of authors talking about that experience, dumbass.

Here are some actual authors for those who read and aren't pol-brained leftovers who don't actually read/study any of the canon or any books for that matter.

Samuel Delaney - Dhalgren (weirdo sci-fi, very violent and sexual)
Leon Forrest - Divine Days (post-modern tome, in the vein of recognitions, gravity's rainbow, etc.)
Israel Reed - Mumbo Jumbo (Harold Bloom's favorite)
Dambudzo Marechera - The House of Hunger (underrated Zimbabwe writer)
Frant Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth (non-fiction)
Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist (contemporary but p good)
James Baldwin - Collected Essays (his speeches are just as good)

>>23235059
Toni Morrison is fine, I guess. Better than Maya Angelou by a mile. I can't stand that woman's writing.

Off the top of my head:

>James Weldon Johnson
>James Baldwin
>Richard Wright
>Zora Neale Hurston
>August Wilson

These are, in my opinion, some of the best ones I've ever read.

>>23235078
Coates is so laughably bad at his job. Everything he's ever written is awful.

>>23220988
Someone said to Yakub “you can’t make a writer worse than Toni Morrison,” and so he created James Baldwin

>>23185780
The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
An American Tragedy -- Theodore Dreiser
The Making of Americans -- Gertrude Stein
Death Comes for the Archbishop -- Willa Cather
A Farewell to Arms -- Ernest Hemingway
The Sound and the Fury -- William Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom! -- William Faulkner
Nightwood -- Djuna Barnes
East Goes West -- Younghill Kang
Their Eyes Were Watching God -- Zora Neale Hurston
U.S.A. -- John Dos Passos
Ask the Dust -- John Fante
The Big Sleep -- Raymond Chandler
The Day of the Locust -- Nathanael West
The Grapes of Wrath -- John Steinbeck
Native Son -- Richard Wright
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter -- Carson McCullers
A Time to Be Born -- Dawn Powell
All the King’s Men -- Robert Penn Warren
In a Lonely Place -- Dorothy B. Hughes
The Mountain Lion -- Jean Stafford
The Catcher in the Rye -- J. D. Salinger
Charlotte’s Web -- E. B. White
Invisible Man -- Ralph Ellison
Fahrenheit 451 -- Ray Bradbury
Maud Martha -- Gwendolyn Brooks
The Adventures of Augie March -- Saul Bellow
Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov
Giovanni’s Room -- James Baldwin
Peyton Place -- Grace Metalious
Deep Water -- Patricia Highsmith
On the Road -- Jack Kerouac
The Haunting of Hill House -- Shirley Jackson
Catch-22 -- Joseph Heller
A Wrinkle in Time -- Madeleine L'Engle
Another Country -- James Baldwin

The birth of Lloyd Alexander (The Prydain Chronicles), José Donoso (The Obscene Bird of Night), Truman Capote (In Cold Blood), James Baldwin (Giovanni's Room).

The publication of A Passage to India by E. M. Forster, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Billy Budd by Herman Melville.

>>23168304
Walter Abish
John Ashbery
James Baldwin
Donald Barthelme
Ambrose Bierce
Elizabeth Bishop
Robert Bly
Richard Brautigan
Charles Brockden Brown
William Cullen Bryant
Charles Bukowski
Gabrielle Burton
Truman Capote
James Fenimore Cooper
Hart Crane
Robert Creeley
H.D.
Don DeLillo
Emily Dickinson
Alan Dugan
Robert Duncan
Durant
Jonathan Edwards
TS Eliot
Emerson
Frederick Exley
W. Faulkner
Fitzgerald
Robert Frost
William Gaddis
William Gass
William Lindsay Gresham
Alfred Starr Hamilton
Marianne Hauser
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hemingway
Langston Hughes
Washington Irving
Henry James
Robinson Jeffers
John Knowles
J. London
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
James Russell Lowell
Robert Lowell
Malamud
David Markson
Cormac McCarthy
Carson McCullers
Herman Melville
James Merrill
Arthur Miller
Henry Miller
Marianne Moore
Toni Morrison
Flannery O'Connor
Frank O’Hara
Charles Olson
George Oppen
PKD
Sylvia Plath
Edgar Allan Poe
Ezra Pound
James Purdy
Pynchon
Adrienne Rich
Philip Roth
James Schuyler
Anne Sexton
William Gilmore Simms
Lewis Sinclair
Upton Sinclair
Frank Stanford
Gertrude Stein
Steinbeck
Wallace Stevens
H. Thompson
Thoreau
John Kennedy Toole
Mark Twain
Updike
Vollman
Vonnegut
David Foster Wallace
Walt Whitman
Tennessee Williams
William Carlos Williams
Thomas Wolfe
Louis Zukofsky

>>23133395
Nearly all black authors. inb4 "Racism!" I WISH I could name even ONE that doesnt suck. Toni Morrison, Leroi Jones, Achebe, Angelou, Ta-Nahisi Coates. They're AWFUL, and you're forced to not only read them but kiss their asses in lit class. James Baldwin's essays are the only things that even approach competence. What the hell is it? Blacks can make great music, or at least great jazz. Put a pencil in their hands and they all become retards who can't write about anything but being black.

>>23081268
I'm reading James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain. I'm at the part where Gabriel, the priest, reflects on his guilt from the debauchery of his youth. I sympathize with his guilt as someone who was raised in a Catholic family and is now struggling with a masturbation addiction.
This particular sentence stuck to me:
>He hated the evil that lived in his body, and he feared it, as he feared and gated the lions of lust and longing that prowled the defenseless city of his mind.