/lit/ - Literature

>The kid ate beans and tortillas near the hacienda across from the arroyo

>writes schlock genre fiction with cartoon supervillain characters and stale themes
>less than 5% of his prose is actually good, the rest is mundane filler and unintentional self-parody
>still the greatest living writer of our time
>still effortlessly mogs everyone else in the industry combined
Based. Imagine if he actually tried.

>Basic punctuation? Oh please, that's beneath me.

>He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.

>Harrogate came batting his way through the jungle of kudzu that overhung the bluffs above the river until he found a red clay gully of a path going down the slope. He followed along through lush growths of poison ivy and past enormous mummy shapes of vinestrangled trees, banks of honeysuckle dusted in ocher, into a brief cindery wood where grew black sumacs, pokeweeds gorged with sooty drainage whose clustered fruit gleamed small baubles of a poisonous ebon blue.

How do some writers get away with using racial slurs without criticism?

will his death be the biggest literary loss of the 21st century?
I am honestly not ready

I've read Suttree, Blood Meridian and Child of God. Should I read The Crossing or All The Pretty Horses next?

Why is it that most great novelists and poets come from unassuming and humble backgrounds...yet the über-intelligent, hyper-credentialed academics who scrutinize their work are talentless and incapable of creating great art themselves, and are intellectually and artistically cuckolded by these writers who have nothing more than bachelor's degrees in most cases?

Surely with all their intelligence and pedigree and time spent studying how great literature is composed they would be able to compose magnificent work themselves?

Why do you read him when you can be reading Goethe?

The Judge is a children's character in comparison with Mephistopheles.

I've been reading blood meridian and enjoying it a fair amount and was wondering if any of his other books are worth reading? what's /lit/'s opinion on this?

How does this guy have the balls to say he's better than Proust?

Cormac McCarthy certainly thinks so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5A1WcFoxi4

>In one of his few interviews, McCarthy revealed that he only respects authors who "deal with issues of life and death", citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples of writers who do not. "I don't understand them ... To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange," he said.[22]
is he right /lit/? are novels that aren't about life and death a waste of time?

LE AGUA? WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?

RIP Cormac McCarthy.

>McCarthy has an aversion to other writers, preferring the company of scientists. He has voiced his admiration for scientific advances: "What physicists did in the 20th century was one of the extraordinary flowerings ever in the human enterprise." At MacArthur reunions, McCarthy has typically shunned his fellow writers to fraternize instead with scientists like physicist Murray Gell-Mann and whale biologist Roger Payne. Of all of his interests, McCarthy has claimed, "Writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list."

>"[Cormac] does his writing at the Santa Fe Institute, surrounded by scientists, whom he finds more congenial than literary folk.” – Harold Bloom, 2018

Dangerously based

Is The Passenger kill?

Can great artists (esp. authors) be forgiven for abandoning their children? Is there anything in an artist's personal life that you feel /can't/ be forgiven (to the point where it diminishes how you view his artistic achievements), despite how great his work might be?

Also, who are the greatest literary figures that were reprobates in their personal lives? I know there are a lot: Pound, Rimbaud, and Malory all come to my mind.