/lit/ - Literature

>>1213667
>authors write about what they know
Well imagine that...

Do we really need one of these threads every other day?

>>1213671
It only proves that white men have better imaginations, and more active brains.

>gennrly

>>1213682
>This only proves that you haven't read Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, or Flannery O'connor

Vonnegut was a pulp sci-fi writer. Ray Bradbury was better.

good sci-fi only happens under threat of nuclear holocaust.

>>1213689
Thank you. My hope for /lit/ has partially been restored.

>>1213686 Flannery O'connor
The only worthwhile author you listed.

>>1213694
If you think Woolf isn't a "worthwhile" writer you probably just didn't understand her work. Or you simply haven't read it.

Literature has jumped the shark A LONG TIME AGO.

>>1213702
Semi-seconded.
In my mind, the best literature was all written before the 1960's with smatterings of exception.

Hey, great scifi has been written in the 21st century...
for film and television.

There have been no good British writers since the 50's.

Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett aren't that funny.

Men and majorities generally only write about being men and majorities.

I FUCKING HATE TYBRAX AND I KEEP A KNIFE NEXT TO MY LAPTOP THAT I FONDLE WHEN I SEE ANY OF HER SHITTY POSTS

>>1213667
Change that to "There is no good western contemporary sci-fi" and I'll agree. There is a lot of books coming out of Japan, China, et al that are quite good.

>>1213717
Honestly, most of the contemporary sci-fi media I consume is anime and manga. Sci-fi writers have no sense of the fantastic anymore.

>>1213711
I don't read much beyond the 1930's.

Charles Williams and Graham Greene and a few others are the exception.

Modern American literature is about Jews, New Yorkers, Gays, and Gay New York Jews.

>>There is no good contemporary sci-fi.
Greg Egan dissagrees

>>1213736 There is a lot of books coming out of Japan, China, et al that are quite good.

Such as?

>>1213721

>>1213738
have you seen the anime Fantastic Children

>>1213742
Fuck Greg Egan. He can't write a character that isn't unpleasant to read, and a moral that isn't clumsy liberal garbage.

>>1213738
>Modern American literature is about Jews, New Yorkers, Gays, and Gay New York Jews.

Sounds good to me.

>>1213743
"Usurper of the Sun" by Housuke Nojiri, for instance.

Or :The Stories of Ibis" by HiroshiYamamoto.

>>1213745

I'll look for a torrent.

maybe if i saved all my opinions for this thread i wouldnt be such a "troll".

troll/emo/hipster

>>1213745
>anime

>>1213749
>>1213749
yes, god forbid someone would write science fiction where the focus is on the science :p

>>1213755

AAAARRRGHHH I JUST SLICED OFF THE TIP OF MY FINGER

>>1213756
look at how pissed you are

>>1213753
Thanks!

I think I like Japanese sci-so much because it is influenced by classic American sci-fi that did have those fantastic elements.

>>1213738
I don't read much beyond the 1930's either, but I acknowledge that there a many good authors and novels in the 1940's and 50's, even if I don't want to read them.

>>1213759

He writes boring political tracts.

>>1213761
:D

There's been no good horror written since the 1930's.

>>1213764
np. Viz actually has a whole imprint of things like this, Haikasoru, or something like that.

>>1213773
There's been no good horror since the 1850's.

That`s because all the good sci-fi writers are writing comic books.

I did not like slaughter house five.

I hope watching anime and reading manga never become socially acceptable.

>>1213785
Me too, and I say this as a fan of both. I don`t need a bunch of snooty critics rushing in and ruining my hobby for me.

Hyperion is a fantastic contemporary science fiction novel.

I read the first three Foundation novels last year and I can't remember anything about them.

It's hard for me to take anything Helien has written very seriously. Even his last novels of the eighties were just stuffed with that folksy, immature sexism that became almost synonymous with his work.

Terry Pratchett is not funny.

>>1213785
>>1213785

exactly

NOT ONLY I AM NOT A REAL DOCTOR
I AM ALSO NOT A REAL WOMAN ;_;

>Modern American literature is about Jews, New Yorkers, Gays, and Gay New York Jews

well, at least my experience is being reflected

I'm gay

Tolkien was the best thing to happen to fantasy.

