/lit/ - Literature

William S Burroughs - The Ticket That Exploded

>The Crying of Lot 49
>Queens of the Stone Age

Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald

literally all of Lovecraft

I've had enough.

No Heavenly choirs. None for me and none for you.

I'm sorry.

You want something to start you off, these are good places to being but you're going to have to read more widely than just ten books for such a huge field with a long history.

The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
Meditation by Descartes
Plato's Symposium
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
The Communist Manifesto (or Das Kapital if you're feeling brave)
Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
The Bible
The Book by Alan Watts
Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky
The Prince by Machiavelli

From there, go for Nietzsche, Locke, Paine Lao Tzu and Hobbes and eventually Kant and Hegel. But it depends entirely on what direction you want to take.

>>8229863
no

>>8228921
yeah really. Lovecraft has some great ideas but the execution is awful purple prose. I could scarcely read Dream of Unknown Kaddath.

>>8228874
No

Descartes did it better

>>8229448
>getting mad at tripfags

hello summer newfriend

>>8229221
anything but Tao Lin, IJ is kind of unavoidable

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte
The Corrections by Jonathon Franzen
The Tesseract by Alex Garland
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
IQ84 by Haruki Murakami
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
The Road by Cormac MacCarthy
Submission by Michel Houellebecq
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Fat Years by Koonchung Chang
Half A Yellow Sun by Adichie Ngozi
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Life of Pi by Yann Martell
Fury by Salman Rushdie
The Constant Gardner by John Le Carre
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving

I need something beautiful to fill my otherwise empty life.

>>8228706
she's going to run out of ideas and resort to suicide via the most public method possible. Live tweeting in downtown NY if she can. Tao Lin and Vice media will set up a hashtag for her and the video will be reblogged all over tumblr. This is apparently what 'sincerity' means in the new sincerity.

Of course, then she'll be forgotten amidst the next political scandal or outrage at a shooting, probably of a safari animal.

>>8227241
There are a ton of vidya references in BE, it was brilliant. I love the idea of this MacArthur Grant winner sitting down and playing video games and watching cartoons.

The Dragonball reference at the Halloween party impressed me. How many men in their eighties could do that? Even Don Delillo doesn't resort to that type of thing in White Noise.

>>8228747
So 'low culture' celebrates scandinavian detective novels, pop science and female authors of historical fiction. Hilary Mantell, Malcolm Gladwell etc.

nerd culture likes GURM and Lovecraft, the less said the better.

'geek' culture likes Harry Potter, Harry Dresden, animu. they cream themselves over anything vaguely SJW related, choosing ideology over aesthetics.

hipster culture likes Mira Gonzalez, Tao Lin and

the high culture is fixated on DFW, who isn't bad but is massively overhyped, and anything attempting to resemble his style or bred from the same ilk: Franzen, Murakami, etc

short story magazines are rammed with Creative Writing Masters students with not real life experience writing godawful stories.

Then there's the buzzfeed culture who worship Zadie Smith.

People talk about the next literary movement, the next IJ, the next masterpiece, but I think there's narrow room for it to emerge.

I seem to gripe at everything, so what do I like? Pynchon, Borges, Woolf, Joyce, Nabokov

>>8228747
>His writing doesn't have the heart or beauty of Joyce's. He's kind of a lesser Pynchon. Pseudo-STEMfag postmodern meme men. Though Pynchon is much more clever and a better storyteller. I don't think DFW will be read in 100 years or anything but he was a good voice for Gen X and millennials. Latch key kids, etc. raised on TV and the net.

>DFW was at least a talented prominent contemporary American writer who wasn't some New York Times special club immigrant story writing meme.

Fair points, I agree

Britain needs a decent post-war voice that isn't entrenched in the Oxbridge establishment or who doestn't flagellate before colonialism.
Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, David Mitchell. Ian MacEwan; They're usually pleasant enough to read, but DeLillo is on another level.

I'm reading Savage Detectives at the moment and it's a treat. I couldn't recommend it more

DFW was a hack, its a joke that people regularly compare him to Joyce and Pynchon.
American Literature pre-20th century was shit.
British Literature 20th century and onwards is shit.
The writers who are widely celebrated on all levels are shit
The Crying of Lot 49 is better than V.
the new sincerity will mean that in fifty years time we'll be laughing at post-modernism in the same why that we now laugh at the dialogue in 50's movies.
Most writers who enter academia or otherwise fully devote their lives to literature don't produce anything meaningful or beautiful.

go market your shit someplace else

getting high and watching TV

DBZ, Godzilla, The Brady Bunch, Gilligan's Island and many more. you see it peppered in his later work.

>calls Heart of Darkness horrifically racist

I had to stop there, wew

>>8211023
Approve bro. Good choices

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Siddharta by Herman Hesse
L'Etranger by Albert Camus
Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

I write short stories. I've written about 60 since I started seriously trying. I'd say maybe half of these are good enough to see the light of day in one form or another and 10% of them have.
It can be disheartening, but then Raymond Carver published 75 short stories over his lifetime writing period of 20 years, so that's roughly 4 per year, which isn't much when you think about it.
>>8188391
I play the game, but I don't know what would happen if I didn't.

Crying of Lot 49 and Bleeding Edge. If you like those, read V and Gravity's Rainbow.

I'm working on a group of things. A couple of short stories which I'm editing for publication. I've had some success in the past.

Also I'm 35k words into this story which is a pastiche of the 20th century history of this central american country in which I'm working atm. It's really shit, but I just want to write something as practice.