/lit/ - Literature

Here are some of the books I'm really interested in :

>Clarel - Herman Melville
>The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil
>The Riverside Chaucer
>Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant (one of those books I really want to read and engage with, but I'm too afraid to get filtered because of my scant knowledge of philosophy)
>Dhalgren - Samuel R. Delany
>JR - William Gaddis (already read The Recognitions)
>Women and Men - Joseph McElroy
>The Making of Americans - Gertrude Stein
>The Cantos - Ezra Pound
>The Complete Poetry of John Donne
>The Enneads - Plotinus

>Socrates
married a woman 40 years younger than him, groomed teenage boys
>Plato
wrote that “spiritual” love between men and boys was better than all other kinds of love
>Aristotle
said the ideal marrying age was 37 for men and 18 for women
>Sappho
groomed teenage girls
>Sophocles, Euripides, Theocritus, Horace, Virgil, Petronius, Catullus
flagrant pederasts, multiple accounts of Sophocles molesting hairless boys
>Julius Caesar
married a 13 year old girl and later a 17 year old
>Saint Augustine
had a 10 year old fiancée
>Muhammad
had sex with a 9 year old girl
>Peter Abelard
groomed Heloise when she was 15
>Thomas More
married a 17 year old girl when he was 27
>Christopher Marlowe
pederast
>Cervantes
married a 15 year old girl
>Francis Bacon
had sex with underage boys
>Milton
married a 17 year old girl when he was 34
>Molière
married a 17 year old girl when he was 40
>Goethe
had sex with underage girls and boys
>Walt Whitman
relationship with 13 year old boy
>Henry David Thoreau
fell in love with an 11 year old boy and wrote a poem about it
>Edgar Allen Poe
married a 13 year old girl when he was 27
>Lewis Carroll
took inappropriate photographs of underage girls
>Charles Dickens
had an affair with an 18 year old girl when he was 45
>Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide, Gustave Flaubert
had sex with Algerian boy prostitutes
>Verlaine and Rimbaud
toxic age-gap relationship
>Friedrich Nietzsche
apologist for man-boy love
>Leo Tolstoy
raped a female servant, married an 18 year old when he was 34
>WB Yeats
proposed to a girl he knew since she was 4
>Martin Heidegger
groomed Hannah Arendt when she was 19 and he was 35
>Henry James
wrote a story about man-boy love
>Thomas Mann
attracted to his own son, stalked a Polish shota around Venice and wrote a book about it
>Marcel Proust
wrote a short story called 'Pederasty' about wanting to live in a boy utopia
>WH Auden
relationship with 14 year old boy
>Sartre and Beauvoir
groomed teenage girls from the school Beauvoir taught at
>Foucault, Barthes, Sartre, Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Guattari, Lyotard, Althusser
signed petition to abolish the age of consent
>Allen Ginsberg, Camille Paglia, Samuel R. Delany
members of NAMBLA
>Pablo Neruda
self-confessed rapist
>JD Salinger
pedophile obsessed with loli feet
>William S. Burroughs
molested boys, killed his wife
>Lawrence Durrell
molested his daughter
>Arthur C. Clarke
molested boys in Sri Lanka

