/lit/ - Literature

>>11006645
Thanks.
/lit/ is full of surprises.

>>11002094
I read a lot of what New Directions has published: Aira, Bolaño, Borges, Castellanos Moya, Dazai, Mishima, Tanizaki, bilingual editions of poetry.

I started with the Greeks, too. Covered quite a number of major works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Read a bit of Shakespeare. Tackled Infinite Jest.

Currently reading The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Still.

>>11002157
Ew.

>>11002181
Mmhmm.

>>11002150
Ew.

>>11003808
Ew.

>>11003201
>tfw no strong guy fondles my dick for 10 minutes while I read

I has benis.

>>10993048
Read Confessions of a Mask.

>>10986297
I can be a "grill" and I have experience dressing as a French maid. If you can get past the benis, sure, I'd clean your place, anon.

>tfw born without a womb and cannot be a dutiful mother and housewife

>>10988184
I always start with a description that suggests that two characters are about to fuck, and then I go on to describe the room around them, or something sensory. Then I write the finishing actions in a non-medical way (usually the guy cums quick). I try to avoid the following words: ass, cum, dick, hot, orgasm, panting, penis pussy, sweaty, thrusting, tits, vagina, etc. That way I can avoid being crude or falling into cliches.

>She maneuvered her way behind him, taking him in her left hand. Quite the grip, he said. She chuckled, not sure how to take that comment, always on the defensive. The trees provided ample cover from onlookers and, save for the wind and the mosquitos taking shade, there was silence. They were alone, with no evidence any human had ever found their mid-summer retreat. She worked her free hand up under his shirt, feeling his abdomen, finding her way toward his chest. He jerked forward, and then relaxed. It was over.

The grip thing is because the woman is a trap. He knows, don't worry, and you would have too if you didn't skip to the naughty bits. Lewd.

>In the novels there will always be cats, mundane kitchen activities, dingy barrooms, pop and/or classical theme tunes set against a surreal, Manichaean danger zone into which the humble yet increasingly resourceful hero must plunge in search of what he’s missing, most likely to find something else. The hero will spend some time at the bottom of a well, or some other deep and lonely space. His mind and heart will be tugged between desire for an ethereal, spiritual woman (usually the one who’s gone missing) and attraction to a sassy, sexy, down-to-earth gal (who at first seems more like a sidekick on his vision quest but may turn out to be just what he needed all along) … There’s always a bit of Chandler, Kafka, and Salinger mixed into Murakami’s fiction, and it’s tempting to say that the Salinger quotient has been growing too pronounced. But for all the dark elements at play in Murakami’s book—rape, murder, suicide, incest, mental illness, war trauma, etc.—Salinger’s vision of adolescence and arrested development in the Glass family stories is ultimately darker.

-Christian Lorentzen

>A person performing an ordinary act in a state of reasonable, attentive calm. A world of plain, exact nouns, and neat, perfectly appropriate cultural citations... Is it cold—by virtue of its detachment and eerie calm—or warmed by the familiarity of safety, routine, the steam rising from the pot, the ardent music of Rossini? Neither, or rather, both. The temperature, like that within a thermostat-controlled house—or, for that matter, within the human body—varies within a very small range. Even when Murakami’s characters are under great emotional stress, or in the midst of a dangerous act, they—or rather the sentences that make them—almost never lose this placid, observant neutrality. A sentence that crops up over and over again in his novels is, 'I didn’t particularly care about dying.'

-Jess Row

I have the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle on my shelf. It was a gift. I might read it some day.

>>10982689
Roberto Bolaño from Chile is essential reading.
>>10979247
>>10984500

Aside from that I've read Jorge's Luis Borges' Labyrinths and Seven Nights, the former of which is essential reading because of his influence. Alberto Manuel's With Borges is a nice little memoir about his time reading for him.

César Aira is a prolific writer with some surreal elements. He just sits in a café and writes whatever comes to mind, apparently. I donated my books to the library (excepting The Musical Brain) so others could enjoy him.

Horacio Castellanos Moya is another I've enjoyed, having only read Tyrant Memory and The Dream of My Return, best enjoyed together. Senselessness, which I've heard is his best, is currently sitting on my shelf.

Alejandro Zambra's Private Lives of Trees didn't stick with me, but I've been meaning to read this short story after bookmarking it a few days ago:
>https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/6327/long-distance-alejandro-zambra

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera was a great read, but I cannot comment on the rest of his work, and it has been some time since I've read this. I actually borrowed the Javier Bardem movie the other day, which I'll probably watch this weekend.

As for poetry I've only read a lot of Neruda. I tried to find bilingual editions with facing translations so I could read aloud in the original. New Directions is good for that. Aside from him if I've read any S.A. poetry it was from the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry.

>>10984394
Fuck. Memoirs of Hadrian has been on my to-read for who knows how long. How is it? (If you've read it).

I'm this anon:
>>10982478
>>10984371

Forgot to mention Donna Tartt. Currently reading The Goldfinch.

>>10980783
First lady has decent Goodreads reviews, but the next two have sub 3.4, and my library doesn't have candidates 4-6 and 12.

David Szalay's All That Man Is was a Man Booker nominee and has 3.67 stars (probably skippable). Evie Wyld sits at 3.62 pretty much across the board. Both seem middlebrow.

I've only read Zadie Smith's Embassy of Cambodia story and it was good, but it didn't compel me to dive into her longer works of fiction.

