/lit/ - Literature

>>18195135
You haven’t read it
>>18194645
picrel op

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

>>10539480

What does /lit/ consider to be some of the biggest tragedies in literary history? Authors that died, or squandered their potential, or some other thing that kept great or potentially great works of literature from becoming available to the public.
I’m only about 80 pages into pic related and I’m already ready to declare Richard Fariña’s death as one of the greatest tragedies in 20th century American literature. Take a look at the opening lines of pic related and tell me if I’m delusional for thinking there’s something special about him:
>To Athene then.
>Young Gnossos Pappadopoulis, furry Pooh Bear, keeper of the flame, voyaged back from the asphalt seas of the great wasted land: oh highways U.S. 40 and unyielding 66, I am home to the glacier-gnawed gorges, the fingers of the lakes, the golden girls of Westchester and Shaker Heights. See me loud with lies, big boots stomping, mind awash with schemes.
On the one hand this may be a young author (Fariña began the novel when he was only 21 and finished it at the age of 26) just trying to imitate great writers and dazzle his reader with prose; but something about it just seems “epic” to me, almost like if Melville were to write about a road trip.
In fact, Fariña so far has reminded me of several different authors. He seems like the fifth member of the Beat generation, but way more talented than Kerouac. The protagonist has all the recklessness the characters in On the Road, and feels a very similar kind of disillusionment as them, except Fariña isn’t an uninspired and lazy writer like Kerouac. There’s so much unrestrained energy and youth in the book, like a motorcyclist going 90 in 30 mile per hour speed zone, which, by the way, is how Fariña died according to Thomas Pynchon.
Speaking of whom, there are some episodes in this book which are very Pynchon-esque. There’s an episode where the protagonist is in a hostile fraternity house that he then must escape from that is almost like an embryonic form of any one of the Slothrop escape scenes in part 3 of GR. (Pynchon, incidentally, described Fariña's novel as "coming on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch... hilarious, chilling, sexy, profound, maniacal, beautiful, and outrageous all at the same time.”)
Anyways, Fariña writes with a kind of excitement that I don’t come across very often, and it’s too bad that he died so young.

anyone reccomend more fun campus or young artist novels? they make me feel good to be young alive and a liberal arts student

I've read Portrait of the Artist