>Socrates
married a woman 40 years younger than him, groomed teenage boys
>Plato
wrote that “spiritual” love between men and boys was better than all other kinds of love
>Aristotle
said the ideal marrying age was 37 for men and 18 for women
>Sappho
groomed teenage girls
>Sophocles, Euripides, Theocritus, Horace, Virgil, Petronius, Catullus
flagrant pederasts, multiple accounts of Sophocles molesting hairless boys
>Julius Caesar
married a 13 year old girl and later a 17 year old
>Saint Augustine
had a 10 year old fiancée
>Muhammad
had sex with a 9 year old girl
>Peter Abelard
groomed Heloise when she was 15
>Thomas More
married a 17 year old girl when he was 27
>Christopher Marlowe
pederast
>Cervantes
married a 15 year old girl
>Francis Bacon
had sex with underage boys
>Milton
married a 17 year old girl when he was 34
>Molière
married a 17 year old girl when he was 40
>Goethe
had sex with underage girls and boys
>Walt Whitman
relationship with 13 year old boy
>Henry David Thoreau
fell in love with an 11 year old boy and wrote a poem about it
>Edgar Allen Poe
married a 13 year old girl when he was 27
>Lewis Carroll
took inappropriate photographs of underage girls
>Charles Dickens
had an affair with an 18 year old girl when he was 45
>Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide, Gustave Flaubert
had sex with Algerian boy prostitutes
>Verlaine and Rimbaud
toxic age-gap relationship
>Friedrich Nietzsche
apologist for man-boy love
>Leo Tolstoy
raped a female servant, married an 18 year old when he was 34
>WB Yeats
proposed to a girl he knew since she was 4
>Martin Heidegger
groomed Hannah Arendt when she was 19 and he was 35
>Henry James
wrote a story about man-boy love
>Thomas Mann
attracted to his own son, stalked a Polish shota around Venice and wrote a book about it
>Marcel Proust
wrote a short story called 'Pederasty' about wanting to live in a boy utopia
>WH Auden
relationship with 14 year old boy
>Sartre and Beauvoir
groomed teenage girls from the school Beauvoir taught at
>Foucault, Barthes, Sartre, Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Guattari, Lyotard, Althusser
signed petition to abolish the age of consent
>Allen Ginsberg, Camille Paglia, Samuel R. Delany
members of NAMBLA
>Pablo Neruda
self-confessed rapist
>JD Salinger
pedophile obsessed with loli feet
>William S. Burroughs
pederast
>Lawrence Durrell
molested his daughter
>Arthur C. Clarke
molested boys in Sri Lanka

>Socrates
married a woman 40 years younger than him, groomed teenage boys
>Plato
wrote that “spiritual” love between men and boys was better than all other kinds of love
>Aristotle
said the ideal marrying age was 37 for men and 18 for women
>Sappho
groomed teenage girls
>Sophocles, Euripides, Theocritus, Horace, Virgil, Petronius, Catullus
flagrant pederasts, multiple accounts of Sophocles molesting hairless boys
>Julius Caesar
married a 13 year old girl and later a 17 year old
>Saint Augustine
had a 10 year old fiancée
>Muhammad
had sex with a 9 year old girl
>Peter Abelard
groomed Heloise when she was 15
>Thomas More
married a 17 year old girl when he was 27
>Christopher Marlowe
pederast
>Cervantes
married a 15 year old girl
>Francis Bacon
had sex with underage boys
>Milton
married a 17 year old girl when he was 34
>Molière
married a 17 year old girl when he was 40
>Goethe
had sex with underage girls and boys
>Walt Whitman
relationship with 13 year old boy
>Henry David Thoreau
fell in love with an 11 year old boy and wrote a poem about it
>Edgar Allen Poe
married a 13 year old girl when he was 27
>Lewis Carroll
took inappropriate photographs of underage girls
>Charles Dickens
had an affair with an 18 year old girl when he was 45
>Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide, Gustave Flaubert
had sex with Algerian boy prostitutes
>Verlaine and Rimbaud
toxic age-gap relationship
>Friedrich Nietzsche
apologist for man-boy love
>Leo Tolstoy
raped a female servant, married an 18 year old when he was 34
>WB Yeats
proposed to a girl he knew since she was 4
>Martin Heidegger
groomed Hannah Arendt when she was 19 and he was 35
>Henry James
wrote a story about man-boy love
>Thomas Mann
attracted to his own son, stalked a Polish shota around Venice and wrote a book about it
>Marcel Proust
wrote a short story called 'Pederasty' about wanting to live in a boy utopia
>WH Auden
relationship with 14 year old boy
>Sartre and Beauvoir
groomed teenage girls from the school Beauvoir taught at
>Foucault, Barthes, Sartre, Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Guattari, Lyotard, Althusser
signed petition to abolish the age of consent
>Allen Ginsberg, Camille Paglia, Samuel R. Delany
members of NAMBLA
>Pablo Neruda
self-confessed rapist
>JD Salinger
pedophile obsessed with loli feet
>William S. Burroughs
pederast
>Lawrence Durrell
molested his daughter
>Arthur C. Clarke
molested boys in Sri Lanka

