/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18540994]

Has there ever been a greater writer of English prose?

[Anonymous No.18541023]

>Yesterday happened to be a good day. They found a child, alive, a little girl, half-suffocated under a Morrison shelter. Waiting for the stretcher, Slothrop held her small hand, gone purple with the cold. Dogs barked in the street. When she opened her eyes and saw him her first words were, “Any gum, chum?” Trapped there for two days, gum-less—all he had for her was a Thayer’s Slippery Elm. He felt like an idiot. Before they took her off she brought his hand over to kiss anyway, her mouth and cheek in the flare lamps cold as frost, the city around them at once a big desolate icebox, stale-smelling and no surprises inside ever again. At which point she smiled, very faintly, and he knew that’s what he’d been waiting for, wow, a Shirley Temple smile, as if this exactly canceled all they’d found her down in the middle of. What a damn fool thing. He hangs at the bottom of his blood’s avalanche, 300 years of western swamp-Yankees, and can’t manage but some nervous truce with their Providence. A détente. Ruins he goes daily to look in are each a sermon on vanity. That he finds, as weeks wear on, no least fragment of any rocket, preaches how indivisible is the act of death . . . Slothrop’s Progress: London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he can find himself inside a parable.

[Anonymous No.18541189]

bump

[Anonymous No.18541827]

>>18540994
>he didn't post it
Why didn't you post it?

[Anonymous No.18542831]

>>18540994
>>18541023
McCarthy is better

[Anonymous No.18542860]

>>18542831
Yes. Pynchon is for people who like video games. Reddit par excellence.

[Anonymous No.18542873]

Robert Burton.

[Anonymous No.18542928]

Salinger. I love the simplicity of it. His prose is so neat and so well constructed, the kind that doesn't need superfluities to make it seem smarter than it is. It just IS good.

[Anonymous No.18542936]

>>18542831
I unironically agree with this; Joyce was no doubt a literary genius but his work is too colloquial, too autobiographical, and too experimental in the case of his later works

[Anonymous No.18542937]

>>18542928
Unironically this. I'm not American, but he genuinely captured the way I thought as a youth.

[Anonymous No.18543011]

>>18541023
The way the Shirley Temple smile sets up what later happens in 300 pages is fucking brilliant; I wonder if the icebox imagery is meant to be intentionally foreshadowing part 4?

[Anonymous No.18543031]

>>18540994
His disciple.

[Anonymous No.18543243]

>>18541023
Great final sentence

[Anonymous No.18543475]

>>18541023
This is probably better with context but it isn't very good taken on its own.

[Anonymous No.18543617]

>>18542936
not a single of those three count as criticisms desu

[Anonymous No.18543624]

>>18543031
hes good but I relate to Joyces aesthetic and way of viewing life more

[OP No.18543631]

I havent even read ulysses yet im just cumming over every sentence in Portrait (and ive read Dubliners)

[Anonymous No.18543830]

>>18542936
Joyce books only work, because they are studied and celebrated in the way they are. Many jokes in Ulysses don't work that well, if you are clueless about his biography and other works.

[Anonymous No.18543842]

>>18541023
I remember that like yesterday, as well as the evensong service that happens around the same section. Both are so beautiful it almost hurts

[Anonymous No.18543906]

>>18541023
> There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural, as distinct from human law, as integral parts of the human whole: the necessity of destruction to procure alimentary sustenance: the painful character of the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and death: the monotonous menstruation of simian and (particularly) human females extending from the age of puberty to the menopause: inevitable accidents at sea, in mines and factories: certain very painful maladies and their resultant surgical operations, innate lunacy and congenital criminality, decimating epidemics: catastrophic cataclysms which make terror the basis of human mentality: seismic upheavals the epicentres of which are located in densely populated regions: the fact of vital growth, through convulsions of metamorphosis, from infancy through maturity to decay.
Joyce is better.

[Anonymous No.18544003]

>>18541023
great

[Anonymous No.18544090]

>>18543906
not even like his best line

[Anonymous No.18544095]

Nabokov

[Anonymous No.18544135]

>>18543624
This is what’s always kept me away from Beckett.

[Anonymous No.18544160]

>>18543906
Completely overwritten.

[Anonymous No.18544194]

>>18540994
Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck.

Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun's heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns on Howth. Below us bay sleeping sky. No sound. [...] Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather scrub my hand under her nape, you'll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft, warm, sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her; eyes, her lips, her stretched neck, beating, woman's breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.

Me. And me now.

Stuck, the flies buzzed.

His downcast eyes followed the silent veining of the oaken slab. Beauty: it curves, curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires. Can see them library museum standing in the round hall, naked goddesses. Aids to digestion. They don't care what man looks. All to see. Never speaking [...]. Suppose she did Pygmalion and Galatea what would she say first?

Mortal! Put you in your proper place. Quaffing nectar at mess with gods, golden dishes, all ambrosial. Not like a tanner lunch we have, boiled mutton, carrots and turnips, bottle of Allsop. Nectar, imagine it drinking electricity: gods' food. Lovely forms of woman sculped Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine. They have no. Never looked. I'll look today. Keeper won't see. Bend down let something fall see if she.

[Anonymous No.18544223]

She prayed for all. She would pray for him.

Gracias.

No puedo hacerlo de otro modo.

He nodded. He knew her well enough, this old woman of Mexico, her sons long dead in that blood and violence which her prayers and her prostrations seemed powerless to appease. Her frail form was a constant in that land, her silent anguishings. Beyond the church walls the night harbored a millennial dread panoplied in feathers and the scales of royal fish and yet fed upon the children still who could say what worse wastes of war and torment and despair the old woman’s constancy might not have stayed, what direr histories yet against which could be counted at last nothing more than her small figure bent and mumbling, her crone’s hands clutching her beads of fruitseed. Unmoving, austere, implacable. Before just such a God.

[Anonymous No.18544239]

>>18544095
Nabokov would concede that Joyce was better

[Anonymous No.18544244]

2ez

[Anonymous No.18544310]

>>18540994
I keep wondering if Joyce had read Melville. I know that Moby-Dick was starting to get popular around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, but was it wide-spread enough for an Irishman living in France to have read it?

[Anonymous No.18544312]

>>18544310
>around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century
Fuck's sake, I meant from the 19th to the 20th century but I am sure you all know that.

[Anonymous No.18544352]

>>18543624
Which is what? Being a degenerate retard?
>Roybag the retardailer
>WEW LAD NOW IM LAFFIN INNIT

[Anonymous No.18544381]

>>18544310
I started asking myself that around the newpaper chapter, it was much too similar to the structure of moby dick to be a coincidence, atleast in my eyes.
>>18544160
That specific passage is from a chapter where joyce was trying to be as analytical and wordy and he physically can while still maintaining quality.

[Anonymous No.18544437]

>>18542937
>he genuinely captured the way I thought as a youth
Yes...
" 'Sensitive'. That killed me. That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a goddam toilet seat."

[Anonymous No.18545039]

Mccarthy and Gass

[Anonymous No.18545070]

>>18545039
All I wanted was to punch Gassmeister's potbelly

[Anonymous No.18545526]

>>18545039
>McCarthy
Unique style and enjoyable but limited in subject. As much as he derides proust for being incapable of talking about death(which is an outright false claim), he himself can't really seem to talk about anything but death and violence
>Gass
The most frustrating american author. Not for his difficulty, but for his personal philosophy.

[Anonymous No.18545557]

>>18545526
What do you mean by Gass' personal philosophy anon?

[Anonymous No.18545663]

>>18545557
The epitome of baby boomer democrat with all that entails

[Anonymous No.18545672]

>>18545526
>he himself can't really seem to talk about anything but death and violence
He does. That is like blaming Proust for always being too touchy, feely and sensitive without change. It is bullshit

[Anonymous No.18545676]

>>18543906
Why would you choose this to represent him. Not a single thought here that isn’t a platitude and it doesn’t even have the elegance of his best writing

[Anonymous No.18545697]

>>18541023
superb

[Anonymous No.18545865]

>>18544239
He already did. Nabokov said that his own prose is patball in comparison to Joyce

[Anonymous No.18545885]

>>18545526
>As much as he derides proust for being incapable of talking about death
lmao he made one off-hand statement where he said that he personally didn't like them (he "found them strange"), but you make it sound like he went on an impassioned rant about how much he hates them

[Anonymous No.18545925]

>>18540994
yep

[Anonymous No.18546083]

>>18541023
I'm missing some context. This doesn't read right.

