/lit/ - Literature

Bumping for interest.

>>6765418

It makes you wonder how/why Stoner didn't an hero...

I found him ultimately pretty likeable, mostly for the sense of self-possession he maintains.

Stoicism, I guess.

>>6690071

"Stoner" cut deep... some of it hit way too close to home.

Also:
>Lanark - by Alasdair Gray

Don't die on me now...

>>6556123

Not:
>Look on my variations, ye Normies, and despair!

>>6551385
The short-stories of M(ontague) R(hodes) James.
Easily the most patrician 'genre-fiction' in English.

He was a Mediaevalist/Classicist/Biblical-scholar and both a museum-director and college provost at Cambridge in the 1890's... so his work is steeped in the very best authentic antiquarian detail.

His work is broadly similar to Lovecraft in that most of the protagonists are a stand-in for the author - an emotionally reticent, unmarried antiquarian - but the comparison ends there. James' prose is more subtle (not hard to do, lol), his uncanny phenomena less squamous-and-squelching and more humanly malevolent, and the scope decidedly personal rather than cosmic. Lovecraft praises him to the skies in 'Supernatural Horror in Literature'.

If you're looking for 'horror' in form of visceral and psychic unease, James' definitely isn't it, but his ghost-stories are still great fun. Mostly conceived of as after-dinner/holiday entertainment, they're calculated to excite and unsettle rather than scare, and the careful attention to historical/contextual detail that underlies his plots (Danish episcopal-chronicles, Romano-British curse-tablets, the Bloody Assizes, Talmud, the Eleusinian Mysteries...) adds hugely to the enjoyment.

He's available public-domain and in Penguin (multiple volumes), but my personal choice is the c.2013 Oxford World's Classics edition: all in a single volume with good critical apparatus.

If the above hasn't convinced /lit/...
>greeks
Start with "Lost Hearts" and "O, whistle and I'll come to you, my lad".
Hellenistic/Roman mystery-cults are 2spooky.

>>5032454