China Meivelle is a wanker.

>>1213818
China Miéville should just write D&D campaigns for a living.

The only good gay writers are the ones who don't write about how hard it is to be gay.

>>1213667
Frankenstein was written by a woman.

>>1213809 Shit just got real.

>>1213851
Does Fight Club count as a non-gay book by a gay author or a gay book by a gay author?

>>1213736
>>1213738
weeaboo scum

>>1213667
>reading short fiction magazines is a waste of time.
Then why was J. D. Salinger's stories so popular in the New Yorker?

I hate Toni Morrison
I hate Tolstoy
I hate Jane Austin
I hate Post Modern fiction
I hate literary realism
I hate Jonathan Franzen
I hate stories about broken families
I hate China Melville
I hate Chuck Palhanuick
Lord Byron was a dickhead
I hate Heinlein
I hate Orson Scott Card
I hate Dune. All of it.
I really, really like Max Brooks.
My favorite book is still the Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

I'm earning my PhD in literature

The Existentialists are a bunch of fucking pussies whose beliefs are nothing less than absolute drivel. Fuck Camus. Fuck Sartre. Fuck Foucault. And FUCK Dostoyevsky.

These assholes are peddling dime-store agnosticism as some sort of new secular faith to save the masses. They, and the audience that believes their wild bullshit as some sort of mirror to our selves are part of the problem and have brought about one of the greatest tragedies in Western Art forms of nearly all kind.

The existentialists were degenerate blights.

>>1213966

>I'm earning my PhD in literature

see, there's your problem

I tried reading Faulkner and I didn't like him.

>>1213974

Existentialism is from sixty years ago. It was only briefly in vogue. Since then philosophy has gone to places you can't get to, because they won't let people like you in. Existentialism was the clue they left you to where they were going next. Go or stay a potato, but don't blame them for trying to help you.

>>1213974
>Dostoevsky
>agnostic

>>1213966

>I hate Orson Scott Card

Faggot.

Just because you got your acceptance letter to East-West Tech yesterday for your freshmen semester doesn't mean you're "earning your PHD in literature".

>>1213974
>Dostoevsky
>Agnostic
>lolno

>>1213985
Thus, why I said that Existentialism was the cause of the greatest degeneration in Western Art form since the burning of Alexandria.

Post-Modernism is a result of this harebrained experiment. And it's a deadly poison. Claim what you will about potatoes and consciousness, but you've obviously divested yourself from any true search for Truth and purged away all meaning.

This society of spectacle is retarded. You've not been enlightened, you've been stripped of your identity.

I loved The Hobbit.
I couldn't finish the lord of the rings trilogy as I despised the characters and it felt like an overdone, bloated and totally unnecessary sequel.

>>1214004
>Claim what you will about potatoes and consciousness

Why would I claim anything about potatoes and consciousness?

Deliverance is my favorite novel.

>>1214004
>implying universal truth

>>1214004

have you looked up deflationary truth yet or what

>>1214004

I know what your problem is, and I know how to solve it for you, but you'll never accept my solution.

>>1214004
the crankiness in this post is combustible

I hate Toni Morrisson. Her imagery and symbolism is so heavy-handed and obvious that it requires no thinking whatsoever.

I rag on Ayn Rand but I still haven't read any of her books.

philosophy of mind will become the proper basis to philosophy in the next century or so.

movies are better than books

>>1214265
Give me a break they can't even refute cartesian dualism in philosophy of mind in its various forms. And then the alternative is to say we're equivalent to robots (thx functionalism)? I think not.

Anyway we already have philosophy of language so it's all good.

I secretly rage every time anyone says anything bad about Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

>>1214254

well if you rag on someone without reading their shit then stop fucking posting dumb nigger. no one cares about your bullshit thoughts

>>1214254
>I rag on Ayn Rand but I still haven't read any of her books.

Don't bother. If her writing was any shallower the characters would probably sparkle.

>>1214278
wut nigga. no one takes cartesian jokers seriously

anyway, the cognitive turn is coming, mark it.

