If yr into this sort of thing:

http://kickass.to/vladimir-nabokov-f...-t8915812.html

Donald Westlake The Road to Ruin. Dormunder is pretty good series, has all the humor missing from the Parker series, not to demean that series.

it's better than I thought (until NOW! but I don't think he really can fuck up the part of the book I haven't read yet). Could be one of my fav alt lit people rn. I don't know.

Nabokov for sure, but also
Joseph Conrad
James Joyce
W. Somerset Maugham
John LeCarre
Evelyn Waugh
Kingsley Amis
Raymond Carver
Steinbeck - his shorter stuff like Cannery Row
Graham Greene
Ernest Hemingway
F Scott Fitzgerald
John Updike

More Contemporary:
Ian McEwan
Kazuo Ishiguro
Julian Barnes

More genre oriented but worth considering just as great writers would be Dashiell Hammett, JG Ballard, Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke.

More for essays than fiction

Orwell
Emerson
Capote
Tom Wolfe
Susan Sontag
Christopher Hitchens
And I love David Foster Wallace's recent collection of essays, Consider the Lobster.

Writers that're meant to be great stylists but who I really struggle with are Faulkner, Bellow, Roth, Martin Amis, James Ellroy, Delillo and McCarthy (who I've gone right off recently)

OK I'll stop editing now.

mccarthy has sent me to a ditch over & over. i like that he makes me consult the dictionary often but eventually i fall asleep. faulkner, to the ditch again. i read some julian barnes books in the 90s but never quite liked him-- flaubert's parrot, it's his brand of morality that bothers me. for that reason there is a lot of stuff i can't stand these days--

speaking of morality, i do love emerson's old essays, he's one of my favorite moralists, like a happier more optimistic nietzsche (ah, americans!). and susan sontag makes me wish i was older so i could have met and married her (one can dream, ha ha ha)--i could read against interpretation a million times. hitchens was a fun journalist, i used to read him on the nation before his iraq schism, but i have never read a book by him. he had one against religion that maybe was well written but i don't need.

ballard is a good stylist but again hard for me to follow him book-long. i've been pecking at his atrocity exhibition for the past decade. i read a page here, a page there, look at some pictures, put him back on the shelf. a kind of porn album for the mind.

orwell's down and out in paris and london was good fun as were his little didactic novels but i don't think i could read those again. i used to have homage to catalonia which started fun with the comparison between anarchists and communists and his talk of kids falling asleep in the trenches but i lost the book somewhere at some point, damn. maybe i should look for that.

carver or do you mean his editor???? what's the name of that cranky old man? the one who cut the fat.

hemingway is for me the gold standard of english prose. in a way he ruined me for a lot else. i expect everyone to live up to his standards now, ha ha ha. cut all the fat and make every word count.

so-- between my demands for efficient syntax and for a certain morality (the morality of the text not of the writer) i am left with very little.

on that note, i think i like tim o'brian.

Hm. This is very interesting, the perspectives.

This is how I see it:

Joyce, Conrad and Updike (easily the greatest American stylist of the past fifty years) are the only ones who belong on demonrail's top list.

The three contemporary Brits are fine ("fine" as in "excellent"), but Martin Amis is certainly their equal, if not their superior.

I don't know who the fuck would even mention Ellroy in the same breath as the others. And I know others consider McCarthy a great stylist, but that's a joke. That particular emperor is buck naked.

Bellow, Roth and Delillo kick the living shit out of, say, Graham Greene.

And if Hemingway's you're gold standard, nevermind my Nabokov suggestion, and certainly nevermind Faulkner. I thought you were just bitching about bad sentences.

By the way, can you imagine if Nabokov followed Hemingway's example, all that would've been lost? Shudder.

I say fuck minimalism. Maximize that shit, yo! I'm hungry, feed me.

Like I said, just how I see it.

(A minute or so later)

Damn it! Just remembered how much I enjoy Paul Auster's minimalist stuff, particularly CITY OF GLASS. It seems like nothing's going on in his brief sentences, but they are chiseled to perfection and bullshit-free.

And by the way demonrail, one woman? All whites? Please see me after class.

(An hour or so later)

I'm I the only one tired of the same old names? Sure, the greats are greats, but it gets a little old after awhile.

