/lit/ - Literature

>>13440780
Definitely not that, and no work of literature written in the 21st century because literature won't exist in a 100 years, let alone classics remembered.

If it isn't translated soon we'll be in trouble

>>13440825
>literature won't exist in a 100 years

Why? Are you burning it all Montag?

>>13440829
forgot my picture

>>13440837
What's it about?

>>13440837
>Even the Euros are doing the "A Novel" meme thing now
FOR FUCKS SAKE

>>13440851
>>13440870
https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2019/02/01/schattenfroh-by-michael-lentz/

read this

>>13440832
Serious literature isn't read by a single soul outside of academic faggots who exist only as a descendant to a time in which the humanities were the leading force in culture, that is, the pre-internet era. With the internet, the process of mass industrialized works of fiction was raised two steps above, and now, literature exists merely as an itch scratcher, like a fetishist who wants to read about his specific feet vomit incest literature, or the STEM faggot who wants to read science fiction. Any attempt to bring out true, real to life characters which represent a particular society, author, or mere aesthetic vision beyond the silly formalisms of genre fiction, is shut down immediately and forgotten by the large public, and academia (who is now moving on to teach Harry Potter studies and similar things). Combine this with the death of the avant garde, the fact that there's not a single new piece of writing since Joyce ended literature in Finnegan is Wake and you have the DEATH of literature.
In two generations or less, in a society which will have no contact with serious literature, nor will see any value in the humanities, literature will simply be forgotten, and remembered as "cool stories that turn into movies".

>>13440780
By “future classics” I assume you mean “books from the last two hundred years.” Hawthorne may be the best, then Faulkner. Hemingway is usually a wonderful read, especially Islands in the Stream and For Whom the Bell Tolls—that is to say, the grandly suicidal narratives. Tadeusz Konwicki’s A Dreambook for Our Time is beautiful. I also love everything I’ve read by Mir Lagerkvist, Sigrid Undset’s trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter. Multatuli’s Max Havalaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, Kundera’s Laughable Loves, Andrea Freud Lowenstein’s This Place (which deserves more recognition than it has received), Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders (which I had the wonderful experience of finding and reading a few months after completing my own book about Greenlanders, The Ice-Shirt). Evans and Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Farley Mowat’s The People of the Deer, the first three books of Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy (how could I have forgotten that?), random bits of Proust, Zola’s L’Assommoir. Shusaku Endo’s The Samurai, the first two books of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, Poe’s stories about love, everything by Malraux (especially his Anti-Memoirs), Nabokov’s Glory and Transparent Things and Ada, Melville’s Pierre, Thomas Bernhard’s Correction, David Lindsay’s Voyage to Acturus, Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, a few of Boll’s short novels (Wo warst du, Adam? and The Train Was on Time), Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel, Maria Dermout’s The Ten Thousand Things, Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, James Blish’s Cities in Flight tetralogy (which is just plane fun); the first three volumes of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, and I don’t know what all. There’s lots more. I am sorry not to be able to put down less contemporary things such as Tale of Genji, which is one of my all-time favorites.

>>13440906

Literature in general was NEVER for the masses - books were expensive and generally always read by the elite. There's a sizeable portion of the United States that's still illiterate. Great books will always remain on the fringes of culture.

>>13440870
Not to mention fuckhuge text trendy cover

>>13440928

Copy and pasting Vollmann ... yeesh

>>13440928
That's laughable, in the future people won't read books, they'll be playing realer than reality VR (porn) games at their basement. The books that will be remembered from our times are:

>Mein Kampf
Simply for the fact that WW2 is an incredibly important event and they'll seek to understand one of the minds behind it.
>The Art of the Deal
>The Fourth Political Theory
They won't have much interest in the rest of our society because we're living through transitory times.

>>13440885
Well, I'll be hoping to see it in English someday, even if it's unlikely.

>>13440906

t. hasn't read Anne Carson, Andrew Joron, Ishmael Reed

or any experimental contemporary lit for that matter lol if you think Joyce was the last person to innovate in english literature you're embarrassingly under read

why is it always people that have little acquaintance with contemporary literature who profess the death of the craft ?

