(untitled)

What are favorite /lit/ authors?

I like reading Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and the lot, the feeling of freedom I get by reading their works is inspiring. Then the classical cyberpunk writes like William Gibson. Also the not so classical and ever genius Philip Dick.

>>1290 I bought Gibson trilogy lately, will read it after I end Lem novel. Mine fav authors are Stephen King, Stanisław Lem, Terry Pratchett.

I can't stop reading Murakami's books. I also like Lovecraft.

i've been really into '00s post-cyberpunk.. particularly charles stross and neil stephenson. accelerando is probably my favorite sci-fi ever. >>1291 assuming you're talking about the sprawl trilogy, i'd also highly recommend the bridge trilogy, particularly idoru if you're only going to read one.

>>1293 yes, sprawl trilogy. Sadly I don't see much books from Gibson in my country. >>1292 Lovecraft books are on my "I want it" list

> Classic Flann O'Brien, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky > Modern Don DeLillo, Clarice Lispector, Mo Yan, Peter Carey > Sci-fi Phillip K. Dick, Kim Stanley Robinson, Stephen Baxter, Ursula K. le Guin >>1293 >accelerando is probably my favorite sci-fi ever Same here!

>>1289 Im a big fan of Cormac Mcarthy's The Road and Margaret Atwood's Maddadam trilogy. So much symbolism in each of the first, and I love the social speculation and technological hypothesizing in the latter

>>1296 Cormac McCarthy in general is pro-tier literature. I will urge everybody to read both The Road and Blood Meridian.

>>1289 Likely J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are my favorites. I have many others which I enjoy, but those are my top three.

Bruce Sterling's "Maneki Neko" ( http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/maneki-neko/ ), and Naomi Kritzer's "Cat Pictures Please" ( http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_01_15/ ) are two really entertaining short stories I read recently. I don't follow the authors that much, but if any lains like sweet and funny scraps like these, I figured they'd serve as a good gateway to more of the same. For best results, read "Maneki Neko" first ^_^

>>1289 George Saunders and Kelly Link are two of my favorite contemporary short story writers, they both make me feel excited about the future of literature

>>1320 This was a sugary sweet take against the traditional almost technophobic mannerisms that are brought up in most science fiction. Some very nice short stories to brighten your day.

Started reading some of Frank Herbert's non-Dune works and liking so far. Would also totally recommend Dune Saga

PKD all the way.

>>1292 Murakami's one of my favorites as well, fantastic writer. Read my first book of his through a post on here in fact.

>>1296 >>1313 The Road is McCarthys worst book. He wrote it for money. It was on Oprah too. Can't say anything bad about Blood Meridian tho but it's not as good as Outer Dark.

>>1377 >>1292 Murakami is a genius I really like how he describe the loneliness. I like reading Asimov, Kafka, and sometimes some philosophy stuff

John Brunner

>>1378 >He wrote it for money. It was on Oprah too. many "classics" were also written for money, and who cares what oprah thinks. the amount of symbolism and nostalgia inducing descriptions in that book were great, even if the entire book is explaining the death of mankind as being a reverse of platos allegory of the cave. parts of the book spoke to me on a personal level, because i have been to the places described in the book which makes the vivid description of them in the book quite melancholy like when he talks about road signs for pic related by comparison, Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou is an anime with a similar vibe (yet not as depressing)

>>1748 MEANT TO INCLUDE THIS PIC

>>1289 I like many of the authors that have been mentioned here so far (McCarthy and Lovecraft especially). I also really like Toni Morrison. I finished reading Beloved a while ago and it was absolutely fantastic.

>>1292 >>1377 >>1741 i recently finished hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world and i loved it. what should i read next? haven't read any other murakami.

For whatever reason, I've always been a really big Yukio Mishima fan, there has yet to be one of his books that I haven't enjoyed. I really enjoy how his novels generally take place in post-war Japanese society, and how they typically have homoerotic undertones (if I'm being frank). My first book by him was The Temple of the Golden Pavillion, and I think that's a great place to start.

>>1752 I got into his works through Confessions of a Mask and I really loved it, I like the homoerotic undertones and the whole feeling of honesty in his books. I've only read that and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. I also think his personal story adds a lot the interest we fans have, such a peculiar figure.