>>1214302
a child knows not to eat shit, thanks to proper education. this is the same sort of thing.

you live in a society of information where people have painstakingly selected the good info for you from the bad, it should be your task to take advantage of this, even though soem noise does remain.

Dracula was boring as fuck

>where people have painstakingly selected the good info for you from the bad

is that right? lol

The field of literary criticism baffles me.

Stories are the most nuanced and effective method of delivering an idea or message. I don't understand why that message becomes invalid because the engine used to deliver it is made of slightly different parts.

I've read lots of "genre" fiction ad lots of "literary" fiction. The ratio of crap to gold seems roughly the same, but the good "genre" stuff is shunned because it has an alien or dragon show up at some point while the bad "literary" stuff is praised for featuring sick mommies and the middle east.

Any attempt to discuss this phenomenon results in NO TASTE, TOO DEEP and scrambling to ignore any examples of powerful themes I present. The whole thing stinks of pretension and trolling and it frustrates me to no end.

>>1214485
2deep 4you

deconstruction seems like an awful lot of work just to take a shit on a text

Frankenstein was the most boring book I've ever read.

>>1214485
The purpose of the "literary," is to abolish genres.

>>1214485

Stories aren't engines.

Ayn Rand will always be my favourite author.

Orson Scott Card is a faggot who writes teenager sci-fi for kids who just realized Star Wars sucks.

THE FIRST BOOK OF THE DRESDEN FILES WAS THE ONLY BOOK I'VE EVER STARTED, AND NOT FINISHED.

I'm sick and tired of having all my book reading peers reading fucking Fantasy YA. Seriously, shit's like a teenage soap-opera with magic. It's terrible.

On sci-fi anime:
Some of it's not bad. Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, and FLCL are great.

On sci-fi literature:
>>1213793
Just this.

>>1214278
>>1214278
Philosophy of Language is a sub-sect of Philosophy of Mind, you jerkass.

In fact, everything in philosophy should be regarded as dependent on Phil. of mind.

>>1214672
oh, you and your obsession with causal distinction, let go already

>>1214672
>Philosophy of Language is a sub-sect of Philosophy of Mind, you jerkass.
Maybe if it all constituted behaviourism and the denial of private language.

Besides, philosophy of mind is kind of useless without epistemology inb4naturalisedepistemology

>>1214278
>can't even refute cartesian dualism in philosophy of mind

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>>1214729
yeah keep laughing bro I'll keep enjoying my non-physical substance of a mind which is co-ordinated to my body by God, feels good man

>>1214708
>philosophy of mind is kind of useless without epistemology
wut

>>1214485

Point taken. Problem is, most genre fiction is unable to get around the fact that it is genre fiction. The aliens and dragons become more than "different parts" of the engine, as you put it - they actually become the point of the whole story. And then it just gets kinda silly, 'cause at the end of the day, aliens and dragons are just not real, and a story revolving solely around them is bound to be shallower than what you might call "proper" literature.

>>1214819

The cunt's been told already, you don't have to offer him your ring.

>>1214739

>non-physical substance of a mind

wut

>>1214588
Evangelion had no point, and was just pointless symbolism. Cowboy Bebop was enjoyable, but nowhere as deep as it's made out to be. FLCL was a mess.

>>1214819
Not the guy you're talking to, but no fiction is real. You can make any story sound shallow by just reducing it to a few key plot elements. A fantasy story about slaying a dragon can be an exploration of courage redemption. A space opera can be an abstract exploration of racial identity.

it takes too much skill to write good fantasy fiction. skill most people don't got and isn't economically rewarding.

sometimes people confuse genre/medium with industry and its particular existing production. this is not okay

Anyone who says their books is "well written" has nothing specifically good to say about the book.

>>1214831
Evangelion wasn't pointless symbolism. The christian symbolism was there to make it exotic to the Japanese audience. The story was much deeper than that. And FLCL is the greatest anime of all time and you are a faggot for calling it a mess.

>>1214847
The story was bad teen angst. Shinjy was as exaggerated and unrealistic as the super robot protagonist he was supposed to deconstruct.

FLCL was post-Eva Gainax at it's worst. Gunbuster is still the best thing Gainax has ever done.

