/lit/ - Literature

Wallace, Pynchon and Joyce. Because /lit/ said so.

Bukowski, Plath, Hesse

I read each author during periods of my life where their writing really resonated with me. Feel free to hate on me /lit/friends

Carver, Mishima, Pessoa.

For the feels, obviously. They're each very profound in a very subtle way, and their writing just radiates honesty, which is important for me.

Milan Kundera, Salinger and Franzen.
Kundera had a pretty big impact on me because i read his books after I got out of a troubled relationship and he covers subjects like true love, individuality and human needs.

Pessoa, Khalil Gebran and Kafka

Pessoa because of his expression of nationalism, Khalil Gebran because of his background that I can strongly relate to (we're both Lebanese, his writing is heavily influenced by our culture. He was born 20km from where I was so even his environment, both cultural and natural, were similar if not the same) and Kafka because I love his short stories and adore metamorphosis.

Doestevsky
McCarthy
Marcus Aurelius
I adore Doest because he's arguably the best author to discuss religion and religion-like aspects, and at the same time create such dark-yet-hopeful characters. His critiques of many philosophies are brilliant as well.
McCarthy is a enjoyable visual reader, meaning its easy to think out a scene as he describes it, and the nature of man's evil.
Marcus seems like a very down-to-earth philosopher, and his writing style is simple yet close to the heart.

Tolstoy for his endless empathy for humanity

Mishima for the intense feeling in his writings

Hemingway for narrative mastery

Pretty safe, entry-level and boring list I must admit

>>4019884
Never thought I'd see another Lebanese on /lit/. That's nice.

Charlotte Bronte. exquisite prose, heartfelt romances and stories.
Virginia Woolf. challenging but engaging, wonderfully interesting characters
EM Foster. effortlessly perfect prose and plot.

>>4019603
Faulkner for his pathos and characters
Dostoevsky for the philosophical implications of his work
Pynchon for his genius

Currently:

Sade
Stotos
Hitler

Because they were edgy.

>>4020002
pleb as feck, breh

>>4019956
soooo feminine, are you a woman?

>>4020009
breddy gud :DDDD

Pessoa feels
Eco Nice mix of entertaining and informative. Prior to reading The Name of the Rose I never would have guessed that I would wind up interested in medieval heretical movements.
Faulkner Mostly for The Sound and the Fury. That intricate plot, that revolutionary story-telling technique, all those sads, all those beautiful sentences. And on top of that Jason is pretty monstrously funny.

Platonov, Beckett, Dazai
Because feels

McCarthy
Nabokov
Gerard Reve

I guess

>>4020009

I don't if it was translation I had or what, but Mein Kampf was so well written

>>4020038
Have you tried As I Lay Dying? I found it better than The Sound.

>>4020058
He's very focused. A go-getter.

>>4020038
Aside from The Name of the Rose is there any other of Eco's stuff worth checking out?

>>4020020
>breddy gud :DDD

are you a straight male,how pathetic

>Maxine Hong Kingston - Tripmaster Monkey is a masterpiece of bilingual literature
>Edward Abbey - Gotta love the o.g. of anarchist nature writers. Rip-roarin' fun stories, and even though his philosophizing can be trite and sometimes prosaic, he investigates what it means to be (not) human with regards to nature.
>Junot Diaz - Every book of his. Delicately covers issues of rape and imperialism. The feels when he writes about love and sex. The feels. Also great bilingual prose.

Honorary runner-up: Joan Didion. Brilliant essayist, so erudite, so sharp on issues of California.

>>4020077
i'm oppresively white and privved as fuck, my mere existence is a feelings holocaust against every minority in the world (except the whites in south africa of course).

>>4019857
All 3 of those are in my top 10. I love you.

Mine.
>Bukowski
I like his dirty style, his realistic stories/stuff that actually happened to him,and the utter respect he has for actual art and writing and beauty, hidden under all that crassness.

>Murakami
His characters enthrall me, his stories draw me in, and I love the way he mixes the style of the West (which he grew up reading) with a lot of things from the East.

>Vonnegut
His prose, his parodies/satire and his stories are so interesting and flat out fun to read.

Runners up
>Kafka
>Chabon
>Nabokov

>people putting down Bukoswki
>Absolutelydisgusting.png

Tolkien, Heller, Dostoyevsky.

