/lit/ - Literature

What is your favorite work in the Kid Diddler's bibliography?

>I'm a pedophile.
>You're just misunderstood, homie. I got you.

What's your favorite passage of prose from any book you've read, /lit/?
>inb4 openings to Lolita or 100 years of solitude

Are you for real?

>>7315652
Fuck /his/ posters

>The girl’s pale skin, so excitingly delicate to Van’s eye, so vulnerable to the beast’s needle, was, nevertheless, as strong as a stretch of Samarkand satin and withstood all self-flaying attempts whenever Ada, her dark eyes veiled as in the erotic trances Van had already begun to witness during their immoderate kissing, her lips parted, her large teeth lacquered with saliva, scraped with her five fingers the pink mounds caused by the rare insect’s bite – for it is a rather rare and interesting mosquito (described – not quite simultaneously – by two angry old men – the second was Braun, the Philadelphian dipterist, a much better one than the Boston professor), and rare and rapturous was the sight of my beloved trying to quench the lust of her precious skin, leaving at first pearly, then ruby, stripes along her enchanting leg and briefly attaining a drugged beatitude into which, as into a vacuum, the ferocity of the itch would rush with renewed strength.

that feel when you'll never be able to write like that.

Why isn't Nabokov taken seriously? There seems to be an impression circulating of him as a floral writer of zero substance - disabuse me of it

>You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style

What did he mean by this?

>You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style

OH IT SHOWS VLADIMIR, IT SHOWS

words that only pseudo-intellectuals use

I'll start: "inherently".

inb4 "pseudo-intellectual"

Anyone else on here read primarily to become a more eloquent jerk on the internet?

Pic related, it's one of the people I'm learning how to be an eloquent jerk from.

Why I like Nabokov so much?

No you fucking pleb. Take your faux-philosophy and idiotic ideas back to /mu/ and allow my medium to wallow in beautiful prose.

I'm new to Nabokov.

How is his early work?

Should I start with Mary or skip ahead to his English stuff?

>>5291204
It's strange how dark his worldview is as someone who led a normal life. Pic related went through all types of terrible situations for most of his life, and his works are much more redemptive and humorous.

I've read Ada, Lolita, and Pale Fire. I'm also working my way through his short story collection. What should I read next?

who are the greatest prose stylists of all time?

pic definitely related

>>5211172

I would consider Nabokov an American author and I think he is a contender for the best

>There was a time in my demented youth
>When somehow I suspected that the truth
>About survival after death was known
>To every human being: I alone
>Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
>Of books and people hid the truth from me.

>There was the day when I began to doubt
>Man’s sanity: How could he live without
>Knowing for sure what dawn, what death, what doom
>Awaited consciousness beyond the tomb?

Is the poem "Pale Fire" a masterpiece in and of itself?

>"My position in regard to Dostoevsky is a curious and difficult one. In all my courses I approach literature from the only point of view that literature interests me-namely the point of view of enduring art and individual genius. From this point of view Dostoevsky is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one-with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between."

>"Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. Leaving aside his precursors Pushkin and Lermontov, we might list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy; second, Gogol; third, Chekhov; fourth, Turgenev." [Realizing the, really, silliness of such rankings, he adds:] "This is rather like grading students' papers and no doubt Dostoevsky and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks."

In this thread we give and receive practical advice w/r/t the writing of fiction. I shall commence this thread with the recommendation that one not end their writing session when they have depleted their current store of ideas, but when they have done so sans a single concept. You will then have a place to start upon writing the following day.

>Loves Ulysses, but hates Finnegans (in his words "Punnegans") Wake;
>Thinks Tolstoy is a genius, but doesn't like Dostoyevsky very much;
>Despises Dom Quixote as a crude and primitive work;
>Makes one of the most perfect, concise and exact observations about Shakespeare: " The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that Is the thing, not the play."
>Greatly admires XX century writers like Proust and Kafka, but thinks that Hemingway, Becket and Pound are overrated and nothing special.

Man, I really wanted to have this guy as a neighbor to talk about literature with him. He seems to really understand things.

What's Nabokov's best novel?

besides Lolita