>>1214857
He wasn't supposed to deconstruct a super robot protagonist. He was supposed to be a bad teen angst protagonist. That was the point. You're supposed to hate him. And FLCL is just a funny coming-of-age story with the best action, music, and humor of any anime ever. It's hardly a mess because it's incredibly easy to understand and like, and not liking it means you're just being difficult.

You probably won't believe me, but about 2 months prior to the release of Inception I was writing a screenplay with a dream within a dream as one of the story elements.

everybody in high school that says they are a wiccan (some fucking stupid form of witchcraft and pagantry) arent accepted by anybody at all so they band together in their self-lies and "magik"

>>1214865
Eva was supposed to be a super robot deconstruction. FLCL just fell flat to me, which was a little sad because they put so much effort into it.

>>1214847

>The story was much deeper than that.

No, it wasn't.

At least unless you consider 26 episodes of Anno going "BAAWW, DADDY DIDN'T HUG ME AS MUCH AS I WOULD HAVE LIKED" as being deeper than, well, Anno being an emo whiny bitch.

>>1214881
Common knowledge.

>>1214893
I just said that was the point. You are supposed to hate it. Anno himself wondered why people liked it so much even though the characters are so disgusting.

>>1213738
someone just hit the boring part of kavalier and clay huh

>>1214899

>You are supposed to hate it.

No you're not. It's supposed to make money. Anno is a hack and Gainax is only worth considering in how they make their shows to be blatantly likable.

>>1214964
It's not supposed to make money. Anno hates it just as much as you do.

>>1214857

this anon is right. Eva was godawful. Shinji isn't unlikeable because he was written that way: he's unlikeable because he's just a poorly written character. he is totally unbelievable, a hollow, featherweight paper shell of a real person. his petty fears, desires, emotions, and opinions all ring terribly false, and not only because they are petty. the audience is supposed to feel for him, whether that feeling is pity, hatred, or sympathy -- but it's hard to do that when everything he does, thinks, and says is incomprehensible (i.e. his motivations are either nonexistant or unbelievable). and really, this goes for all the characters in the series. Shinji isn't even the worst offender; that title probably would go to Asuka.

Eva was little more than a manic mishmash of "cool" visuals, themes, and symbols. fanboys the world over try to legitimatize it outside of the anime community in hopes that said legitimacy will make their boners for animated teenage girls and their adolescent angst acceptable.

I've just spent the past half an hour ordering free samples from the web and one of them was a skin toner for women! :O

>>1214974
>>1214974

Holy shit, are you unaware how business works? Just because Anno is a self-hating hack who can't write himself out of a wet paper bag doesn't mean Eva isn't designed to make money. You're the same idiot that wrote this? >>1214865 You couldn't even tell that Shinji was the antithesis to super robot heroes purposefully ? Jesus, you're dense.

>>1214995
You seem to be the dense one who doesn't realize that Anno hates what Eva has become. It was supposed to be an anime series, but Gainax made it what it is today.

>>1215004
saying he hates it maintains his artist cred. lol

lol

>>1215009
Say what you will about that, but I'm not even an Eva fan and I believe him.

>>1215004

You do know that Anno is involved with the new movies and that it was his incompetence that lead to the ending of the original series?

>>1215013
No, it was the budget cuts the series suffered. They had no money to actually do a proper ending so they had to resort to whatever those last two episodes were.

>>1215020

They had budget constraints because they didn't know how to balance the damn budget.

English major here.
I most everything that's in the canon.
I hate Kate Chopin.
I hate Chuck Palahniuk.
My favorite book is The End from A Series of Unfortunate Events. I cry at the end of every chapter.
Third-person narration should almost always be avoided.

Most of the most interesting modern literature is being done in comic books.

I didn't like Slaughterhouse Five until I learned a little about temporal physics. I suspect when I learn a little more I will begin to hate it again.

Short fiction has gone the way of poetry.

>>1215318

comic books are not literaturebut I agree that the comics scene is a lot more vital than contemporary literature

>>1215318
>Short fiction has gone the way of poetry.

;_;

>>1215263
>Third-person narration should almost always be avoided.
Jonathan Franzen would disagre with you

>>1215340

Yes, but that's because he's a middlebrow furniture-man.