>Socrates
married a woman 40 years younger than him, groomed teenage boys
>Plato
wrote that “spiritual” love between men and boys was better than all other kinds of love
>Aristotle
said the ideal marrying age was 37 for men and 18 for women
>Sappho
groomed teenage girls
>Sophocles, Theocritus, Horace, Virgil, Petronius, Catullus
flagrant pederasts, multiple accounts of Sophocles molesting hairless boys
>Julius Caesar
married a 13 year old girl and later a 17 year old
>Saint Augustine
had a 10 year old fiancée
>Muhammad
had sex with a 9 year old girl
>Peter Abelard
groomed Heloise when she was 15
>Thomas More
married a 17 year old girl when he was 27
>Cervantes
married a 15 year old girl
>Francis Bacon
had sex with underage boys
>Milton
married a 17 year old girl when he was 34
>Molière
married a 17 year old girl when he was 40
>Goethe
had sex with underage girls and boys
>Walt Whitman
relationship with 13 year old boy
>Edgar Allen Poe
married a 13 year old girl when he was 27
>Lewis Carroll
took inappropriate photographs of underage girls
>Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide
had sex with Algerian boy prostitutes
>Verlaine and Rimbaud
toxic age-gap relationship
>Leo Tolstoy
raped a female servant, married an 18 year old when he was 34
>WB Yeats
proposed to a girl he knew since she was 4
>Martin Heidegger
Groomed Hannah Arendt when she was 19 and he was 35
>WH Auden
relationship with 14 year old boy
>Sartre and Beauvoir
groomed teenage girls from the school Beauvoir taught at
>Foucault, Barthes, Sartre, Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Guattari, Lyotard, Althusser
signed petition to abolish the age of consent
>Allen Ginsberg, Camille Paglia, Samuel R. Delany
members of NAMBLA
>Pablo Neruda
self-confessed rapist

>Socrates
groomed teenage boys
>Plato
wrote that “spiritual” love between men and boys was better than all other kinds of love
>Sappho
female pedo
>Saint Augustine
had a 10 year old fiancée
>Muhammad
had sex with a 9 year old
>Peter Abelard
groomed Heloise when she was 15
>Francis Bacon
had sex with underage boys
>Goethe
had sex with underage girls and boys
>Walt Whitman
relationship with 13 year old boy
>Edgar Allen Poe
married a 13 year old girl when he was 27
>Lewis Carroll
took inappropriate photographs of underage girls
>Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide
had sex with Algerian boy prostitutes
>Leo Tolstoy
raped a female servant
>Hitler
groomed his underage niece who promptly committed suicide
>Martin Heidegger
Groomed Hannah Arendt when she was 19 and he was 35
>WH Auden
relationship with 14 year old boy
>Sartre and Beauvoir
groomed teenage girls from the school Beauvoir taught at
>Foucault, Barthes, Sartre, Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Guattari, Lyotard, Althusser
signed petition to abolish the age of consent
>Allen Ginsberg, Camille Paglia, Samuel R. Delany
members of NAMBLA
>Pablo Neruda
self-confessed rapist

>>23350451
yeah I suggested Zelazny because his Lord of Light (I'm going through it right now) reads like a trip and it feels like it's closer to the "weird fiction" side than it does an actual sci-fi tale.

Delany apparently gets weird on another level. Babel-17 and Nova are the books that new wave sci-fi fans talk about. IDK if he's really up your alley, but a lot of the '60s New Wave Sci-Fi writers feel like there's some influence from the Weird Tales trio in them. Might be worth checking out. Philip K. Dick's probably the most accessible of these writers because his work's been adapted.