>Tolkien
>Orwell
>Steinbeck

>inb4 pleb

>>4020059
Yes I have read As I Lay Dying. I did enjoy it. I thought Anse was a great comic character and thought the ending was devastatingly darkly comic. I didn't emotionally connect to the Bundrens like I did to Quentin, Caddy and Dilsey though. But still definitely a classic.

>>4020181
>not being able to appreciate Bukowski
>laughinggirls.png

>>4020070
Foucault's Pendulum definitely worth a read.
I have Prague Cemetary on my 'to read' list.

>>4019603
>DFW -
yes, but IJ was one of the best, if not the best, read of my life. I loved his non-fiction. I've got pale king on the rainy day pile.
>John Irving -
Prayer for Owen Meany is the one of the few contenders to the top spot. It's perfect on so many levels. Love his other stuff, too.
>Stephen King -
fantastic writer, great style, half the time he pulls of a great yarn, too.

Bonus:
Guess I'm one of the few who LOVED Moby Dick. Great book.

>Larry McMurtry -
loved his stuff too. It was great he usually wrote a few novels about a set of characters, and each stood on their own, you didn't need to even read the others or in order to enjoy the ones that spanned a world.

>Douglas Adams -
the whole hitchhiker thing was still the best set of comic novels evar.

>Christopher Moore -
one of the few authors to mix great comic writing and great themes. A Dirty Job is in my top 5.

>>4020219
He's a disgusting man. There are no girls laughing with hm.

Schopenhauer because of his beautiful essays

Joyce mainly because of Dubliners and the Portrait of the Artist.
Edgar Allen Poe for his dark and gloomy stories,

>Chabon
His prose is very "real", his characters feel like actual people, and the emotions dredged up while I read his stories (sadness, nostalgia, joyfulness) are so genuine that it feels more like Chabon's lived half of his stories, or something close.

>Kafka
As much as his stories are about the cruelty of life, I can't help but find hilarity in the absurdity of it all.

>Virginia Woolf
The Waves is in my top 3 favorite books. I absolutely adore it.

>>4020177
>>4020218 <---I forgot vonnegut, read the whole cannon

Vonnegut, funny as hell, really clever, crazy sci-fi type shit and thought provoking

Bruno Schulz, outright beautiful prose

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Magical Realism done perfectly, at least 100 years of solitude is, the rest of his stuff is meh to me admittedly but i luh dat shit

J.D. Salinger, don't know why i like him so much because I usually don't like the kind of things he writes but he has a sort of casual conversational style that i think works really well

McCarthy, as manly and blunt as melville with an added element of the archaic, and it reads like religious scripture

Borges, really fucking thought provoking metaphysical shit, also the whole mystique of tigers and mirrors and whatnot is awesome

i know i did 6 but fuck it

runner ups: Herman Hesse,Aldous Huxley,Bukowski, Richard Adams

>>4020223
>Disgusting man
First, are you a feminist?

Second, there's nothing wrong with his life, or his stories. Life is a dirty thing and sex, drugs, alcohol, and suffering are part of it. But he still manages to find beauty in life, good people and genuine art.

>>4020020
>soooo feminine, are you a woman?
no. I put EM Foster there for two and a half reasons.

capote, heller, wilde, hiassen

take that, femi/lit/s!

this black sheep's got gold hooves.

>>4020255
>for two and a half reasons.
great phrase mang

>Heller
>Wodehouse
>Pratchett

pleb on my level

Nietzsche
Baudrillard
Schopenhauer

Brautigan, Saki, Vonnegut
Humour, heart, and accepting the world is fucked despite the first two.

>>4019603
London
Stevenson
Tolkien/Lewis tie

>>4020337
Wait no, replace Tolkien/Lewis with Hemingway.

>>4020335
>Brautigan
My nigerian

>>4019875
In what other book does Kundera covers such subjects, apart from the Unbearable Lightness of Being?

>>4020353
Laughable Laughs and The book of laughter and forgetting. Great reads.

>>4019857
>tumblrcore

Hemingway for dat insight into masculinity

Salinger for dat great first person narrative perfection

Vonnegut for dem poignant accounts of startling human emotions/actions while still being able to make me laugh

>>4019956
Funny how you can't even spell your favorite author's name correctly.
did I say funny? I mean phony

>it's forster

>>4020566
I suppose this is to be expected in /lit/

Nabokov
Toole
Pynchon

dat prose (I have yet to read Joyce though, so Pynchon is likely to bumped off)

Roth, Salinger and I can't think of a third. A couple of years ago I'd have said Murakami.