>>13440929

also this,

it's not like Jim the Janitor in 1936 would've been reading Ulysses. The stuff was high brow for a reason, it was never meant to be read by lay people. If anything, the insular readership of high literature is only a continuation of the tradition which had been established for centuries prior. And eventually some college students with interest will dig it up like they always do, and so goes the cycle.

>>13440929
Read my post again and realize that literature isn't behind the cultural forces of this time, and this doesn't mean only mass public opinion, but also the leading artists. For example, the Modernist parties in which writers, painters, musicians, directors etc all gathered around to discuss "art" and see that common theme that no one would be called an artist, a "high brow" artist, without reading Shakespeare or Tolstoy or Flautbert, etc etc. You don't see this in our day and it's obvious if you frequent 'art' circles. Literature lost space in the place that was the most important; it never mattered if Johnny Shmuck down the street had read Shakespeare or not, but it mattered a lot as to whether Stravinsky or Tarkovsky or any other respectable artist had read it; literature was the basis for any cultured man, and it simply isn't anymore. With this comes DEATH.

>>13440959
>t. hasn't read Anne Carson, Andrew Joron, Ishmael Reed
kys retard
>experimental contemporary lit
pukingpepe.jpg
>why is it always people that have little acquaintance with contemporary literature who profess the death of the craft ?
exactly why i have the most acquiantance with contemporary literature i can say that no one, absolutely no one has surpassed Joyce.

>>13440780
Harry Potter

>>13440952
If they can translate Zettel's Traum and do a halfway decent job, anything is possible.

>>13440906
I bet you had a chubby writing that one, didn't you anon?

I can already tell picrealted will become a modern day classic. Classics are defined by the age they are written in, thus a classic from this time period will have to address the internet. And what better work to do that than a work entirely written for the internet by a compulsive user of the internet.

>>13441060
That would imply passion. Think more of that pic (i'd appreciate if an anon post it) in which there's a guy reading Kant but in his mind he's a chad intellectual browsing /lit/.

Savage Detectives

>>13440906
How many people appreciated Dante or Milton when those were written? There were like 10 books worth reading pre-1700s and they are regarded as some of the Best of all time. I don't buy it anon.

>>13440780
This

>>13441210
Based

>>13441090
Unironically this. Someone needs to make a pdf version

>>13440780
Time to shill your books, /lit/ authors...you have written your book by now?

>>13440979
>it's obvious if you frequent 'art' circles
You don't frequent 'art' circles. You sound like those morons who claim classical music, or theatre, or opera is dead, because you never actually go and you don't mix with people who do

>>13441273
>lincoln in the spurdo

>>13441273
George Saunders is literature for middle age suburban account dads with coalburner daughters and who think The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is biting, witty satire.

>>13441287
There is a PDF version, it was released in the same topic that the EPub was in.

Here it is:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11COSgkBImgCih0bTbjHakz__Upnjd8dv/view?usp=sharing

>>13441090
based

>>13441506
how can a man be this based, we don't deserve londonfrog

>>13440829
>>13440837
>the ebook costs 32 euros
nice try, Michael

>>13440780
Hopefully Serotonin once the translation is released

>>13440906
>Finnegan is wake

>>13440989
>no one has surpassed Joyce
Krasznahorkai and Pynchon are on the same level.
>>13440979
The cultural forces that would work against the preservation of high-effort lit are only prevalent among the masses. There exist clusters of artists and academics that are untouched by them. The rise of lit-as-entertainment manifests as a separate phenomenon from lit-as-art: even though on the surface they are similar, their influences are almost completely discrete.

The wolf is made the way the world is made. You
cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only.

>>13441273
>contains exclusive deleted scene

>>13440906
>there's not a single new piece of writing since Joyce ended literature in Finnegan is Wake

>>13440906
>Finnegan is Wake
You're retarded anon. First of all Finnegan's Wake is a shit book, hands down. Only enjoyed by the same academic establishment you inveigh against in your post. Secondly there HAVE been good books published since FW, e.g. Lolita.

>>13442126
>calls the 'Finnegan is Wake' anon a retard
>Finnegan's Wake
Guess how I know you're a retard.

