Which author has the best prose?

[Anonymous No.20374641]

post author and sample of their writing

[Anonymous No.20374644]

>>20374641

[Anonymous No.20374650]

>>20374641
CEASE AND DESIST WITH THESE JEZEBELS

[Anonymous No.20374660]

>>20374650
I want my thread to have a good reply count though.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!bGBGaUpA8kS No.20374669]

>>20374641
The one you like the best.

[Anonymous No.20374678]

>>20374669
Kill yourself fake "Butterfly", you abhorrent negro.

[Anonymous No.20374686]

Flaubert:

He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them. Emma was like all other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language. He could not perceive--this man of such broad experience--the differences in feelings that might underlie similarities of expression. Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness; one had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed commonplace affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiness of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars.

Nabokov:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged--the same house, the same people--and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

[Anonymous No.20374693]

Proust:

And then my thoughts, too, formed a similar sort of recess, in the depths of which I felt that I could bury myself and remain invisible even while I looked at what went on outside. When I saw an external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain behind me and it, surrounding it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever touching its substance directly; for it would somehow evaporate before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body that is brought into proximity with something wet never actually touches its moisture, since it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation. On the sort of screen dappled with different states and impressions which my conscious would simultaneously unfold while I was reading, and which ranged from the most deeply hidden aspirations of my being to the wholly external view of the horizon spread out before my eyes at the bottom of the garden, what was my primary, my innermost impulse, the lever whose incessant movement controlled everything else, was my belief in the philosophic richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever the book might be.

[Anonymous No.20374718]

>>20374693
was about to post him

[Anonymous No.20374778]

F Gardner

[Anonymous No.20374785]

>>20374778
Name of book?

[Anonymous No.20374788]

>>20374785
Call of the Arcade

[Anonymous No.20374821]

My diary desu

[Anonymous No.20374879]

While I do love the prose stylists they have a disconnected quality, the reader becomes removed from the character, the author is always standing their between you and the character as middleman and there is never that direct empathetic connection. Of their ilk Joyce would have to be the best for me, he had a knack for pulling the rug out from under you and removing all the context he had so carefully prepared leaving the reader adrift.
>When all that was was innocence.
But for me the greatest prose is not that of the stylist, it is those that went for a more direct and human connection and did not feel a need to elevate the banal through fine prose, just draw the readers attention to it and then provide context to suggest that there is something more, something intangible. This is where the prose stylists fail for me, they make the intangible almost tangible which removes something very important. The writers with the best prose take a larger view of their work, they see the importance of this contrast and the context of the work as a whole, it is not that every line needs to be a masterpiece, just that each line needs to be subservient to the whole and they achieve their perfection through context. These sorts of writers do not produce good excerpts as a rule, removing context often reduces the passage to something trite and banal. Paul Bowels would be up there for me, instead of pulling the rug out from under you like Joyce he just points out that there are actually another 50 rugs beneath the one you are standing on and things really are more complex then they seem.

[Anonymous No.20374907]

>>20374686
>>20374693
>best prose
>French writers with English quotations
What are you talking about? Proust and Flaubert didn't write in English. The translators were as or more responsible for the style of those excerpts

[Anonymous No.20374920]

>>20374907
>translation autists have arrived

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!bGBGaUpA8kS No.20374930]

Pater:

The two lads were lounging together over a book, half-buried in a heap of dry corn, in an old granary — the quiet corner to which they had climbed out of the way of their noisier companions on one of their blandest holiday afternoons. They looked round: the western sun smote through the broad chinks of the shutters. How like a picture! and it was precisely the scene described in what they were reading, with just that added poetic touch in the book which made it delightful and select, and, in the actual place, the ray of sunlight transforming the rough grain among the cool brown shadows into heaps of gold. What they were intent on was, indeed, the book of books, the “golden” book of that day, a gift to Flavian, as was shown by the purple writing on the handsome yellow wrapper, following the title Flaviane! — it said,
Flaviane! lege Felicitur!
Flaviane! Vivas! Fioreas!
Flaviane! Vivas! Gaudeas!
It was perfumed with oil of sandal-wood, and decorated with carved and gilt ivory bosses at the ends of the roller.

[Anonymous No.20374932]

>>20374669
Tell me about your hip hop career

[Anonymous No.20374938]

>>20374641
martin
Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!bGBGaUpA8kS No.20374957]

>>20374932
Not the biggest fan
https://youtu.be/SrSPcH5Jdfo

[Anonymous No.20374960]

>>20374686
>Nabokov
Lmfao

[Anonymous No.20374970]

>>20374957
welcome back butters, missed you

[Anonymous No.20374993]

unironically Hemingway

[Anonymous No.20374996]

>>20374778
perfection

[Anonymous No.20374997]

>>20374993
>This is what americans actually believe

[Anonymous No.20375002]

>>20374650
get your dick in order

[Anonymous No.20375003]

>>20374997
guess how I know you're from South America

[Anonymous No.20375035]

>>20374641
Bruno Schulz

[Anonymous No.20375114]