>>1751 I'm none of those lains but probably my favourite novel of Murakami's is A Wild Sheep Chase. It's not so famous/hyped as some of his others, e.g. Wind-up Bird Chronicle (which is also good) or Kafka on the Shore (which I didn't love). It's one of his earlier books, so he's still kind of finding his voice ... and it's a real pleasure. By the time he writes 1Q84 (I admit I haven't read Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki) he's quite self-aware of the kind of author he is, especially in relation to the international market*. Not to say his later stuff is rubbish or anything, I'm not that hipster, just trying to find an explanation for why I like that book. * check out this interesting article http://lithub.com/the-murakami-effect/

>>1753 Yes, the Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is a fantastic short book. Emblematic of that philosophical sincerity and idealisation of youth which he wrote of. And for sure, his personal life is just as fascinating. >>1754 With Murakami, I have read Kafka on the Shore and IQ84 so far and was initially quite enamored with them, but I recall a conversation about him I had with an english teacher in which he described Murakami's fiction as extremely formulaic, and honestly, I kind of see where he was coming from. In just the two novels I've read by him, they both have some very similar motifs. Off the top of my head, coincidence is used very often to a point where even if it bears some intentional relevance to the story, it comes off as lazy. Then there's how both the main male protagonists in each story invariably find themselves in relationships with women with little to no romantic development. Not to say that I didn't enjoy both novels. I did. but I felt a little bit dirty after reading them. The writing just wasn't that great. That's an interesting article, perhaps it shows why some of his writing seems so palatable yet lacking in depth.

>>1289 This might be Micky D tier, but I really like Jim Butcher's writing. No other author has made me cry like a little girl

Knausgaard's My Struggle series. I would've never have thought that I would enjoy someone's drawn out 3,600 page autobiography until his work. The way that he writes about his life is so cutting, frank, and plain that it feels refreshing. Most of his topics are about the day to day of his life which makes his dark points hit you like a shotgun blast to the stomach.

>>1759 This is the reaction that pretty much everybody has. Got to see him speak in public. The man is insanely suave and draws you in just like the books.

Franz Kafka is my all time favorite. Stephen King for going to sleep. Adorno for waking up again. E. M. Cioran for holding my hand im dark hours

>>1811 > Franz Kafka is my all time favorite. Reading Kafka feels like being fed waste oil down my throat.

>What are favorite /lit/ authors? Not sure what the list of /lit/ authors are. I'll just list some favorites. Gore Vidal, Graham Greene, Thomas Pynchon, Hunter S. Thompson, Ian M Banks. Bonus: some off the wall lessor known works that are individual favorites. Also, I don't see them discussed in /lit/ land. The authors themselves are not on my shortlist of favorites though. The Seven Who Fled, Cakes and Ale, The Age of the Fish, Grendel, The Gallery, and The Wardove.

I find this impossible to answer. When I discovered the most incredible books I would ever read and then looked up the authors' other works they were often just interesting, not really mind blowing. I can name authors who have never written a bad one but not any that have consistently written masterpieces.

matias faldbakken, especially "macht & rebel".

Philip K Dick He's got a lot of what I'd call proto-cyberpunk. Generally his stories have the psychedelic questions of identity and purpose in a dystopic world but lack the overzealous technological shtick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vdpd8A5sTg

If I really must pick one, it would be Yockey

I'm going to second Philip K Dick. He weaves a web of wonders, delves into the darkness in-mind and out-of-this-universe, and delights with curious observations and statements of fictitious-fact.

Recently finished Island by Alistair MacLeod. Definitely putting it up on my all time favorites list. I also quite enjoy reading Lovecraft and Neil Gaiman.

>>1374 Just finished Messiah, but I heard the later books get more and more soykafty. Did you read them all?

I love Stanisław Lem (author of Solaris) but I am not sure if translations into English are as good as original versions. Does anyone have experience with translations?

>>2144 I have read it in polish only ;/

>>2144 I read some of his short stories in English a long time ago, never any novels. The stories were pretty light hearted as I recall, there was a cosmonaut who was funny and absent minded though it was all still based in the laws of physics. It wasn't anything like I imagine Solaris to be but I've only seen the Tarkovsky film, never read it. There was another book of his made into a movie, the Congress. It was 50/50 animated and live action. Robin Wright was the star, playing herself. No one I've mentioned it to has heard of it for some reason except on this board.