[Anonymous No.18546124]

>>18540994
too normie for /lit/, but he's great nonetheless

[Anonymous No.18546155]

>>18545663
>baby boomer
Born: July 30, 1924

[Anonymous No.18546503]

>>18546124
Bro did you just try to claim orwell of all people as equal to joyce

[Anonymous No.18546536]

>>18544310
he certainly read alot of obscure things, so it wouldn't suprise me

[Anonymous No.18546577]

>>18540994
Maybe, though in any case Joyce is one of the definitive beltnotches for the language. Normally I don't really enjoy elaborate baroque Pseudolatin, but Browne's peaks are extremely moving and elegant.
>There is nothing strictly immortall, but immortality; whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end. All others have a dependent being, and within the reach of destruction, which is the peculiar of that necessary essence that cannot destroy it self; And the highest strain of omnipotency to be so powerfully constituted, as not to suffer even from the power of it self. But the sufficiency of Christian Immortality frustrates all earthly glory, and the quality of either state after death, makes a folly of posthumous memory. God who can only destroy our souls, and hath assured our resurrection, either of our bodies or names hath directly promised no duration. Wherein there is so much chance that the boldest Expectants have found unhappy frustration; and to hold long subsistence, seems but a scape in oblivion. But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equall lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us. A small fire sufficeth for life, great flames seemed too little after death, while men vainly affected precious pyres, and to burn like Sardanapalus, but the wisedom of funerall Laws found the folly of prodigall blazes, and reduced undoing fires, unto the rule of sober obsequies, wherein few could be so mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a mourner, and an Urne.

[Anonymous No.18546579]

>>18542831
Fucking retard/American

[Anonymous No.18546587]

>>18543842
The evensong section absolutely kills me it's the most I've read any piece of writing.

[Anonymous No.18546645]

Something from the stuttering hand comes back to us; resonances from the Wake. It's a rhythm that may enter the mind, Earish he calls it. It is mine, in scrawl, the jaunt, the incessant nature; a furtherance, my ministry. Meaning is inherent to language; we are ordering, in channels, coal-black lamplight, to frieze. A comma, a semicolon, the parenthesis, of use. Fullstop. I do have it, don't I, pardner? A tongue. Two pair. Roll slab!

[Anonymous No.18546720]

>>18544090
>>18544160
>>18545676
t. never read ulysses

[Anonymous No.18547360]

>>18546579
cry more europansy

[Anonymous No.18547378]

>>18541023
Damn this just feels right to read.

[Anonymous No.18547390]

>>18541023
Why did he have to name him slothrop

[Anonymous No.18547486]

>>18541023
>the eurocuck shakes in fear as he reads this

[Anonymous No.18547503]

>>18543631
just you wait, your gonna run out of cum before even reaching three quarters of ulysses

[Anonymous No.18547512]

>>18546124
t. Didn't read OP.

[Anonymous No.18547610]

'And I had to get a grip on it in order to extract the gnat from her eye. I was merely steadying it.'
'You were steadying it gloatingly.'
'I wasn't!'
'Pardon me. I have eyes and can see when a man is steadying a chin gloatingly and when he isn't. You were obviously delighted to have an excuse for soiling her chin with your foul fingers.'
'You are wrong, Lord Spodecup.'
'And, as I say, I know what your game is. You are trying to undermine me, to win her from me with your insidious guile'

[Anonymous No.18548864]

>>18544310
Probably not
I feel like if he had read it he would have dropped a reference to it

[Anonymous No.18549047]

>>18545925
holy retard

[Anonymous No.18549053]

>>18547503
glad to hear it

[Anonymous No.18549357]

>>18549047
Shakespeare did write multiple sections of plays in prose
Notably, john falstaff's lines in the henry plays

[Anonymous No.18549418]

>>18544223
this is very bad, I was considering reading more Mccarthy but I think this has put me off for good

[Anonymous No.18549442]

>>18540994
Kneel, Eurofag

[Anonymous No.18549449]

>>18546645
tf is this?

[Anonymous No.18549547]

>>18549418
Filtered.

[Anonymous No.18549571]

>>18542831
McSharty is overrated
>noooo punctuation is so heckin lame not using punctuation means im a unique snowflakerino

[Anonymous No.18549580]

>>18549571
he definitely is talented, some of blood meridian impressed me a lot, but it all felt rather childish, not surprising bloom liked him so much

[Anonymous No.18549581]

>>18549418
Stick to your own language, ESL.