Probably why I've spent the past year and half reading nothing but short stories. I subscribed to a few literary journals and scored gold at the library's used booksale: about a dozen volumes each of the Pushcart Prize, O Henry Awards and Best Am Short Stories. Oh, and a fat stack of Grantas. I went home that day with about 800 short stories, the vast majority of which were written by people I never heard of.

Anyway, I saw one of my bookshelves--the one I've actually been reading from--and felt dumb having written anything about the same old names.

i just gorged myself on medium rare grilled ribeye so my brain is probably clogged with fat at the moment but to answer briefly to all that it's not that hemingway is my universal gold standard but rather he's my gold standard IN ENGLISH for the syntax that works best in that language with its serious limits that won't let you write a one-page sentence and even a couple of dependent clauses make it all fucking confusing and unreadable.

in spanish i much prefer the baroque constructions of góngora or garcía márquez or lezama lima or sarduy. the syntax is different-- it invites gluttony and excess. it's way more festive.

about "old names" -- they're there for a reason. it's like saying you must like rihanna's music because she's brown and a woman and mozart is just OLE NAMEZ.

shit fuck in college i had to read so much crap because the faculty had an ax to grind against the canon. fuckit, waste of time. those people are now forgotten.

anyway i forget what i was saying. there was also beer, so...

oh paul auster was good once upon a time i think he's gone down no? i couldn't read something about a horse and a chessboard i can't remember fuck. music of chance was good.

alright i have to go process this beef off the internets with people and drinks but

hey i liked jhumpa lahiri's interpreter of maladies and her gogol ganghuli novel. not because she's a fucking "WOC" (my fucking gott what horrid acronym) but because she wrote them well.

one last thing to consider is that nobody takes the time these days to properly cook, ferment, cure and age a book. the writers are busy tweeting and churning careless crap before their 15 minutes are up. writing talent has migrated to television.

flaubert took 17 years to write madame bovary. good shit, that. viva los old names. the older the better. i should go try and read the decameron.

ps

JEAN RHYS

YOURCENAR

CLARICE LISPECTOR

MACHADO DE ASSIS

JOSÉ MARÍA ARGUEDAS

i read the whole library once. can't say i'll do it again. you can waste ages 21 to 27 neurotically without it affecting you for the rest of yr life and dropping out of college(gross). then i got a 'hands on' job and put down the books and never looked back since with drugs and sex to cure my anxiety .

it's like politics. don't want to discuss it. bore. now excuse me while i really torment another message board.

The list was just some names of authors I think write well and on that basis I still stand by it. Obviously someone like LeCarre isn't in the same tier as a Nabokov but the list wasn't just about isolating the absolute uppermost of the uppermost. They're all writers I enjoy as much for their style as for their content.


I disagree but only because I personally find Martin Amis's style almost unreadable. It's not saying he writes badly, just that I can't stand it.


Apples and oranges, surely. Greene vs Hemingway, or even Chandler, makes sense but not Greene vs Delillo or Bellow or Roth.


I'm with El Symbols on this, the canon has been a target in univ literature departments for decades now. The tradition of the great white European male has been almost entirely banished from some departments, as they scramble to validate anything that represents its alternative. All in the name of some muddled top-down thinking about 'relevance'.


Kazuo Ishiguro? And I would've included Salman Rushdie if I'd remembered him at the time.

What's his brand of morality?

I take it you're still waiting to try Elmore Leonard, which is me politely telling you to stop whinging and read Swag.

i may be wrong under the influence of gin and tonics (one of the best things about the summer) but i recall a kind of pathetic nihilism, a "poor little humans, look at the poor little humans," attitude or vision. it's like being an atheist he lost his god but misses having him around to make sense of things and can't enjoy his freedom.

i remember now what i read: history of the word in 10 1/2 chapters (that's the one w/ the wormwood, right? and the ship's hijacking?), flaubert's parrot (it's all gone from my brain now)... i believe i ditched him in the middle of talking it over… mostly all gone from memory except for that displeasure at his sorry pity.