>>1215324
I wouldn't say vital. Comics are still mostly entertainment, and thank God for that. I don't want comic books to go the way of literature and become stuffy and impenetrable, enjoyed only and written for "serious" critics.

>>1215357

Do you not know what vital means

Furniture-man, eh? I'll remember that.

>Reading short fiction magazines is a waste of time.

:(

>>1215375
Yes, and I don't think comic books are essential to the future of literature as a whole.

I don't read books and I feel like I missed out.

The only books I've read in the last 5 years were for english class.

I didn't care until I realized my writing began to lose its edge. I realized this when I read "The Things They Carried"

>>1215399

That is not the only meaning of vital and comics are not literature

I always read two books at the same time. One for public and one i actually like

I prefer The Iliad to The Odyssey.

>implying graphic novels aren't /lit/

>Women and minorities gennrly only write about being women and minorities
OP is totally right about that. Ursula LeGuinn, though, produces some decent material, if that's the sort of thing you're into politically.

>>1215263
>English Major
>My favorite book is The End from A Series of Unfortunate Events. I cry at the end of every chapter.
>Third-person narration should almost always be avoided.
Have fun at failing at everything forever.

>>1215507
This post is so fucking dumb that I just shat my pants and died irl

>>1215515

People enjoy books which validate their do-nothing life scripts. Hence literature: "everything I do is so significant because I'm so sensitive"

Anyone with real ability will do something more important than write fiction.

You are incapable of evaluating the books you read because you aren't intelligent enough to understand them in context (think like Roger Ebert with movies)

Our lack of a letters based culture is producing its third or fourth generation of literary cripples (influx of immigrants does not help)

I feel Toni Morrison is irritating as hell and just plain ol hates white people and further breaks the race divide.

I think comedy is harder to write than tragedy, but tragedies can be so unfunny their funny.

I think Borges is terribly good.

I think automatic writing is fun as hell

I fucking love Gravity's Rainbow

I'm a pitifully creepy lover of fables and myths.
I'm obsessed with unicorns, but Elves are kinda scary
(I kinda fear the fair folk)

Subversions and inversions concerning worship fascinate me greatly. Especially with the concept of Götterdämmerung, I like to believe that it acts as a spiral; with each passing age of gods giving birth to the next generation moving in such a violent fashion that it twines together like a rope, solidifying our world like a tether.

I'm Obsessed with the term nobody, particularly with the names Nemo and Outis. I often connect this with the dream that they are all the same people, all originating with the man that blinded the cyclops.

I am a self professed vandal of books. If there's spare space in a column or margin I'll write in it.

I think Diogenes of Sinope was a better philosopher than Socrates.

I'm double majoring in Lit and Creative Writing. I have no idea why I did this...

I think people who go on about how much they love the "feel" of the pages, cover, etc are fucking gay

>>1214810
>philosophy of mind is kind of useless without epistemology
>wut

Because how can you know anything about the mind if there's no such thing as knowledge

>>1215748

Philosophy of Mind falls under the branch of Epistemology. So that sentence is a tautology

PhD in Philosophy of mind who lectures intro to epistemology here, so take it as an argument from authority

>>1215879

>PhD in Philosophy
>Accept the logical fallacy of Argument from Authority

shit, they just give philosophy degrees away, don't they?

Virginia Woolf is awesome. Fuck the haters.

But yeah, the only decent sci-fi these days is in anime and manga, it really sucks beacuse I really love the genre, but writers of these days just can't seem to shy away from cliche

To those who say there's no good sci fi these days because the writers are shit.

Bear in mind the market for books these days.

Chances are publishing houses don't even give a second thought to scrapping a book that is remotely original. It's too much of a risk for such a niche genre.

>>1215888

it was trying to be ironic. it obviously didn't work as well as i'd planned

>>1215888
>888
ur on fire bro!

>>1215894
I think the problem with modern sci fi is that technological advancement today is so sci-fi-like that if a writer doesn't mention it he is criticized for it and if he does mention it he's being criticized for being cliche.

Take for example nanotubes.

Write a story about nanotubes: cliché
Write a story without naniotubes and everyone is going, where the fuck are nanotubes? Not at all realistic.

