/lit/ - Literature

>>7827311
>recommendations

Fuck autocomplete

>>7827311
George Elliot is God tier. Probably should start with Mill on the Floss. The Bronte sisters are also pretty good.

Also have to plug some southern Gothic: Flannery O'Connor, Donna Tartt, Carson McCullers, Shirley Jackson.

In fact, I don't know why but a lot of women have written in the southern Gothic / Gothic genre. Mary Shelly and Ann Radcliffe are pretty great as well.

>>7827311
jane austen, all works

>>7827311
Willa Cather is my favorite female author.

I just read pic related and i cant decide if it is irredeemable trash or good, but it was certainly an experience.

>>7827311
Norman Mailer on "Sniffing out the pen of women":

I have a terrible confession to make—I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today. Out of what is no doubt a fault in me, I do not seem able to read them. Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale. At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn. Since I’ve never been able to read Virginia Woolf, and am sometimes willing to believe that it can conceivably be my fault, this verdict maybe taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers who do not share with me the ground of departure—that a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.

If the book is about a woman or teenage girl, there's LITERALLY a 50/50 chance it's by some wench.

Mrs.Dallowaty - Virginia Woolf
Short Stories - Katherine Mansfield
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Poems - Emily Dickinson
Diaires - Anaïs Nin
Poems - Sor Juana Ines dela Cruz

>>7827311
>Its actually posible to distinguish if a book is written by a woman if you don't know it?

yes, I do it all the time. same applies to journalistic pieces and often to internet forum posts as well

>>7827357
I read it described as "feelings porn", but it's on my to-read list too

It's very difficult to tell a woman's writing from a man's. Maybe impossible. If I didn't know who the authors were, I would've guessed that Frankenstein and The Fountainhead were written by a man and The Picture of Dorian Grey was written by a woman.

Anyway, recommendations:

The Age of Innocence by Wharton
Pride and Prejudice by Austen
Middlemarch by Eliot
Wuthering Heights by (best) Brontë
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by (second best) Brontë
The Optimist's Daughter by Welty
The Fountainhead by Rand
Geek Love by Dunn
To the Lighthouse by Woolf
Frankenstein by Shelley
The Bell Jar by Plath
Offshore by Fitzgerald
Haunted by Oates

For poetry:
Sexton
Plath
C. Rossetti
E. Brontë
Dickinson
Sappho
Bradstreet

>>7827409
Forgot to mention My Ántonia by Cather.

>>7827311

Flannery O'Connor - Wise Blood
Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights

I wanna read Virginia Woolf soon- heard she's good.

>>7827354

lmao

pride & prejudice is soft as fuck dude grow a pair

>>7827463
>implying she didn't basically invent modern literature
>implying mansfield park isn't one of the best books ever written

>>7827467

got a movie recc for ya :^)

>>7827476
>disregarding the quality of an author's work because it contains ostensible romance elements
>what is anna karenina
>most of western literature

Two amazing recent ones:

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

>>7827481

>strawmanning via greentext
>getting your undies in a bunch
>making sweeping generalizations

>>7827476
got a website recc for ya ;^)

https://www.reddit.com/r/books

>>7827518

much obliged, miss bennet

>>7827311
Subject matter can hint at gender, but it can also be way off. Memoirs of Hadrian is a very "male" book, while Nicholas Sparks writes material even more feminine than Twilight

>>7827360
Why did you put such noticeable effort into that?

>>7827352
Just Emily is good.

>>7827360
That's a lot of words for "I'm a pleb".

>>7827360
Of all the American "hypermale" writers, Mailer was the one straining the hardest to supress his homosexuality.

>>7827360
>norman mailer

>>7827728
I rather enjoyed his post, except the horrific string of thesaurus inspired adjectives.

>>7827311
>Its actually posible to distinguish if a book is written by a woman if you don't know it?
There's a couple of female authors who have been published under male names without people really noticing. The lack of public appearances eventually becomes suspicious though.

>It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing.

Edith Wharton is my bitch, also have a soft spot for Wuthering Heights.

>>7827826
What by Wharton would you recommend?
Ethan Frome was wonderful, but I haven't picked up anything else by her yet.

Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

>>7827832
Age of Innocence and the House of Mirth are great. If you're more into her rural stuff, check out Summer, which is basically "Wharton does Hillbillies"

>>7827311
I think there are some writers who couldn't easily be mistaken for a writer of the other gender (Plath reads as female pretty quickly, someone like Conrad will always read as male), but plenty of us have probably had the disorienting experience of reading something without knowing the author, assuming it's a man, and then finding out it was written by a woman and going "oh, I guess that makes sense in retrospect," but the fact that it's only clear that it's a female author once you already know that probably means it's at least 2/3 just confirmation bias (advance apologies for that run-on sentence).

If you're into early modern/restoration lit, Aphra Behn is super cool (basically female Rochester - lots of "wow, how did she get away with that in the 17th century" moments). Barbauld, Haywood, Phillips are all worth checking out too. On the 19th century poetry front, Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson match the hype imo.

As for more modern writers not already listed, some of these might seem too "Oprah Book Club" for some people's tastes, but I think Amy Tan is worth checking out (at least her first 3 novels or so,) Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is great (must be on the very short list of books by black female writers that aren't primarily about racism), Ursula Le Guin's fantastic when she's at her best, Margaret Atwood is hit-or-miss. I might be one of the few people who will defend J.K.Rowling's detective novels but I think they're solidly above average for the genre.

>>7827360
god bless Mister Mailer
He was a great American and a great man
suck it dykes

>>7827795
>Of all the American "hypermale" writers, Mailer was the one straining the hardest to supress his homosexuality.
yeah? and?

>>7827311
>Its actually posible to distinguish if a book is written by a woman if you don't know it?
Yes. Here's how:
1) The Main Character is a woman.
2) She's smarter and more fair and generally better than men.
3) The men are stereotyped to the utmost.
4) She will have 2 men to choose from: a cool, hot, assholish one that makes her wet, and a puppy-like one who would do anything for her, even though she doesn't like him that much. Lover and provider.

The above is true for EVERY book written by any woman ever.

>>7827360
>Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale.
Isn't Colette published before Mailer? And she's just the most popular one to be made into Sunday matinee movies....

>>7828043
checkmate

>>7827943
I honestly kinda hated Wharton. I know James loved her but I have trouble with the pacing of her novels (I only read the two you mentioned in your post). Chopin's The Awakening struck me a lot more, as an insight into the feminine mind that still holds up in the present day.

>>7827967
>Margaret Atwood is hit-or-miss
I agree with this. Surfacing is great, the short stories are worthless.

>>7827728
He didnt write it...

>>7827311
The book will nearly invariably be about relations between men and women. Men are guilty of this as well but it's a bit ridiculous how often this is the case with women authors. Even Feminist type writers are almost always going on about man-woman relations.

As far as writing style goes no you can't always tell.

I recommend the book Une Saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel, by Marie-Claire Blais. Québecois book from the 60s about a family living in poverty and the children growing up. It's depressing but I think it's very relevant to modernity.

Marguerite Duras is another very talented author with a unique style, though she falls pretty firmly into the man-woman relation category.

>>7827352
>In fact, I don't know why but a lot of women have written in the southern Gothic / Gothic genre.
Deconstruction of the common women-related tropes.

>>7827360
Pulp-noir writer can't understand women, groundbreaking.

>>7827311
My girlfriend accused me of being biased when I told her that I don't care for female authors, so I bid her take excerpts from books written by male and female authors alike and to withdraw the author's names from the pieces. I was then to discern which were written by both genders respectively.

I was right 9/10 times.

>>7828369
Mohammed accused me of being biased when I told her that I don't care for arabic authors, so I bid him take excerpts from books written by western and arabic authors alike and to withdraw the author's names from the pieces. I was then to discern which were written by both respectively.

I was right 9/11 times.

>>7828380
What are you trying to articulate?

>>7828383
I wanted to make a 9/11 joke.

>>7828383
That you're a fucking idiot.

The only way to tell is if they start writing about anatomy. Writing about the opposite sex's anatomy is almost always clunky and awkward

>>7827374
TUMBLR