the most vivid thing i remember is the wormwood making fun of the human obsession with number 7 (but dh lawrence was better and more rabid). yes barnes can be funny at times, and he's clever, i will give you that, but i can't stand his overarching lack of guts or glory. in the end, i like writers with a big appetite. in the end, i must believe that sishyphus is happy with his rock. i enjoy a morality that embraces the void and takes a bite out of it with the teeth of luis suárez.

oh, speaking of that era in literature, russell hoban's medusa frequency was hilarious and i still reread bits from it from time to time because it's simply so awesome. i tried other books by him but they didn't take. that one however is still fantastic.

anyway, inglés, you like gin? what gin you like? i'm a fan of beefeater for some drinks (salty dogs, foghorns, rickeys) and bombay blue for others (tonics, martinis though im not a big fan). not sure about hendrix cucumbers and roses are good for much. gordon's is too watery (80 proof). i used to like tank (my 1st gin at 15) but befeeater beats it and not just cuz the name-- the juniper is just right.

cheers from the desert.

It's ages since I read 10 1/2 chapters and the only 'chapter' that stood out was the one about Noah's Ark. I only listed him for his quite nice writing style but, a bit like Updike, I'm not sure he uses it to say much. Which is a problem for a lot of contemporary British writers of a more literary stamp.

I'm not a big gin drinker but when I do have one it's a beefeater G&T. But I recently got into Martinis, which is killing my finances. People's choice in spirits seem to echo their cultural fantasies, which only makes me think that you harbour dreams of a gutter literary life in 1940s London, while I just yearn to do rude things to Joan in Mad Men.

oh no no i'm simply a glutton and always go for flavor. i've loved gin since i was a little kid ha ha haaaa. no, seriously. my first bad alcohol experience was with rum. my first great alcohol experience was with tanqueray. it's a lifelong affair. and look, ma, no hangover! (not today anyway).

martinis should be cheap to make, but then again i rarely go to bars. gin, dry vermouth, olives, a pitcher of ice, a cocktail glass--no great mystery there. martinis remind me of their late 90s fad and some "rude" memories ha ha ha. they're good to get plastered. i like gibsons more (w/ onion).

you know joan didn't drink vodka martinis, right? i think those are a recent invention in the history of booze. besides, to quote jep gambardella, "drinking vodka is uncouth." i'd say the marketing appeal of a gin with the same name as her real last name ha strong appeal though. damn, you got me thinking about her now. thank you.

okay i'll take a couple of things back

re: cultural fantasies. because what i really wish i was drinking in this hot fucking day is a bottle of pastis with a pitcher of ice-cold water and brigitte bardot my waitress like in and god created woman.

and about joan… i wouldn't be rude, but a perfect gentleman. i'd propery court and marry her, then impregnate her furiously, and our brood of thoroughly evil children would rule the planet like some latter-day rothschilds, and in our old age we would cackle with satisfaction while we destroy each other's bodily ruins with sex.

hell yes.

but anyway. pastis for the win. i just need to find a good deal in this vast wasteland. and a pack of gitanes.

Michael Brodsky
Alain Robbe-Grillet

ah yes. books. i'm sniffing around a volume of chekhov's stories.

Smoked some killer hash ten minutes ago.

But what the hell.


I understand, and I love the canon without apology.

All I mean is when lists like this are made, it all seems to be the same names.

Great names.

Names that should not be forgotten.

But names that perhaps I see a little too much. That's all. A bit of tedium on my part.

---

Really, I was just foolin' around with the charge of being politically incorrect.

Trust me, if I read one more story about some docile Asian women who somehow finds her true self in the course of the story, I'll pull my hair out.

---

Barnes' non-fiction meditation on death Nothing to be Afraid Of might tickle some pickles.

I defend it against those countless 'people's choice' lists done by the likes of GoodReads or Amazon, chock full of Ayn Rand, J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling, but its very existence goes against pretty much everything that this current generation of intellectuals and academics charged with maintaining it appears to stand for.

The BBC faces a similar problem right now. It's attempting to redo its Civillisation series that came out in the 60s. The original is seen as one of the great achievements in tv but critics have obviously pointed to its underlying prejudices, asumptions, etc. So how do you make a programme like that now without turning it into the equivalent of a GoodReads list, and at the same time avoiding the charges levelled at the original?

you just get some good contemporary historians involved.

writing is no longer the dominant means of cultural transmission, which funnels talent away from words alone to media such as tv/movies/games

documentary makers replacing non-fiction authors

etc.

we should probably be talking about tv writers. sad but true.

