/lit/ - Literature

>>17811302
Different anon and can't read Portuguese but the penguin edition of disquiet in english is still really beautiful. Currently enjoying the fuck out of it. Each passage is basically prose poetry.

Starting to realize I'm almost never relaxed.

I'm also trying to put my thoughts down in long form, not just quickly passing them onto the paper, spending a little more time before I let them go

How can we detach capitalism and Christianity from the common conception of traditionalism?

Best melancholy non-fiction suggestions? Thanks.

Any books on the appreciation of art, silence, the 'sublime', etc?

Need suggestions for my 2020 list. I have these so far:

Lud in the mist
The Golem
Carmilla
Boy in Darkness
A Study in Scarlet
The Idiot
The Sorrows of Young Werther
The Bodysnatcher (Stevenson)
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
The Fall
The Body Artist
The House on the Borderland
The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories
A Clockwork Orange
Silence: in the age of noise
The Sea-Wolf
The Monk

>>14232009
>So man's insanity is heaven's sense;
This line is just fuckin magical
Stuck with me from the first time I ever read it

As a kiwifag I don't know what to do.
I've been writing and even got published in some short story spots years back but I don't know what to do when I complete my novel.
I actually think it's pretty good but there is such an atmosphere of nobody giving a fuck about anything in New Zealand and enforced mediocrity I feel like I'd be forced to leave the country if I wanted it to succeed.
Any advice?

>>13631853
Please be my gf

Works read this year, guys. Enjoy the thread. Cheers.
>Pan, Knut Hamsun
>The Lottery and Other Stories, Shirley Jackson
>At the Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft
>Hero With a Thousand Faces, Campbell
>The Horla, Maupassant
>Tree and Leaf, Tolkien
>The King of Elfland's Daughter, Dunsany
>The Castle of Otranto, Wolpole
>Best Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
>Master and Man, Tolstoy
>Heart of Darkness, Conrad
>Haunting of Hill House, Jackson
>Ancient Greece A very short introduction
>Classical Literature A very short introduction
>The Iliad
> A Little History of Literature
>El Tunnel, Ernesto Sabato
>The Collector, John Fowles
>The Celts, Alice Roberts
>Mythology, Edith Hamilton
>The WoW Diary
>Aesop's Fables
>Diary of a Madman, Gogol
>No Longer Human, Dazai
>Wabi Sabi: the japanese art of impermanence, Andrew Juniper
>The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker

I'm fucking depressed. I've written all of my life, but I've always attempted other hobbies, such as art, sculpture and animation over the years. With those visual mediums, you can be a good artist, but I feel like today no one is a good writer. It's like the hobby I've spent my entire life honing is null and void because there's no such thing as a quality contemporary writer. I only ever read old classics--why read anything new? We only have a finite time on this planet, so why would I want to read anything, say, after the 1970s? This is a problem I have. I can't dispell the notion that writing as a hobby is pointless because our age just isn't a writing age, at least in terms of fiction. Only plebs read new books. Fuck sake. My entire creative output is meaningless because even if I did manage to publish a novel/novella it'd be considered crap, especially here... simply because it's new. And I would agree with them. New books are shit. Is there a single author that is on the same level as Woolf, Hamsun, Dostoevsky, etc. etc. from today? I don't think there is.

Suddenly the sun hit the store window and I saw James bent far over the pavement reaching out for something. I swivelled round, dashing past the statue that was my wife Isabel, and swooped him into my arms. A shout followed the blast of a car horn, then a head shaking furiously out of the passenger window. I set my boy down and shook him by the shoulders.
‘Look, dad!’ he laughed. He produced a little black beetle in his hands and spun with it. ‘It’s Khepri, dad, see? The beetle’s Khepri! Watch, the pavement’s hot sand!’
I had to bite my tongue as I ran for Isabel, release all tension—nothing must be transferred. Both hands trembled at her sides, tears were in her eyes. I held her close, wanted to say something. We just stood there in the pavement as my son pronounced the coming of the scarab god. Then over Isabel’s shoulder I cursed myself when a group pointed and stared, turned their heads back toward us even as they passed, laughing. That was the first strike. Khepri, I found myself thinking, let the sun set sooner. Could I not take Isabel to James’s dreamland—could all of us not live there? I shook my head at the absurdity of it all.
‘Peter,’ she said, “I was doing so well.’
‘Oh, Is—so well. It’s alright now. We can always turn back, try another day. Look, it’s not far.’
But without another word she went to her son and knelt to see what he had found. Looking after her and beyond her I saw the street and its downward slope like a gauntlet—all the shops were grey, and the bodies of the shoppers were as one shapeless mass closing her in—and I knew today would be difficult. Isabel smiled as our boy put the creature into his shirt pocket and I wished everyone would turn to smoke and make it easier for her. But that was wrong: the world was full of noise and people and she would have to face it sooner or later. Just as I had.
I had told her before we left that we did not have reach the end of Main Street. All that mattered was that she tried—and she had tried. I did not want to shatter the moment between them, make them aware of the staring eyes and the whispering tongues. My son in his world and my wife in hers.
‘You can take your scarab with you. Just remember that your mother isn’t well outside, okay? That was dangerous.’