>>2148 Lem generally has two modes. Lighthearted stories about robots and incomprehensible abstract hard SF. From second kind i recommend: golem XVI, fiasco and dialogs.

P Y N C H O N Y N C H O N Pynchon is laincore.

>>2149 Yeah, exactly. I recommend Return from the Starts, it's not as abstract as the others. A small fragment of it: The books were crystals with recorded contents. They could be read with the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons – like lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation. Yeah, Kindles and audiobooks in a book written in 1961. Comparing his visions of the future with our present can be quite fun.

>>1316 add Patrick Rothfuss to that list, and you've got yourself a deal

>>1920 ol' Don is the man.

>>1292 I love Lovecraft but god he's a fuarrrking hack sometimes

>>2479 How is Lovecraft a hack?

>>2576 Why, he hacked everything from the ancient texts and scrolls which only he had seen of course. Silly Lain.

Fitzgerald, Renata Adler, Cesar Aira, John Hawks, Gustav Meyrink. You can try "The Lime Twig" by John Hawkes if you want to try a serious mind-fuarrrk.

Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, William Gibson, Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs, Phillip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin.

Oscar Wilde, Jorge Luis Borges, Tsukumizu, Lucretius, Agatha Christie, and David /hum/e

>>2967 where should I start with William Gibson?

>>2994 Anywhere, it's all interlinked, but not episodic.

>>1289 W. Somerset Maugham He has a great way of putting in words nuances we expect out of human behavior but aren't consciously aware of. Simply, he writes things about people that sound right.

I've always appreciated Hunter S. Thompson's work not necessarily of his proficiency but how his boisterous attitude truly bleeds through his works making them highly entertaining to read. Otherwise I've always adored Soren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, Thomas Pynchon, and Phillip K. Dick. I haven't read much outside them but the ideas they toy around with stick to me the most.

Jorge Amado

>>1289 Bruno Schulz

Just read “America is in the Heart” by Carlos Bulosan. Great work of socialist realism of the immigrant experience.

>>2981 >Borges Based. Borges is brilliant.

everything that Borges recommends is gold: http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/jorge-luis-borges-personal-library.html also my favorite criminal based story is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eiger_Sanction also this is gold too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vivero_Letter_(novel)

>>1289 I'd have to go with Tolstoy. Maybe it's a "basic" taste but I think his writings have affected my outlook on other people more than anything else. His prose (at least in translation) is simple and enjoyable to read, but despite - or maybe because of - hat his characters are very vivid and sympathetic. His writings have also helped me understand compassion and made me more aware of other people's humanity. I used to be really "blunt" and uncaring, and reading Tolstoy has made me more aware of the fact that other people are creatures who are just as complex and fallible as I am, and be more interested in understanding the underlying motivations behind their beliefs and actions.

>>1289 call me basic, but I'm a big fan of Ray Bradbury and Jack London. They're consistently satisfying and fun to read; the classics are classics for a reason. Of course these are just two of the many authors I've and liked.

19th c: Edgar Allan Poe & Stephen Crane 20th c: Robert Heinlein & J. G Ballard Love-Hate Edgar Rice Burroughs (rough quality pulp; I thought that he pulls off many famous lost world/primitive world/ubermensch authors' moods in a more digestable way than they did. He's like the McDonalds of adventure fiction,) and Thomas Ligotti (can get pretentious, but his settings are worth it Does 'em better than any horror author I ever read.)

>>1749 Girls' Last Tour seems pretty on point as well.

>>3378 Nothing basic about Bradbury, what he did is not easy at all.

Cory Doctorow

All of the following wrote at least one book, story, or poem that blew me away, and a few of them changed me forever: Mark Twain, Dostoyevsky, E. E. Cummings, Poe, Lovecraft, Bradbury, Hesse, Salinger, Robert Burns, James Thurber, Kafka, H. G. Wells, Ambrose Bierce, Snorri Sturluson, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, Steinbeck, Orwell, Feynman, Einstein, Wallace Stevens.