>>4020552

Like you fucking know anything. I'll have you know I go out every night and experience the pursuit of aesthetic perfection and practiced apathy. I hit up some of the best restaurants in the country. I drink a bottle of wine to loosen up and another to want to fuck. The hot baristas at my local coffee shops want to know who I am as a chug away at my laptop on a hot Hell's Kitchen day. I feed my cats leftover gourmet. I housesit for professors and artists, inviting my friends over for copious amounts of cocaethylene. I smoke American Spirits except or when I'm smoking Nat Shermans, or when I want some menthols. I occasionally smoke weed, but Vicodin's really my thing. Last night I couldn't get it up for this perfect waif of a redhead. She texted me first today. I hammer out at least 12 pages of literary fiction a day on my typewriter.

You don't know shit, /lit/.

>>4020651
>You don't know shit, /lit/.

Goddammit lit

>people liking bukowski

>>4020651

> dat pasta potential

>Lovecraft
Either it's his baroque wording or concepts that were so outside of the box at the time, but for whatever reason..he can catapult me into a construct of atmosphere with only a few pages, whereas it takes someone like King an ENTIRE book to make me feel it. All respect to King, but this is just how it is with me for some reason.

>Melville
I'm just truly left in reverence with most of his work. Period.

>Danielewski
Only has a small handful of books out sure, but this guy and his ideas knock me on my butt every time. Probably my favorite living author right now.

>>4021984
>Everyone else ITT putting the same 3 or 4 names as everyone else

All of you are
>Nabokov
>Joyce
>McCarthy

Depends on the language

-Beckett
-GK Chesterton
-W. Blake

-Jose Donoso
-Roberto Arlt
-Leopoldo Marechal

in translations
-Kafka
-yalal al-din rumi
-muhammad ibn arabi

>>4019603
DFW
Joyce
Tao Lin

McCarthy, Vonnegut, Robbins

Call me a pleb. Go ahead.

Hemingway - pure prose, and I like his fierce esprit. Maybe he's just really good at making war look glorious amusing.

Tie Strugatzki / Lem - philosophical, thaught me that science fiction isn't about robots or friggin laser-battles in space.

Capote - Liked "In Cold Blood", stunning depiction of the two murderers, felt bad for them getting hanged at the end

>>4022051
>languagefag

>>4022077
you disgusting fucking pleb

>>4022077

my list [ >>4022081 ] seems pretty plebby too, bro ...

>>4022081
>Capote - Liked "In Cold Blood", stunning depiction of the two murderers, felt bad for them getting hanged at the end
We have fucking spoiler tags for a reason dick

>>4022086

it's practically said on the first page that they're getting hanged. But read it anyway, it's really great. Then watch the film "Capote".

>>4022089
you ruined the fisrt page for me

I hope you are happy now

William Shakespeare
John Milton
James Joyce
Because I enjoy them and I think they're unmatched in terms of language. Especially Milton, goddamn.

>>4022090

happiness is for plebs, I'm at best mildly amused by your frustration.

>>4022082
Thanks, bro. I needed that.

>>4022093

>they're unmatched in terms of language.
>Especially Milton

Milton was poser tier compared to Blake.

>>4022108
Blake worshiped Milton you-you rascal.

>>4022108

"Is this another white man's trick?"

>>4022116

Milton was a genius.
Blake was a prophet.

He was on a completely different level.

>>4022116

blake invented milton

if you must know


http://www.archive.org/stream/propheticbooksof00blak/propheticbooksof00blak_djvu.txt

>tfw still entry level as fuck
Dazai because of how plainly and precisely he states everything without being devoid of style.
Gogol, I'm not exactly sure how to describe it but I very much like something about the way he integrates characterization and progression of the plot and some other things.
Chaucer, probably mostly because I quite like verse storytelling but haven't read many other authors that do it.

>>4022162
You are not entry level. You like good authors.

>>4023932
For as much as you may think that, others would think otherwise. Thanks anyway though I guess.

Besides, what I mean is that I am not well-read, though I think I have read some great things. I have much to go.