Literature and the novel has been on the way out for decades. That said, it did not exist very long in that form anyway. Read McLuhan. Future classics will exist, but they will be movies, tv shows, comics, video games. People in the future will look back on Breaking Bad the way we now look back on The Great Gatsby.

its faggy, but its still gonna happen

>>13440885
>What was it like to be THERE in 1851, when Moby-Dick was published? Or in 1913, when Swann’s Way came out? Or in 1922, when Ulysses crashed into our culture like a meteor and changed it forever? Or in 1955, when The Recognitions was not recognised for the masterpiece it was? Or in 1959, when The Tin Drum inaugurated the birth of new German literature: complex, linguistically overwhelming, and irreverent? Now I know because I was THERE in 2018, when Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh saw light.

>>13442348
cringe

>>13441090

>>13441402
It's different from our times that back then there was a high culture, a literary culture, in which people would preserve and retain quality art. Such thing is barely present in our day, dilluted through academic institutions who are more concerned with using critical theory and the classics to legitimize their own identity politics. But as the classics get less and less relevant, they'll be replaced with the up to date cultural phenomena, such as the MCU universe, Harry Potter, GoT, Buffy The Vampire, etc etc.
>>13442126
>You're retarded anon.
no u. You're the retard for being a newfag. I also never said there wasn't good or even great books after Finnegan Is Woke. I merely said, or implied, that after Joyce no one made significant structural innovations in literature, and everyone writes under the modernist shadow stylistically, thematically and in attitude.

>>13441223
It differs from our times that back then there was a high culture, a literary culture, in which people would preserve and retain quality art. Such thing is barely present today, dilluted through academic institutions who are more concerned with using critical theory and the classics to legitimize their own identity politics. But as the classics get less and less relevant, they'll be replaced with the up to date cultural phenomena, such as the MCU universe, Harry Potter, GoT, Buffy The Vampire, etc etc.
>>13442126
>You're retarded anon.
no u. You're the retard for being a newfag. I also never said there wasn't good or even great books after Finnegan Is Woke. I merely said, or implied, that after Joyce no one made significant structural innovations in literature, and everyone writes under the modernist shadow stylistically, thematically and in attitude.

>>13441090
>>13441287
>>13441545
>>13442810
fellas............................ i'm gonna need a quick rundown

>>13442348
>getting excited for good literature is bad

>>13443386
If you dont know London Frog you will never ascend.

>>13441090
>>13442810
I'm not even memeing when i say that someone should start compiling and editing a 'Londonfrog: Selected Posts 2015-2019' right now. It would make for an extremely comfy cautionary tale about being a beta male in a world of Chads and Stacies.

>>13443435
getting excited for literature isn't bad. awful, absolutely pretentious writing style, which steers the text away from criticism and turns it into VICE-tier journalism, is pretty bad.

>>13441273
Lincoln in the Bardo is alright but categorizing this book as a Novel triggers me greatly and his short stories are much better anyway.

>>13440979

This is your brain on Spengler (not that I’d disagree)

Souls in the Twilight and The Disappeared by Roger Scruton

>>13441704
Houellebecq is terrible, he's only liked by 4chan because he's edgy. His oeuvre can be summarized as incel tier rants that hold no particular insights or any literary beauty whatsoever; you literally can't find a single passage in any of Houellebecq's works in which he uses language in a unique or interesting way. It's ridiculous that a mind so opaque to metaphors, sentence structure and rhythm is considered to become a 'classic'. He's pretty much just a journalist.

>>13441498
Zing!

>>13440959
>Jim the Janitor
And Tim the tanitor. And rim the ramitor

>>13441090
So fucking based good god

Unmentioned on /lit/, unsurprisingly

>>13443841
It's a blog first and foremost dedicated to the love of literature and the introduction of major texts that have yet to be translated in languages other than those they were written in. The mere fact that the man takes the time to learn the languages needed to read these books and the introduce them to an audience who likely would never have heard of them is a feat and a blessing. If you don't like it, go read some german reviews, they're the only ones you'll ever find.

>>13443386
An Anon compiled LondonFrog's posts recently into an ebook and pdf. If you google "The Last Binge Ever Volume 1" you should be able to find it on Smashwords

On the other hand, if you don't know who LondonFrog is then I suggest you lurk more

>>13440780
David Foster Wallace, Murakami, and Houellebecq will be considered classics probably George Saunders, barely anyone has talent now, because they don’t put in the work by extensively reading and taking it seriously. All the shit books you see being shilled now at airports should be burned and the authors hung from a tree.