[Anonymous No.18549584]

>>18549442
towards the end of Moby Dick he starts repeating the word verdure

[Anonymous No.18549588]

>>18545526
Is there a bigger, more butthurt fanbase than Proustfags? An achievement considering how few they are lmao.

[Anonymous No.18549593]

>>18546155
To a zoom zoom anyone over the age of 30 is a boomer

[Anonymous No.18549594]

>>18549588
The proust quote speaks very ill of Mccarthy's breadth of thought, regardless of Proust's merits

[Anonymous No.18549601]

>>18549580
Retard

[Anonymous No.18549607]

>>18549580
Yeah, I think a lot of people only like him because of the "mature" subject matter as though violence is anything new in media

[Anonymous No.18549608]

>>18540994
Embarrassing you even had to ask.

[Anonymous No.18549610]

>>18545039
american "writers"
lol

[Anonymous No.18549616]

>>18549607
>subject matter as though violence is anything new in media
Ghastly. Absolutely ghastly. The Zoomerism is absolutely over the top.

[Anonymous No.18549625]

>>18549610
Post a better passage than this from the entirety of European literature

Going up a track of a road through the quarry woods where all about lay enormous blocks and tablets of stone weathered gray and grown with deep green moss, toppled monoliths among the trees and vines like traces of an older race of man. This rainy summer day. He passed a dark lake of silent jade where the moss walls rose sheer and plumb and a small blue bird sat slant upon a guywire in the void.

Ballard leveled the rifle at the bird but something of an old foreboding made him hold. Mayhaps the bird felt it too. It flew. Small. Tiny. Gone. The woods were filled with silence. Ballard let the hammer down with the ball of his thumb and wearing the rifle on his neck like a yoke with his hands dangling over barrel and buttstock he went up the quarry road. The mud packed with tins trod flat, with broken glass. The bushes strewn with refuse. Yonder through the woods a roof and smoke from a chimney. He came into a clearing where two cars lay upturned at either side of the road like wrecked sentinels and he went past great levees of junk and garbage toward the shack at the edge of the dump. An assortment of cats taking the weak sun watched him go. Ballard pointed the rifle at a large mottled tom and said bang. The cat looked at him without interest. It seemed to think him not too bright. Ballard spat on it and it immediately wiped the spittle from its head with a heavy forepaw and set about washing the spot. Ballard went on up the path through the trash and carparts.

[Anonymous No.18549633]

>>18549594
It speaks nothing beyond his very subjective taste. But of couse Proust fags are insanely insecure that they let him live in their heads rent free. Not everybody who speaks ill of the frog is in the wrong. Even Joyce didn't like him ffs.

[Anonymous No.18549636]

>>18549625
found the mutt

[Anonymous No.18549692]

>>18549584
verdure
>>18549625
gif related
>>18549608
Oh herro I make a duh flied lice
>>18549633
That's because they know deep down that although his prose may be nice, the story puts them to sleep

[Anonymous No.18549749]

>>18549625
>Going up a track of a road through the quarry woods where all about lay enormous blocks and tablets of stone weathered gray and grown with deep green moss, toppled monoliths among the trees and vines like traces of an older race of man
Hot damn! That is a brilliant sentence.

[Anonymous No.18549764]

>>18549636
>>18549692
Seethe

[Anonymous No.18549781]

>>18541023
>Yess, yess," all staring at him, "but then why keep saying 'mind and body'? Why make that distinction?" Because it's hard to get over the wonder of finding that Earth is a living critter, after all these years of thinking about a big dumb rock to find a body and psyche, he feels like a child again, he knows that in theory he must not attach himself, but still he is in love with his sense of wonder, with having found it again, even this late, even knowing he must soon let it go. . . . To find that Gravity, taken so for granted, is really something eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth's mindbody . . . having hugged to its holy center the wastes of dead species, gathered, packed, transmuted, realigned, and rewoven molecules to be taken up again by the coal-tar Kabbalists of the other side, the ones Bland on his voyages has noted, taken boiled off, teased apart, explicated to every last permutation of useful magic, centuries past exhaustion still finding new molecular pieces, combining and recombining them into new synthetics—"Forget them, they are no better than the Qlippoth, the shells of the dead, you must not waste your time with them.