>>1213667
I HATE OSCAR WILDE!

>>1215900

If the japanese animation industry can pull decent sci-fi out of its ass, why can't western writers? No-one can say that Evangelion or Battle Angel are cliche.

The wonderful thing about sci-fi is that is plays on our fears of technological advancement and the state of society. Back in the day it was robotics, then it became genetic modification and nanotechnology, all keeping up technology at the time...

I suppose the problem is lack of creativity. Where do we go from here?

Frankly, I think sci-fi should stop being so obsessed with space travel and hard science. I've read enough sci-fi books that spend a whole chapter describing the make up of a space ship to last me a lifetime.

In depth character interaction in a different and changing world would be a welcome twist to the science fiction genre.

I think it was discussed in a thread a few days ago that the reason why sci-fi these days isn't that well respected is because the writers fail in terms of depth of character, even if the novels are intelligent on a scientific level.

Anime does well in conveying characterisation. Hell they have 26 episodes plus to expand on the characters.

The next thing left for us to explore isn't technology, but the makeup of the human psyche.

By the way I'm the guy who asked if there was an evangelion-eque book in another thread.

Now you know why

>>1215888
It's not always a logical fallacy.

>>1215879
Actually that sentence is nonsense because it is neither true nor false. You are a fucking retard.

>>1216338
well, maybe always a logical fallacy (I suppose that is kind of the point of logical fallacies) but not always a mistake in reasoning.

>>1215879
>philosophy of mind is kind of useless without epistemology
This is not a tautology either, if that's the sentence you were referring to. You warrant the abuse levelled at you due to displaying such crass ignorance at such a high level of education implying you have a phd what a joke

not very deep but very edgy.

>>1216941

hulahoop what do you make of chinese rooms and godel?

90% of everything is crap and 90% of the people who say everything in [genre they don't like] are also crap.

Literature is no better or worse today than it was at any given moment in time.

Soft scifi is in general better than hard scifi, because I care more about the characters and what they're doing than I do about pages and pages of theories that have nothing to do with the plot.

90% of the people on /lit/ that hate SF/F are people that have never read it and/or people that think all of it is for children (due to having never read it). They hate it because they want to look like they're too good for it.

If the average reader needs a guide to reading any particular book in order to understand it, it's not "high minded" or "intelligent," it's a book by an author who sucks at getting his point across. The only exception to this is when a book is hard to understand due to language changing over time. If you have to stop and puzzle over the significance of things, that detracts from the impact.

90% of books written before [your chosen "classic" cutoff line here] are crap. This is the same ratio of crap:not crap as every other genre. We only see the classics because they were outstanding. Thus, classics seem like they're better than non-classics because you just don't see the books that don't stand up to time.

>>1217038

You...

You're my hero.

>>1217038
That's the reason I read mostly books written before 1930. It's easier to sort the good from the bad.

I don't care one way or the other about David Foster Wallace.

PRO TIP:
If you have posted in this thread and are out of high school, close this 4chan browser and stop embarrassing yourself.

>>1216950
cra isn't very good. i don't know where you are going with godel.

in any case, like that other guy said, the study of the mind is rather important to the evaluation of mental reports of all kinds, including knowledge and rationality claims.

>>1217088
you got a gay hero yo

>>1217038
I'm saving this, it's just too beautiful

>>1214857

Evangelion, whether you think it's a mess or not, challenges and approaches characterisation far better and more extensively than any Sci-fi novel has in ages. These days Sci-fi isn't interested at all in characterisation, hell most sci-fi writers can't even pull off a decent plot, let alone come up with good characters.

Its time for people to stop complaining about Shinji being a detestable character. If you can't tell that Anno was trying to create a character that was a caricature of the insecurity and fear you feel when it comes to being around people, and succeeding in your goals, then you're obviously blind, and just hate seeing that part of yourself.

Shinji wasn't entirely realistic, but what he represented was fascinating. He was put in situations far more tense and far more gripping than I've read in sci-fi in ages. When he was fighting the black ages, of the incident with Kawaru, it was all fantastic, And they all affected Shinji.

Normal fiction can approach character relations right. I don't know why sci-fi lit can't.

