/lit/ - Literature

The Shining
Shawshank Redemption
Haven't seen or read (haven't read any Stephen King actually) IT, but probably that too.

Whats his best book?

To write a good story. How true is this

Can we finally admit that Stephen King is one of the greatest authors of American literature, clearly up there with Melville, Twain, Poe, Henry James, etc.? His imagination is outstanding, his writing skills are always impressive, his characters are all psychologically complex, and his stories have such thematic depth to them.

unironically

I don't hate him because "lol pleb genre fiction." There's a horrible cynicism in his stories that he usually attempts to relieve by sentimentality but it just feels phony.

>>13453816

>While T. S. Eliot was inventing modern conservatism by half-heartedly trying to piece tradition back together, while James Joyce was inventing postmodern nihilism by happily spraying his ejaculate over the ruins, while Virginia Woolf was inventing elite left-liberalism by nervously pretending that spiritual-but-not-religious and privileged-but-really-guilty-about-it could somehow answer for the ruins, Lovecraft threw everything—including, above all, good taste—to the wind and devised a set of images to express something of what the world would actually look like if we ever succeeded in forgetting that we had once been Platonists or Christians or humanists. And, given that he takes his literary stand at the intersection of symbolism and naturalism no less than did Joyce, he should not even be denied a share in modernism.

>Consider how much of At the Mountains of Madness consists of Dyer’s description of the Great Old Ones’ wall friezes. A third of the novel is ekphrasis, like the book of the Iliad concerning the shield of Achilles. Consider too the mundanity of that ekphrasis. Lovecraft through Dyer tells us that the Great Old Ones ‘had passed through a stage of mechanised life on other planets, but had receded upon finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying,’ that last phrase redolent of advertising and popular psychology, and also goes on to detail the changing nature of their furnishings and home designs, such that we have to picture these winged mollusks as ‘they used curious tables, chairs, and couches like cylindrical frames—for they rested and slept upright with folded-down tentacles—and racks for the hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their books,’ an image impossible to imagine without laughter. Lovecraft is too learned a critic and too conscious an artist to be producing such comic effects—precisely the emotional consequence of the over-literal fantastic—without design, so what, between the ekphrasis and the mundanity or near cuteness of his horrifying anti-divinities, is he trying to do? He is obviously trying to return literature to the naive concreteness of the epic, with its squabbling gods and strange journeys, its quotidian bizarrerie; he is trying to become the bard of the new age, the Homer of the scientific millennium, the de-spiritualized singer of the new gods we find on the threshold of our post-Darwinian and post-Einsteinian perceptions. It is not a question of his being better than Joyce or Eliot, but of his truly accomplishing what they only wished for and gestured toward—not the invention of a new Gothic, but rather, at long last, after the Platonic, the Christian, the humanist centuries, a cyclic poem of the universe, nothing less than the restitution of the epic to modern man.

Where do I start with this genius?

What makes him stand out among regular genre trash? Why is he supposed to be the greats of American literature? Someone defend his writing.

>>12932782

>Edgar Allan Poe must have the strangest legacy in modern literature: he invented both pulp fiction and the literary avant-garde.

>While these two tendencies may—in their shared commitments to sensationalism and formalism—be allies in a high-low war against the middle mind (exemplified in literature by the realist novel and the expressive lyric), it is quite a feat to have birthed them both. But Poe codified several important popular genres that would later flourish in the era of mass literacy and mass media (horror, detective fiction, science fiction) and thereby influenced such proto-pulp and pulp writers as Doyle, Stevenson, Wells, and Lovecraft, even as his theoretical insistence on a "pure" (i.e., non-mimetic) literary writing designed to affect the reader through the manipulation of form and surface, not to mention his depiction of disordered psychological states and waking dream-worlds, bequeathed a legacy to modernism and the avant-garde through Baudelaire and the French Symbolists and Decadents as well as such other admirers as Dostoevsky, Wilde, and Kafka.

>Whether pulp fictioneer or avant-garde poet, Poe is the founder of a literature concerned with the production of forms (well-constructed generic tales or abstract sound-surface lyrics) rather than of truth or meaning. Neither a thriller nor an avant-garde poem can really be read as one is supposed to read Keats or Hawthorne, whose texts are dense entanglements of allusion and implication; thrillers and avant-garde poems are rather absorbed as intellectual structures and interpreted as sensational events. In this sense, Poe is one of first writers who, as in the German critical judgment that opens his story "The Man of the Crowd," does not permit himself to be read.

I’ve heard that some of his stuff is good, but he’s also one of the biggest targets of criticism on /lit/. Are both true?

How come pretty much everyone of his books has some weird kinky sex scene? Often times for no reason?

Like the Stand, what was the purpose of having that bitch with the white hair becoming a sex slave? What did it add to anything?

Was he raped as a kid or something?

Is any of his stuff good?

Is he a meme author that just produces movie bait, or is he actually a good author?

>the stand
>main character breaks his leg

>It's another thread by a some lonely redditor chasing a brief feeling of superiority for not liking a very popular horror writer
Stephen King is the king

let's settle this once and for all....is he awesome?

/lit/ seems divided on the Stephen King question, so what are some books by King one should read, and what are some books by King one should avoid?

Why do people say he is a hack?
He matches many classic writer criteria:
>drug addict
>pedophile
>mentally ill
>disturbing psychopath prose
>excentric outlook
>childhood trauma
>tough life
>influenced by classic writers

Metallica

>Time's the thief of memory

Is he, dare I say it, the most overrated author of all time?

So with the new trailer for IT some anons over in /tv/ have been debating the merit of the gangbang in the sewers. What does /lit/ think?