[Anonymous No.18549789]

>>18547390
Sloth+Winthrop

[Anonymous No.18549791]

>>18549789
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothrop_Stoddard

also Tyrone Slothrop is an anagram for "Sloth or Entropy"

[Anonymous No.18549801]

>>18549781
So Pynchon is 'go green, muh arda' fag?

[Anonymous No.18549802]

>>18540994
Virginia Woolf

[Anonymous No.18549804]

>>18549801

[Anonymous No.18549805]

>>18549802
Frater BTFO'd her.

[Anonymous No.18550036]

>>18549801
what d does the Silmarillion have to do with this

[Anonymous No.18550045]

>>18549802
I don't think anyone on this board even likes her. im excited to read her because a suicidal lesbian misandrist borderline personality disorder high modernist sounds like an exceptionally interesting read. I enjoy reading about the depths of female absurdity as I do with men.

[Anonymous No.18550176]

>>18550036
Pynchon is a fan of Tolkien

[Anonymous No.18550634]

>>18549584
It was his favourite word.

[Anonymous No.18551633]

>>18545070
I wonder if you rubbed it hard enough would his eyes would slowly become less sunken?

[Anonymous No.18551813]

>>18542831
Jesus Christ. The fucking pleb level of this post is off the chart.

[Anonymous No.18551866]

Sterne

[Anonymous No.18551948]

>>18551813
Post your pick.

[Anonymous No.18552083]

Nabokov >>>> everyone else
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.

[Anonymous No.18552161]

>>18542831
>>18552083
This is the dilemma; I personally enjoy reading Nabokov and McCarthy much more than I do reading Joyce and Faulkner

[Anonymous No.18552200]

>>18552161
I don’t care for McCarthy but I definitely relate about Nabokov. He wrote playfully and energetically, which makes more his convoluted sentences easy to get through. I’ve tried reading Faulkner several times but that shit is so fucking dry.

[Anonymous No.18552365]

>>18552083
>>18552200
yeah, Nabokov may have considered Joyce the supreme prose stylist, but Nabby's prose absolutely sings in a way that Joyce's doesnt.
>What attracted me was neither her ways, which I thought repulsively vivacious, nor her looks, which other men thought striking. She had wide-spaced eyes very much like her sister’s, of a frank, frightened blue with dark points in a radial arrangement. The interval between her thick black eyebrows was always shiny, and shiny too were the fleshy volutes of her nostrils. The coarse texture of her epiderm looked almost masculine, and, in the stark lamplight of her studio, you could see the pores of her thirty-two-year-old face fairly gaping at you like something in an aquarium. She used cosmetics with as much zest as her little sister had, but with an additional slovenliness that would result in her big front teeth getting some of the rouge. She was handsomely dark, wore a not too tasteless mixture of fairly smart heterogeneous things, and had a so-called good figure; but all of her was curiously frowzy, after a way I obscurely associated with left-wing enthusiasms in politics and “advanced” banalities in art, although, actually, she cared for neither. Her coily hairdo, on a part-and-bun basis, might have looked feral and bizarre had it not been thoroughly domesticated by its own soft unkemptness at the vulnerable nape. Her fingernails were gaudily painted, but badly bitten and not clean. Her lovers were a silent young photographer with a sudden laugh and two older men, brothers, who owned a small printing establishment across the street. I wondered at their tastes whenever I glimpsed, with a secret shudder, the higgledy-piggledy striation of black hairs that showed all along her pale shins through the nylon of her stockings with the scientific distinctness of a preparation flattened under glass; or when I felt, at her every movement, the dullish, stalish, not particularly conspicuous but all-pervading and depressing emanation that her seldom bathed flesh spread from under weary perfumes and creams.
Obviously this is far from one of his best passages but damn

[Anonymous No.18552394]

Nobody really talks about Marquez in the same sentence as Joyce, perhaps rightfully so, but he’s capable of magic too:

He sold everything, even the tame jaguar that teased passersby from the courtyard of his house, and he bought an eternal ticket on a train that never stopped traveling. In the postcards that he sent from the way stations he would describe with shouts the instantaneous images that he had seen from the window of his coach, and it was as if he were tearing up and throwing into oblivion some long, evanescent poem: the chimerical Negroes in the cotton fields of Louisiana, the winged horses in the bluegrass of Kentucky, the Greek lovers in the infernal sunsets of Arizona, the girl in the red sweater painting watercolors by a lake in Michigan who waved at him with her brushes, not to say farewell but out of hope, because she did not know that she was watching a train with no return passing by.