>>1751 I highly reccomend giving Sputink Sweetheart a shot. It's a short book and it's probably one of his most underrated works. If you like surrealism you will love this one. A nice little gem.

>>4093 Farenheit 451 fuarrrking is like kicking dead whales down the beach. fuarrrk Ray Bradbury he is a total hack

Peter Watts. Give Blindsight a read (it's public domain! Along with a lot of his stuff) https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm Greg Egan also good if you like really really *really* out-there science fiction. He's also one of the most active amateur mathematicians worldwide. http://gregegan.net

>>1290 are you me ? add in a little Jung with that will ya

Louis Ferdinand Destouches dit Céline Mishima Yukio Victor Hugo Nietzsche

Arthur C. Clarke and Leo Tolstoy

Burroughs Pinecone Lovecraft Spackman David Shetzline Hob Broun

>>6089 oh yeah, celine is good too and that's only writers who've been translated into english

>>6089 Borroughs is great, way ahead for his time and even our present times

>>6107 Check this out, his first short story. Can't find the text online so a reading will do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBTkk3b7Ofo

Terry Pratchett JorgemLuis Borges Juan Rulfo Fyodor Dostoyevski I'm not very cultured, but these I consider very high q.

I've been reading a lot of Jose Saramago recently and he probably ranks. His psuedo "stream of consciousness" writing style, humor and absurd settings really pull me in and can just keep me in place for hours though I have heard others call all three of those barriers. I read the Silmarillion last year and I was surprised at how much Tolkien plays with words and turns of phrase. I've been meaning to revisit the original trilogy and the Hobbit for the first time in a decade to see if those elements of wordplay are present. Finally I see a lot of love for Terry Pratchett, and I echo that but also think that The Long Earth which he co-authored with Stephen Baxter was some of both of their best work.

>>1289 Dazai. Is there any place that has Return to Tsugaru in print?

>>1290 >>1376 >>1916 >>2011 This >>1293 >accelerando Seems like a more accessible version of Meltdown? similar?

I used to like Clive Barker a lot more. He was really good in the 80s. Not sure what happened, but I read The Scarlet Gospels and it was disappointing. Really could have used another 20,000 words during the bits where they're in hell. Imajica is kind of 'meh' so far. We'll see how that turns out. Stephen King is awesome from what I've read so far (Pet Sematary, The Langoliers, The Shining, about 1/2 of Doctor Sleep) so I'll be reading him more frequently. I have a soft spot for S.D. Perry's novelizations of the Resident Evil games. Some classics. H.P. Lovecraft for sure. Still looking for someone to write what I want to read (occult/horror + erotic romance + dark fantasy in 3rd person omniscient that's not some pandering harlequin YA nonsense).

>>2144 I read Solaris in English, it was pretty good.

Ernst Junger is pretty good, his books can be quite different but I've enjoyed what I've read.

I'm a fan of Joseph Keller. Catch 22 is one of the funniest books I've ever read.

>>6364 Catch-22 is the best fuarrrking book ever written in english. It ought to be read by every kid as mental inoculation against the bullshit that they'll encounter in big organizations, once they reach adulthood. Also for the darkly-funny-in-retrospect subject of a truth-teller named Snowden suffering from the consequences of his own government's vicious actions.

>>1754 I enjoyed Norwegian Wood, Wind-Up Bird, and Kafka: how does Wild Sheep Chase compare? I've been interested in starting it once I finish my current queue, but I don't have time right now to invest into books that fall apart by the end, I've been sticking to "classics" for now. Is Wild Sheep Chase worth my time?

>>1289 i like yukio mishima

>>1754 >* check out this interesting article God the Japanese tricked me again!

>>1289 >What are favorite /lit/ authors? I like Frictional Games because I'm both allergic to books and ignorant. >inb4 games are not literature They are.

>>1289 Joyce is a slog at times and at other times he is the best person I have ever read. Conrad is also good imo but I've only read HOD Also read Eliot's "The Waste Land" it's very good

>>1289 I really like J.D. Salinger, James Joyce, Herman Melville, Aldous Huxley and Katsuhiro Otomo myself.

>>6865 how the fuarrrk did I forget hunter s thompson jesus christ