Ha! After all this talk of style, you end up with an author who is known to not have any sort of particular style. Flourishes of syntax and diction were among the last things of Anton's mind.



Well, move the goalposts in that direction and I'm loyal to your side. Graham Greene's most sensational entertainment still holds more literary weight than the truly awful Ayn Rand, etc.

But I suppose I get the BBC's dilemma: how much time is appropriate to spend on the Harry Potter books?




I guess. Maybe. But, you know, it's not like 100 years ago Henry James novels were flying off the shelves.

Indeed, I was shocked to look at the bestseller list of the 20th century. It was page after page of "Who the hell are these people?" Turns out they were massively famous people for a few years, then resigned to the oblivion of history because the books weren't very good. Meanwhile, names we take for granted as "great" were usually nowhere to be found. A few exceptions.



I was thinking last night how I've never finished a Rushdie novel. I've tried 3 or four, just can't get past page 50.

I wouldn't say he writes badly, just that I can't stand it.



I've been meaning to read WIDE SARGASSO SEA for awhile now, unless someone can recommend a superior Rhys.

Otherwise, sorry, I erected a border that prevents Mexican books from crossing into my bookshelf because they take away jobs from American books.

ha ha ha. wide sargasso sea is the most famous for "theory" people (colonization! hybridity! wimmins!) and they made some crap movie out of it too. but i'd recommend her paris novels. e.g., after leaving mr. mckenzie, or good morning midnight (she has 4 of those total).

xix century novels were published in newspapers!! and everyone who could read read them-- there was no tv news, no radio, just the newspapers. they published poems too. now we have rap: bitchez & money. i'm not saying anything mcluhan didn't say already though. but i'm sure henry james helped sell plenty newspapers.

chekhov: i don't read russian so i can't know shit about his style but a couple of little stories i just read were awesome and hilarious and i want to read more. he saw people. the translations seem decent enought, it's a volume edited by richard ford ('merica! right?)

i'd start going off on how lispector was a jew just like joo but i'm not fond of literary nationalisms.

http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/ New blog of mine where I review/summarize the books I read. Working in a Library rules. Just added 6 books, but have 25 reviewed and will be adding those soon.

this deserved another napoleon dynamite "luckee" picture but it would be repetitive

let me emphasize


i am very rarely jealous of people's "jobs," but in this case i am

congrats of finding the best possible way of feeding your addictions

ps- i laughed reading that andré breton wrote a boring book! i've never been a fan. i wish you had quoted some boring samples, for corroboration.

I cold have quoted anything from that Breton book and it would have bored you to death!!!!

i believe you. he was more ideologue than actual artist.

I always thinking getting kicked out of the surrealists by Breton was a badge of honor: Dali, Gysin off the top of my head

Reading is fun.

Right now I am reading this book that was "channeled" through an older retired British guy called A New Understanding of Life, by Ralph A. Steadman (NOT the artist I adore who drew for Hunter Thompson)




It is cool stuff, real mindfuck. It describes the nature of existance, and a million other things that people like Blatavsky and Gurdhieff and Swedenborg have tried to share but they couched their shit in esoteric lingo. this is plain spoken and very very in-depth.

just started Fire on the Mountain by Edward Abbey

just finished Northern Borders by Howard Frank Mosher, also a story told from a child's viewpoint about his grandfather, both old curmudgeons in both novels...

i am reading this rn (probably gonna finish before morning). it's very sad but let me quote symbols ...

i am not reading as much as i want to...

getting paid in the mid-october though.

watch out you guys, watch out.

right now i am re-reading the short stories of lorrie moore and lydia davis cause i am a poor lil girl

Lot of books

waiting to get a charles portis book called masters of atlantis

anyone read siri hustvedt? can someone point me to her best work? hoping i'll get into a class about her next semester and i want to prepare!

^ I read Summer Without Men. At less that 200 pgs, it might be a good way to be introduced.

There's an entire class about her?