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie has good reviews; also Man Booker nominee. Seems okay. Definitely a stand out so far, but her novel Burnt Shadows sounds more appealing story-wise.

So I get to The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota (3.85) and it says, "a sweeping, urgent contemporary epic, set against a vast geographical and historical canvas." That basically describes Shamsie, Selasie, Guo, and most books from these authors. If there's that noticeable of a formula, then it's clear to see why all these books are resonating: variations on a theme.

Waterline by Ross Raisin (3.77) doesn't fit the mold. Seems milquetoast: guy follows his wife home to Australia, she dies, he has to adjust. If anything it fits into the larger theme of moving across borders and displacement. So it's safe to see why it's on this list with the others.

Helen Oyeyemi (range 3.3-3.6). Someone I know read two of her books and said they're just all right.

Orchard of Lost Souls by Nadifa Mohamed (3.81) actually does sound interesting. I might actually check it out sometime. Same with The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall (3.87).

Sarah Hall also ranges from 3.3 to 3.8 for her novel The Wolf Border about the reintroduction of wild wolves in the U.K., which could be okay for someone, but doesn't appeal to me.

The Panopticon is Jenni Fagan's highest rated young adult novel at 3.63, but that could be that the concept is above most YA readers. Seems interesting, but I wouldn't read it.

I'd go more in depth, but this should suffice. I wanted to add more to this thread just to break the monotony of /pol/ whining about Jews and diversity.

For the record, I like to read international works, and one of my favourite publishers is New Directions. But I don't think a lot of these authors appeal enough to me to make me diverge from my current reading list.

>>10974446
Depends on the book. Each one is different, which is what I enjoy about him.

A Little Lumpen Novelita was more in the vein of Hemingway: terse sentences that complement that youth, lack of education, and depression of the narrator and protagonist Bianca. But then you read By Night in Chile and the narrator is a highly educated literary critic, poet, and priest recalling his life and glossing over his complicity in the Pinochet regime with more exquisite language. The sentences are longer, flowing, and the anecdotes send the reader all over from the Austro-Hungarian shoemaker to shit hawks and after dark literary meetings. In fact, the whole thing reads like one long monologue, a death-bed confession (if it wasn't an apologia), with no chapter breaks. Less room to breathe, to think, and that's perhaps the aim of Father Urrutia. When people say it's "poetic," I believe what they mean is lyrical and allusive, sometimes witty. After all, Fr. Urrutia is a poet.

Distant Star and the stories in The Insufferable Gaucho were likewise different beasts. So it seems to me that it's difficult to describe Bolaño's prose outside of one word: versatile. He tailors his style to the situation, and gives consideration to who is telling the story.

I'd cite examples, but I lent my copies to a friend. Maybe when I read The Savage Detectives and 2666 I can speak to his aesthetics in more depth.

I started watching wrestling again because it comes on while I'm at the gym doing cardio. Much better than the news. The women's division in particular is killing it. Really, though, it's probably the most stimulating thing on television. Wading through the muck that is reality TV - border shows, storage room auctions, housewives - just kills the soul, and the news is non-stop Trump, who I'm sick of (not even American). I can't bring myself to be one of those e-reader cardio lumps.

Last:
>Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño
>A Cat, A Man, and Two Women by Junichiro Tanizaki

Current:
>The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
>The Musical Brain and Other Stories by César Aira
>The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition

Next:
>To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway

I'm planning to read more Bolaño, too, but I've been watching the Open Yale lectures for the Faulkner/Fitzgerald/Hemingway course. Some of the books I've read before, while others I haven't.

The short story collections are things I keep bedside and dip into whenever I get the chance.

>>10970402
At university I had to read Pound and H.D., and I enjoyed them enough. Before being exposed to them I went through a phase where I devoured nothing but the New York Beats - Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs - only to discover the San Francisco Renaissance thanks to my research into Howl. So I bought Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and read Kenneth Rexroth's translations of Japanese poetry.

It wasn't long into university either that I had heard of Bolaño. I'll admit, seeing the cover to 2666 in the university bookstore pulled me in and, in looking into him I discovered something. Pound, Doolittle, Snyder, Ferlinghetti, Rexroth, and Bolaño all had a common denominator: New Directions Publishing.

Looking into their catalogue took me to Borges, César Aira, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Jenny Erpenbeck, Fran Ross, Clarice Lispector, Yukio Mishima, Junichiro Tanizaki, Felisberto Hernandez, and so on.

Bolaño, too, became a star, and has even been adjectivized: Bolañoesque. Through that I came upon Hassan Blasim.

So look into who publishes what you're already reading, and then branch out from there. I obviously recommend New Directions, but check out NYRB, City Lights, Dalkey Archives. And then look at the publications reviewing the authors you like which, for me, is New York Review, LA Review...

>>10970315
y-yeah, I'm "male"
w-wat do you have in mind, daddy?

>>10969587
>tfw born male
>cannot carry a child
>cannot breast fed
>current science cannot make a womb
>see this monstrosity

Any books for this feel?

>>10960904
It's too early to make a judgement about a book that size, I just listed it because it's my current read. More recently I finished A Cat, A Man, and Two Women by Tanizaki, which I found odd and hilarious, and enjoyed some the sentences in the translation enough that I made note of their structure for my current writing project. I'd say Tanizaki and Bolaño have both been influencing me. But I like Donna Tartt so far, too.

Off to work now. Might get some more reading accomplished.