Xun posted:

inktvis posted:

Sounds like GViktor Pelevin to me, except he's post-soviet. Not that it matters though since, like all things from the 90s, he has a timeless quality.

Xun posted:

Well this is a good a place to ask as any. I've heard of some Russian "literature" written during the Soviet Union where the writer wrote some book criticizing the bureaucracy and saying they were all vampires. He later wrote another book about how the bureaucracy was so bad even vampires thought it was poo poo. I think his name started with a G. All my google searches have brought up Draco Malfoy vampire fan fiction and the vampire diaries. WHAT ARE THESE BOOKS I MUST READ THEM.

Jive One posted:

If anyone is looking for a solid list of classic literature I edited an old 2009 thread's OP into my post at the beginning of this thread. Lots of books from different eras and across different cultures. Big post but worth reading I think.

Mr. Squishy posted:

I don't think Gogol satirized the USSR as he died the better part of a century before its inception.

Xun posted:

It was Bulgakov, thanks! I might have been thinking it was Gogol, all I know is some stuff from a half remembered conversation. But now I have a bunch of other Russian writers to look at too yay.

the JJ posted:

Needs more Ferdowsi. And Rumi.

(I'm sorry, I got trapped with some Persians for a while.)

Mr. Squishy posted:

Does anyone know a good English translation of Goethe's Faust, or at least which ones are just awful and to be avoided?

Cloks posted:

If people are looking for something modern and reminiscent of Calvino, you could do worse than read "The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards" by Kristopher Jansma.

Captain Mog posted:

Fun question I've always wondered and this is the best thread I can see to do it in: who do you think will be regarded as our generation's literary stars one hundred years from now? Who will be our Hemingway, our Faulkner? Will we even have one or has the ease of publication ended the era of literary greats and instead started a new one of the literary "mediocre-to-good"?

Usually when I ask this question, I get a whole lot of "X author who like ten people have heard of". Which isn't answering the question at all.

Captain Mog posted:

Fun question I've always wondered and this is the best thread I can see to do it in: who do you think will be regarded as our generation's literary stars one hundred years from now? Who will be our Hemingway, our Faulkner? Will we even have one or has the ease of publication ended the era of literary greats and instead started a new one of the literary "mediocre-to-good"?

Usually when I ask this question, I get a whole lot of "X author who like ten people have heard of". Which isn't answering the question at all.

Smoking Crow posted:

No idea. People forget, but probably the best reviewed writer of that day, Franz Kafka was just a crazy guy in Prague. It'll probably be someone like that.

tonytheshoes posted:

It surprises me that Jorge Luis Borges hasn't been mentioned in this thread. I picked up Collected Fictions a while back and it continues to blow my mind. His stories are like literary brain-teasers, with plenty of things to decipher, piece together and puzzle out for yourself.

Captain Mog posted:

Fun question I've always wondered and this is the best thread I can see to do it in: who do you think will be regarded as our generation's literary stars one hundred years from now? Who will be our Hemingway, our Faulkner? Will we even have one or has the ease of publication ended the era of literary greats and instead started a new one of the literary "mediocre-to-good"?

Powered Descent posted:

Here's a strange one for you.

I know this isn't quite your specialty, but is there any contemporary literature (say, from 1950 onward) that you suspect future historians will regard as the classics of our time? Flash forward to an English Lit class at Tranquility Base University in the year 2309. What 20th and 21st century authors will your silver-jumpsuited counterpart remember in one breath with the Bard?

Will the class discuss Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke? J.D. Salinger and William Golding? Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume? Stephen King and Dean Koontz? Or even... J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer?

Brainworm posted:

If I were betting, I'd split two ways:

1) Probably, people are going to remember the late 20th / early 21st as the infancy of recorded music, film, television, and various species of hypertext, regardless of whether those media produce any durable classics.

2) Of all the authors you've listed, Stephen King seems the most likely to win a place in the canon of American Naturalism. And he deserves it. It's worth remembering that most classics were commercial successes if not blockbusters -- that's a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for real durability. So that immediately excludes most avant-garde and academic novelists (and every post-1950 poet except Robert Frost).

Second, King swims against the current. I'll exclude The Stand for a second. Most post-1950 genre innovations have involved human beings accidentally breaking the world, or at least the threat of the world being broken by some human action, deliberate or no. Think of SF time travel plots for a second. In, say, The Time Machine, Wells doesn't give a poo poo about causality. Instead, you get a more or less allegorical extension of Wells's contemporary social divisions. In that sense, the text is more like Swift's Modest Proposal than anything.

But in any post-1950 time travel plot, the unwritten assumption is that people have the ability to irreparably break the world -- see "The Sound of Thunder" for an early example or, you know, any original time travel plot in film or television. This kind of anxiety pervades modern media, in one form or other, like you wouldn't believe.

King, on the other hand, generally tells a completely different kind of story (BTW, inventing an entirely new novel subgenre in the process), in which sympathetic characters' basic humanity is menaced by a threat that, generally speaking, is not a consequence of human action. Carrie's not a threat because she's an outcast. She's a threat because she can kill people by thinking. And Cujo isn't a threat because he was a terribly abused dog who turned vicious. He gets rabies in a totally natural way and menaces a mom and kid for no good reason at all.

Third, It's no small matter that (when he wasn't drunk or coked up) King's an extremely capable writer and versatile storyteller. Compare the way the story in Carrie is framed and forwarded to, well, any other author's first effort, and you'll see a huge difference. King has some real kung-fu, even if early success means he hasn't always needed to exercise it.

tonytheshoes posted:

It surprises me that Jorge Luis Borges hasn't been mentioned in this thread. I picked up Collected Fictions a while back and it continues to blow my mind. His stories are like literary brain-teasers, with plenty of things to decipher, piece together and puzzle out for yourself.

If you're looking for a good place to start, I'd recommend the story The Garden of Forking Paths. Ostensibly, it's about a spy, but don't read anything else about it ahead of time, just jump in and discover the trippy mind-fuckery for yourself.

blue squares posted:

Thomas Pynchon for sure

CestMoi posted:

Borges' essays are all really well informed investigtions of interesting topics and occasionally he just makes up funny references to prove a point http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.html

Barlow posted:

Borges poetry is also quite worthwhile. The Penguin Books edition is nice because it has the Spanish original alongside the English translations. I used to use that book to practice my Spanish.

Mr. Squishy posted:

All literary long-lists make me depressed because not only have I read none of them, I've not heard of any of them either.

Poutling posted:

The Booker Prize long list is out. Now with American Authors!


http://www.themillions.com/2014/07/here-come-the-americans-the-2014-booker-prize-longlist.html

Mescal posted:

I'm very very slowly reading Gravity's Rainbow and relishing it. I'd like having some concordance, or discussion spot, or some kind of companion to it as I'm reading. Just started the third section, and would prefer to avoid major spoilers. Any ideas, Real Literature folks?

mango gay touchies posted:

You could make a let's read thread about it here and try to read a certain length as a group per week and discuss it, I'd post in it because I'm going through the book myself as well

Mescal posted:

Do you think? If I did, it couldn't really be a certain length per week just because of the nature of the book. It'll take you either a few days or a year to read it--I bought my copy three years ago, actually. Anyway, there's no way to keep a group on the same page. If TBB isn't picky about OPs I could throw one up real quick for general discussion.