Another anon is right. Comic books do it better, and this is coming from a guy who doesn't read comic books and acts kind of snobby about them

Hyperion was pretty much the last good science fiction novel (series), if you ask me. I'm sure there are some other gems here and there, but on the whole I think Simmons takes the cake.

Faulkner fucking sucks.

Ulysses was all right. Finnegans Wake is shit.

American literature has always been inferior to British literature. Mark Twain and Mencken where their respective generations' versions of Dave Barry.

>>1213719
Don't you like Ian McEwan?

>>1217676
No really. Atonement was meh.

Guess what faggots? Faulkner has not aged well and is super over rated and boring as all fuck.

I can't think of any other writer that bores me more.

>>1217690
I didn't like Atonement that much, but his other works were good. I'd say you're about right with that assumption. I think the same can be said with American literature. I'm not impressed with Pynchon or Updike as much as I was impressed with Faulkner and Hemingway. I think Faulkner was the last great American writer.

>>1217696
That's your opinion, and I respect that.

Petersburg is much better than Ulysses, and it's a crime that most people, even the so-called litterateurs haven't read it. It's a brilliant piece.

Fernando Pessoa is also horribly underrated. The Book of Disquiet is a great work of literature.

I don't think Mario Vargas Llosa should have won the Nobel Prize.

I hate Fettered for Life/Lord and Master and I can figure out why it's been out of print for so long.

>>1213759

The point of science fiction has always been about how people react and live with new technologies, not the technologies themselves.

>>1217672
When people cite Twain and Mencken as examples of "American Style writing", I take it that they believe that writing like an American means being too colloquial and not caring about constructing an elegant sentence.

>>1217724
You can make that argument about Twain but it's a pretty stupid argument to make about Mencken

If you don't spell "colour" with a "u", you're an idiot.

When I first got back into reading (about 3 years ago) a friend of mine at work suggested I read the Sookie Stackhouse novels (Vampires)

I thought I'd give it a go and (sigh) I actually enjoyed them

>>1217733

No, it means you're ameri...

Ohhhhh I see what you did there

>>1217747
I'm American and I use a "u".

>>1217757

I guess that makes you one of the smart ones

Hyperion is shit.

Sci-Fi lost it's edge sometime in the 60's when sci-fi writers wanted to be taken as seriously as "literary" authors.

>>1217950

Yeah but not as bad as Endymion. Even the critics hated it back then and made Keats a laughing stock.

>>1217724
I think Twain tended not to care about writing an elegant structures because the characters that narrated in his books wouldn't have used elegant structures. His essays and some of the short stories have more complicated sentence structure.

>> Women and minorities gennrly only write about being women and minorities.
> implying that's a bad thing and that you're dyslexic

i don't get why white males complain that minorities and females don't write books about them.. lol i don't think you'd be too pleased with their opinion of you

>>1218083

A poor imagination is a bad thing in an author

>>1218083
It'd be nice if they wrote something other than "My vagina gives me special powers" or "white people are mean/don't understand us".

I hate every goddamn bastard on /lit/ so much.

>>1218096

I think someone needs a cuddle

>>1218098
posters on /lit/ - every single thing to NOT look for in human companions (friends and otherwise)

If I ever knew any of you irl, I'd punch you in the face.

>>1218102

Let's make that two cuddles.

I will never read David Foster Wallace because of this board.

>>1218535

Oh good! Then my toil has not been in vain. Happy reading!

ya, don't read anything by women or minorities(unless you are one)
they tend to be garbage.

>>1213974
ya most of that shit is absolute garbage and most of the reason why i utterly hated english class.

>>1217720
No it's about the realization of dreams and overcoming challenges and such things.

>>1218083
I dislike when white writers write nigger loving shit.

you and me both sister

i haven't read most of the shit they talk about here, and have no intention doing so.

>>1218604
<---/b/

I'm probably the best writer on here...

>>1218629
sure you are ;)

>>1218096
stop reading JD Salinger, hipster faggot

i really like JD Salinger no matter what the haters say

>>1213738
this is true

>>1213966
I am also doing a PhD in literature.
Tell me, what is it you hate about Jane Austen?