>>20374641
I really liked this passage from Joyce's Portrait.
>He passed out of the schoolhouse and halted under the shed that flanked the garden. From the theater opposite came the muffled noise of the audience and sudden brazen clashes of the soldiers' band. The lights spread up words from the glass roof making the theater seem a festive ark, anchored among the hulks of houses, her frail cables of lanterns looping her to her moorings. A sidedoor of the theater opened suddenly and a shaft of light flew across the grassplots. A sudden burst of music issued from the ark, the prelude of a waltz: and when the side door closed again the listeners could hear the faint rhythm of the music. The sentiment of the opening bars, their languor and supple movement, evoked the incommunicable emotion which had been the cause of all his day's unrest and of his impatient movement of a moment before. His unrest issued from him like a wave of sound: and on the tide of flowing music the ark was journeying, trailing her cables of lanterns in her wake. Then a noise like dwarf artillery broke the movement. It was the clapping that greeted the entry of the dumbbell team on the stage.

[Anonymous No.20375303]

>>20374641
>prose that washes over you like a wave-type
Thomas Carlyle
>underated because he only wrote light comedies-type
PG Wodehouse
>fat tradcath larper-type
GK Chesterton

[Anonymous No.20375465]

Wolfe:

No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death – every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence.
The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. We say, “I will,” and “I will not,” and imagine ourselves (though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves.

A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart.

A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what is commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice, and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences.

[Anonymous No.20375570]

>>20374641
Besides the usual mentions I’ll add that Graham Greene has a very writing style. It’s not as show-offy as Joyce but it reads very well.

>A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

[Anonymous No.20375757]

>>20374641
midwit question, it`s just like WHAT THE FAVORITE single hair from the head of your beloved.

[Anonymous No.20375827]

>>20375757
>he doesn't have a favorite single hair from the head of his beloved

[Anonymous No.20375976]

>>20375757
The one single white hair she has in a head of all black hair. She apparently has always had it.

[Anonymous No.20376037]

>>20375827
>>20375976
mkay do greek love to each other now, autists

[Anonymous No.20376104]

>>20376037
I'm gonna do some to you

[Anonymous No.20376844]

Bumping for more prose selections to encourage me to try new authors

[Anonymous No.20376861]

>>20375757
>FAVORITE single hair from the head of your beloved
kino

[Anonymous No.20376895]

just imagine her firm tits

[Anonymous No.20377396]

>>20374641
Although as of yet unpublished, my prose is most supreme.

[Anonymous No.20377603]

ive been reading a bit of john fowles lately. he knows how to summon an evocative, visual quality in his writing, where you can vividly picture whats going on in the scene, but he uses this power judiciously so that the visual parts illuminate he more cerebral or darker parts of the texts. The screenshot is from the novel i'm reading at the moment, A Maggot, which is structurally unlike anything i've read-- it gives short sections of evocative, dreamlike description of events and images of characters. Then it switches into an epistolary voice, telling the story through court documents, personal correspndences, and magazine articles. The oneiric sections cast an aura of mystery over the epistolary and make sure that you get random flashes of the characters passions while you read it. He also does this weird thing where he'll speak in first person giving you his own polemic take on the events that he's fabricated.

the barrister character also has some mad banter with the cunts hes interviewing e.g.
A. It is truth. We are equal in this, if not in the world. Blame me not for defending my right, and God’s word.
Q. Thy right and God’s word! Shall I fetch thee to a pulpit?
A. I say they are one. Who takes my right steals from Christ.
Q. Thou hast no right to be stolen, thou art a most notorious whore. I am not thy new modesty’s fool. I see thy whorish insolence still proud in thy eyes.
A. I’m no harlot now. And thee knows it, thee hast inquired of me. Christ is my master and mistress now. My pride is to be His servant, naught else.
Q. Thou canst buy remission of your sins so easy? Why, thou shouldst be at Rome.
A. Thee dost not know my religion. I am repentance with each breath I breathe, until my last, or still I sin.
Q. I know I’ll have thee whipped, if thou throw’st more piety at me.

i'm not trying to say hes the best writer ever, but definitely stylistically interesting. The Magus was also cool, but the collector seemed like a potboiler.

[Anonymous No.20377630]

Conrad

[Anonymous No.20378079]

>>20374778
>>20374785
>>20374788
I’ve seen you out today shilling pretty hard, Frank. Ever consider getting a real job, or at least using some of daddy’s money to take a writing class instead of just buying ads?

[Anonymous No.20378099]

>>20377630
ew

[Anonymous No.20378135]

>>20378099
why?

[Anonymous No.20378139]

>>20374641
bruno schulz

[Anonymous No.20378140]

>>20374907
oh God, I thought I was sad

[Anonymous No.20378143]

i don't know about 'best' but chuck palahniuk is pretty damn good

[Anonymous No.20378152]

>>20374778
"the feminine voice"? what the fuck is that? are you fucking retarded? thats the stupidest fucking thing i've ever read.

[Anonymous No.20379215]

>>20378135
Anon is a loser

[Anonymous No.20379428]

>>20374960
filtered

[Anonymous No.20379815]

>>20374641
sex