Dunsaney's good. I wish that British Publishing House that did the Fantasy/Sci-Fi Masterworks series would also do them in America. I do believe they'd sell decently here.

one thing that does frustrate me is seeing some acquaintances and friends that would probably have done really well in english lit humanities academia but decided against it due to the current environment being very toxic and stifling. Most of them just decided to get 9-5s working white collar jobs and snatch time to read whenever they can. One of them suggested I try grabbing some Science Fiction Anthologies with a fuckton of short stories by respected writers. Which I've done. Picked up Ellison's Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions. I've got another one on the way that covers all the big ones up to the mid '60s to give me a taste.

I've been seeing the Library of America Science Fiction collections secondhand for good prices and it's a lot more satisfying to read something that isn't a crumbling shitty paperback from the '50s-80s (I still have quite a few because they're the only way to reasonably read some works physically).

>>23349697
the del rey books are usually 10-20 a piece. I got lucky and scored me almost all of them+the centenary collection of conan book that's like a thousand pages.

Lovecraft. I have like 2 collections by B & N that are decently fun and just picked up the dream cycle. I'm looking at eventually picking up the penguin editions of Blackwood/Machen stuff eventually so I can read them comfortably. I'm working on rebuilding my library, so I'm also winding up picking up a variety of good sci-fi/fantasy as budget allows.

Notice you also have Asimov/Card/Tolkein. I'm assumming you're eventually gonna round out the classics with Clarke/Heinlein/Bradbury/Lewis? It's a good set. Or maybe with your fondness for the weird fiction greats, maybe Philip K. Dick/Ursula le Guin/Roger Zelazny/Samuel Delany?

/lit/, how do you all arrange your bookshelves? By genre? Or by paperback/hardback?

>>23339168
Dambudzo Marechera
Amos Tutola
Osamu Dazai
Richard Wright
Thomas Bernhard
Roberto Bolano
Samuel Beckett
Almost feel the same way about:
Ishmael Reed
Samuel R. Delany
Dennis Cooper

>>23308979
Samuel R. Delany, who was a noted critic and writer with a controversial approach to postmodernist science fiction.

>>23304036
Delany died?
Holyshoot!

>>23266298

>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=Delany
>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=Zelazny
>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=Sturgeon
>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=Disch
>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=Guin
>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=LeGuin

>>23266268
>>23266262
It's pretty grim. Can't remember the last time I saw an earnest discussion here of authors like Le Guin, Delany, Zelazny, Sturgeon, Disch, etc. It's all lowest common denominator garbage (and tired circlejerking over Lem, Peake, Wolfe, Vance, Strugatskys). No aspiration to read anything bigger. Truly sad.

>Wolfe, Moorcock, Tolkien, Asimov, Herbert, Aldiss, Tepper, GRRM, Peake, Vance, Le Guin, Blish, Asimov, Powers, Clarke, Niven, Heinlen,Gibson, Tad Williams, Erikson, Bakker, King, Ward Moore, Robert Jordan, Wyndham, Delany, Frederick Pohl, Matheson, Hodgson, HP Lovecraft, PKD, Stephenson, Vongt, Holdstock, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Ballard, Zelazny, Machen, Keith Roberts, M John Harrison.


These are all the authors on my sffg shelf what level would you say I'm at?

>>23257250
>Despite the book's infamous reputation, several respected authors have given it their endorsement. Norman Mailer, for instance, said "There is no question that Hogg by Samuel R. Delany is a serious book with literary merit." J. G. Ballard, prolific speculative fiction author and elder statesman of transgressive literature, also praised Delany's work, citing the medium of pornography as being the "most political form of fiction."

>Author Dennis Cooper said in his collection Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries that "Hogg is tiresome and indulgent" and that the "pace is molasses-slow". However, he also goes on to say that "the book is a highly charged object...[and] that's reason enough to recommend it." In the preface to a later edition of Smothered in Hugs, Cooper writes, "I now think Samuel Delany's Hogg is a great novel, and I don't know why I didn't realize that upon first reading."

>Jeffrey A. Tucker, associate professor of English at the University of Rochester, comments in his critical study A sense of wonder: Samuel R. Delany, race, identity and difference that Hogg "gave expression to the author's hostility toward a heterosexist society, an anger that had no socially constructive outlet prior to the modern Gay Rights movement."