From 'Paean', my short story about a husband's attempt to 'cure' his wife's social anxiety, though really it's a celebration of the other. Each of the family members has their own quirks and oddities. It's inspired partly by the scene of Merricat Blackwood at the beginning of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Hey, /lit/. Can I get some recommendations for works similar to The Yellow Wallpaper, Hunger,
The Turn of the Screw and To the Lighthouse? Anything really introspective and/or psychological. Shorter works are preferred as I've been doing a lot of larger readers this year. Much appreciated. Thanks.

Hands of fire fell from the sky, floated lifelessly to the ground to be trampled by a passing boot or wheel. A gust fanned the flames, the crowd ahead wrapped in the conflagration. The bodies seemed to flicker in and out of existence as the sweep of leaves picked up then died down again. Suddenly his voice broke in, timed exactly to that point when the winds lost all power.

One ought to care about these things, he implored—care because it’s the right thing to do. Life was in the signing of one’s name, the folding of an envelope, the race to absorb the fleeting facts of the every day. Strolling coolly along the path, one hand in his pocket, he indicated a newsstand with his cigarette. Why couldn’t his dear friend take an interest? It was after all the natural way of things. We passed through the gate and entered the park.

“Suppose you’re on a train; that’s life going, going on. Kids are glued to the windows because they like the speed, find something funny in the way the trees whizz past and the mountains stay the same. Everything is new, there’s excitement and thrill. Dad’s reading that day’s paper or finishing important work while mum casts her sentinel gaze over her chicks or gloats with other mums. Seniors find rapture in crosswords because, damn it, the mind needs it. Their stop’s first, life’s over. Where are you?”

The ash of the cigarette he’d pinged away lay heaped like a mountain crumbled to dust. I delivered it to the bin mere feet away and caught up. “I don’t know, where am I?”

“One of the kids grazes you and you’re none the wiser: you’re asleep in the middle row.’

His smile told me he didn’t mean for me to take offence and we laughed. It was fine, he’d said this and many similar things before and knew, like every other time, I wouldn’t grumble. But I’d wanted to respond with something other than that idiotic laugh. As we came up the hill and took our usual position at the start of the trail—we had half an hour before heading back to the office—I saw the lake.
A boy controlled a boat from the bank. It sent up a blinding spray as it sped across the expanse. Exultations followed as it effortlessly cut the wind, skimmed the surface and lifted itself into the air to land safely on its hull. It surged with ever increasing speed as the clouds parted and made the waters shimmer. Mesmerised by the drone of the little motor I became aware of a sudden expansion in my sight and all that it encompassed. Looking as if from on high the lake on whose surface the toy vessel enjoyed such freedom had shrunk to a pond. In seconds the boat completed several laps around the margins. Round and round it went until, sight broadening once again, the pond dried up and gravel scraped the belly of the boat. Stranded, toppled, the hopeless craft lay motionless. The last drop seep through the cracks.

Hey, /lit/, can we get a suggestions thread for the pysch books? I really enjoy books like Hunger, Turn of the Screw, Crime and Punishment, Lolita, The Plague and so forth. Would be much appreciated. Cheers.

>>11301313

I wonder if there are actually any people on this thread who love books.

This place is so hostile. It makes reading a chore. Everyone is elitist and constantly out to try and one-up each other.

It's ridiculous.