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/lit/ - Literature

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11399358 No.11399358 [Reply] [Original]

Recc some good essay collections or authors. Doesn't have to be hardcore philosophy but preferably philosophical and more importantly literary in nature. Fiction authors who also wrote non-fiction are cool too. Examples of authors I'm lumping into this (broad) category-

Virginia Woolf
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
Susan Sontag
David Foster Wallace
Walter Benjamin

I need to read Montaigne obviously but it's kind of intimidating to jump in to his complete works. Is there a volume of selected essays anyone would recommend that's well curated in a good translation?

>> No.11399520

>>11399358

Charles Lamb
Bertrand Russel
Sartre (his essays were just collected by NYRB.)

>> No.11399540

>>11399358
gass, everything else may burn

>> No.11399553
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11399553

Chesterton was an elite essayist. Start with "Heretics," his very first collection.

>> No.11399717

Joan Didion
Montaigne
George Orwell
James Baldwin is okay, but he might not seem that impressive because of the awful people that parrot him today.

>> No.11399986

>>11399358
Paul Valery
Walter Bagehot
Robert Louis Stevenson (Virginibus Puerisque, Familiar Studies of Men and Books, et al.)

>> No.11400058

>>11399358
Penguin has two editions of Montaigne, a complete essays and a selected essays. The translation and notes are excellent.

Also, read Hazlitt, Chesterton, Alfonso Reyes, Octavio Paz and Augusto Monterroso.

>> No.11400073
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11400073

>>11399358
I can only really recommend Emil Cioran, especially his, "The Temptation to Exist." Hell it has an intro by Susan Sontag.

>> No.11400395

John Updike's collected nonfiction, where he lowkey reveals himself to be the the smartest man to ever live
For example
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/magazine/1983/05/09/kafkas-short-stories/amp

Emerson

>> No.11400404

Sorry, bad link, try this, Updike on Melville:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1985/07/18/the-artist-and-his-audience/

He's got about 3000 pages of collected essays, all