[Anonymous No.18552398]

>>18552394
this is pretty, what is this from?

[Anonymous No.18552407]

>>18552398
One Hundred Years of Solitude

[Anonymous No.18552415]

>>18552394
People who write in spanish prose are disqualified in talks of the best english prose writer

[Anonymous No.18552426]

>>18552415
lmao fair, I missed the word english in op’s post

[Anonymous No.18552739]

>>18552415
What about the translator?

[Anonymous No.18553357]

>>18549625
Pretty good. This one's one of my favourites
>A light sputtered off in the field and a blue tailed rocket went skittering toward Canis Major. High above their upturned faces it burst, sprays of lit glycerine flaring across the night, trailing down the sky in loosely falling ribbons of hot spectra soon burnt to naught. Another went up, a long whishing sound, fishtailing aloft. In the bloom of its opening you could see like its shadow the image of the rocket gone before, the puff of black smoke and ashen trails arcing out and down like a huge and dark medusa squatting in the sky.
Also lmao@yuronigs acting smug. Even super minor McCarthy destroys their hypejob greats. Absolute cope.

[Anonymous No.18553817]

>>18549804
>I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another… then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

[Anonymous No.18553907]

>>18540994
I have a soft spot for Vonnegut. His prose feels extremely natural to me.

[Anonymous No.18554441]

>>18552394
Horrible. It's probably even worse in Spanish, where the word 'esperanza' kills the energy out of any text.
I mean, all the imagery is sentimentalistic. Poems, jaguars, winged horses, Greek lovers... How cute!

[Anonymous No.18554486]

>>18552365
>>18546577
>>18549442
Along with OP, the best picks in the thread

[Anonymous No.18554508]

>>18553817
all time greatest, close to tears every time I read

[Anonymous No.18555013]

>>18549625
Krasznahoraki, Lobo Antunes, and Fosse are better than McCarthy.
I won't post a passage because I can't find any doc files on LibGen.

The guy who praised McCarthy for his similes should read Memória de Elefante, a 150 page book in which nearly every sentence contains a simile. (Lobo Antunes hates similes nowadays; he only uses direct metaphors now.)

[Anonymous No.18555028]

>>18549442
Shakespeare for teenagers.

[Anonymous No.18555062]

>>18540994
>>18541023
>>18543906
>>18545070
>>18545925
>>18549442
>>18549625
>I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about. But I shuffled them well in my pockets, before I began to suck, and again, while I sucked, before transferring them, in the hope of obtaining a more general circulation of the stones from pocket to pocket. But this was only a makeshift that could not long content a man like me. So I began to look for something else.

Way better than anything else that was posted here.

[Anonymous No.18556018]

It’s Emily Dickinson. Her letters have wonderful moments.

This is one example:

> These sudden intimacies with Immortality, are expanse-not Peace-as Lightning at our feet, instills a foreign Landscape.

This is from the time she was around 17:

> How very soon it will be now - why when I really think of it, how near, and how happy it is, my heart grows light so fast, that I could mount a grasshopper, and gallop around the world, and not fatigue him any! The sugar weather holds on, and I do believe it will stay until you come.

Other example:

>Vesuvius don’t talk, Etna don’t. They said a syllable, one of them, a thousand years ago and Pompeii heard it and hid forever

There are hundreds of moments like these. Some of them are greater than many famous poems I know.

[Anonymous No.18556088]

>>18543624
Ah yes, being a fart sniffing schizo

[Anonymous No.18556091]

>>18555028
1. He was obviously influenced by Shakespeare
2. Teenagers are better able to follow Shakespeare than Melville

[Anonymous No.18556439]

>>18555062
This is shit.

[Anonymous No.18556465]

>>18555013
Thread is about stylists in English.
>Krasznahorkai, Antunes and Fosse
As stylists? Definitely not. Krasz and Fosse at least are not. Haven't read Antunes.

[Anonymous No.18556478]

>>18549801
>he doesn't know

[Anonymous No.18556587]

>>18551948
No, I'm scared you'll make fun of it, and I don't want anyone to think I have poor taste.

[Anonymous No.18557607]

>>18543011
what are you talking about, haven't read it in a while