Write what you know, they say. So we can’t really complain when writers write about writers. Well, we can, but they’re going to do it anyway. Here are one hundred examples to identify. Some non-fiction. Translations marked [*].

Hints on request.


The authors:

Louisa M. Alcott, Dante Alighieri, Kingsley Amis, W. H. Auden, Paul Auster

John Barth, Ambrose Bierce, Roberto Bolaño, Flann O’Brien, Charles Bukowski, Anthony Burgess, William S. Burroughs, A. S. Byatt

Albert Camus, Truman Capote, Thomas Carlyle, Raymond Carver, Constantine Cavafy, Raymond Chandler, Anton Chekhov, Agatha Christie, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hart Crane, John Crowley

Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Joan Didion, Lord Dunsany, Lawrence Durrell

T. S. Eliot

John Fante

William Gass, Stella Gibbons, William Golding, Kenneth Grahame, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Thom Gunn

Dashiell Hammett, Knut Hamsun, Seamus Heaney, Robert A. Heinlein, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, Zbigniew Herbert, Horace, Ted Hughes

John Irving

Charles Jackson, Henry James, Robinson Jeffers, James Joyce

Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling

R. A. Lafferty, Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence, Doris Lessing, Jack London, H. W. Longfellow

Norm MacDonald, Thomas Mann, W. Somerset Maugham, Ian McEwan, Henry Miller, Czeslaw Milosz, L. M. Montgomery, Iris Murdoch

Vladimir Nabokov

George Orwell

Boris Pasternak, Fernando Pessoa, Harold Pinter, Sylvia Plath, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, Terry Pratchett

Philip Roth

J. D. Salinger, William Saroyan, W. G. Sebald

William Shakespeare, Varlam Shalamov, P. B. Shelley, Philip Sidney, Dan Simmons

Dylan Thomas, James Thurber, Anthony Trollope, Mark Twain, Anne Tyler

Kurt Vonnegut

Evelyn Waugh, Jean Webster, E. B. White, P. G. Wodehouse, Thomas Wolfe, William Wordsworth

>>23200807
Do you really think 81 year old Delany is really going on ebay and choosing what category second hand copies of his works get assigned to lol

How homosex is Delany's Nevèrÿon cycle? I'm looking at the blurb of the first book on ebay, and it's literally marked as 'Fantasy / Literature / Gay Studies. I don't mind non-straight characters, but not really interested in reading a "queer" novel, if you get me.

Samuel R. Delany

>>23137459
Depends upon the book... Books were originally maent to be read aloud, but some books are written with only a silent reader as the target audience. Delany's Dhalgen comes to mind.

Incest is BLACK culture

>The Color Purple by Alice Walker
"Only fourteen, Celie is already pregnant with her second child—the result of rape and incest. Alphonso, Celie’s father, has turned to Celie for sexual gratification because Celie’s mother is ill and can no longer endure Alphonso’s sexual demands."

"Celie’s mother dies. Celie writes that Alphonso stole Celie’s first baby while she was sleeping and killed it in the woods, and she believes he will kill her second baby as well. However, Alphonso does not kill the second baby, and Celie suspects that he instead sold the child to a married couple. Celie is left with her breasts filled with milk for no one."

>Lord of Dark Places by Hal Bennett
"Novel about a black man who pimps his own son to men all across the USA."

>The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
"Novel about a young woman who gets raped by her biological father."

>Hogg by Samuel R. Delany
"The plot features a silent pre-adolescent boy (called only "cocksucker") sold into sexual slavery to a rapist named "Hogg" Hargus, who exposes him to the most extreme acts of deviancy imaginable. The novel involves graphic descriptions of murder, child molestation, incest, coprophilia, coprophagia, urolagnia, anal-oral contact, necrophilia and rape."

>>23073720
>Hogg by Samuel R Delany
"The novel deals graphically with themes of murder, child molestation, incest, coprophilia, coprophagia, urolagnia, anal-oral contact, necrophilia and rape."

Very on-brand. /lit/

Hogg by Samuel R Delany

Hogg by Samuel R Delany