>>13445103
Is it good? It's been on my radar.

>>13445103
ill read it sounds interesting and short

>>13446143
I'm not against his project at all, I respect such notions, it's just one piece of his writing that stroke me as very peculiar. Are you the author? Because the idea for such blog is indeed interesting, but you'd need to be an absolute retard in order not to cringe while reading the first sentence[/spoiler

>>13446143 #
I'm not against his project at all, I respect such notions, it's just one piece of his writing that stroke me as very peculiar. Are you the author? [Spoiler]Because the idea for such blog is indeed interesting, but you'd need to be an absolute retard in order not to cringe while reading the first sentence[/spoiler]

>>13446143
I'm not against his project at all, I respect such notions, it's just one piece of his writing that stroke me as very peculiar. Are you the author? Because the idea for such blog is indeed interesting, but you'd need to be an absolute retard in order not to cringe while reading the first sentence

>>13446354
This. I will still probably read Schattenfroh, since I'm interested in the idea. However, I remain sceptical about the blog objectivity. The blogger seems to have particular affection for books that are experimental or infused with erudite, encyclopediac bits and knowledge, like in Eco, which is great but can be easily overdone to the point of cringe. Are his recommendations genuinely good or just autistic fits of a fanatic?

>>13445558
Based af

anything by louis-ferdinand céline fgts

>>13440837
Utterly brainless garbage, Lentz is one of the worst European authors ever and the product of the last days of Germanistik. He's a complete hack relying on gimmicks and mindless references. It has nothing - it's not even style over substance because the style is garbage.

>>13446201
what an edge lord. They're just making a living. They're the popstars of writing. Ed Sheeran probably can't tell you the history of music very well, but he writes music that gets him money and puss.

>>13440885
Paragraphs of applauding the book to get the actual synopsis. This guy >>13440906 is right, people care more about the spectacle of a work than the actual story.
>The main premise of the book is outlandish and unsettling. The narrator, called Nobody (Niemand), is held captive in a dark room in complete isolation from the rest of the world. He is wearing a face mask equipped with the technology that harnesses his thought processes, the product of which he calls “brainwater script” (Gehirnwasserschrift). The writing of the book Schattenfroh, apparently the one we are reading, takes place in the captive’s mind, but the advanced technology is capable to transfer the text into a more tangible form; whether it is a digital book or an old-fashioned printed manuscript is not specified. The mystical creature called Schattenfroh is Nobody’s evil jailor. (It’s worth noting that Schatten is the German for “shadow”, and froh means “glad”) He has lured the protagonist into the dark room by a certain game of numbers, which involved the city map and the number 666, and now his victim is trapped inside the middle 6, forced to write the book for Schattenfroh whose total control over Nobody makes him a co-athor of the book, if not more. Schattenfroh represents a mysterious organisation called the Frightbearing Society (Die Furchtbringende Gesellschaft), which is an allusion to the 17th century Fruitbearing Society (Die Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft – note that Furcht is an anagram of Frucht) whose goal was to standardise and promote vernacular German. The book Schattenfroh is envisioned as the foundational text of the secret group on whose behalf Nobody’s detainer is acting.
You see, that sounds interesting. LEAD with that, instead of hiding it past the edge of the bottom of the screen, where no normies eye would even come close to after reading this >>13442348 travesty of an overzealous introduction.
I DO want to read this book now, yes. It reminds me vaguely of two old greats, The Man Who Was Thursday and The Thirty-Nine Steps, two books I never would have read if not for the interesting premises they provide.
Continued.

>>13440780
12 Rules for Life

>>13440780
What part of the body is the photograph on this cover of The Elementary Particles of? I've never been able to tell.

>>13446201
Ryu Murakami? Absolutely!

>>13447326
Scrotum

>>13447317
based

>>13440946
nah

>>13447107
Read my book, anon.

Seriously though, I suspected that having checked out that blog and I'm not convinced.

>>13447221
Take yourself serious you immature retard
>>13447435
My fucking sides

>>13447087
He'll never be required reading in American high schools or anything, but Journey and Death on Credit seem to have classic status already.

>board for people who like books
>can't agree on a single good book

>>13448584
Yeah wtf, it's just like there's no really good books out there or something.

>>13447277
I'm gonna be real, that premise sounds absolutely terrible