Most discussion on /lit/ is about novel and philosophy. Let's add some variety. What are your favourite plays? Favourite playwrights?
Hard mode: no Shakespeare
As an American I guess I'll go ahead and say Tennessee Williams. He stirs passions if nothing else.
I've enjoyed Marlowe, but only a little. Really only Doctor Faustus.
Am actually not a big fan of Beckett. I dislike him on philosophic grounds. "Waiting for Godot" merely annoys me.
>>9410914
Strindberg when he's not being wallowing in self-pitying sentimentality or too much over-the-top insanity, though I think his insane plays (To Damascus in particular) might be some of the best ever written when performed, it isn't all that great when read.
Miss Julie is one of his all time greats and ought to be mandatory reading. The fact that Bloom thinks Ibsen belongs in the Western Canon but Strindberg does not makes me think that Bloom is a gargantuan faggot.
Edward Albee and August Wilson.
Calderon de la Barca
>Stephen and [his grandfather James] Joyce took regular walks along the Zürichsee. Joyce bought him a box of toy soldiers. Helen recalls in her memoir, “I do not think that Stephen will ever forget his famous grandfather and their relationship was a deep and lovely one.” Even now, when Stephen has to make important decisions about the estate, he goes to Joyce’s grave to consult with him. In 1948, he wrote an essay about his grandfather, titled “The Man Whom I Loved and Respected Most in This World.”
>Stephen, in his thirties, was angered by the way that academics were circumventing the wishes of the estate. When the estate registered its desire to keep Joyce’s erotic letters to Nora private, Ellmann maneuvered around it. His 1959 biography alluded to the correspondence; his 1966 volume of Joyce’s letters contained expurgated versions of the letters; and his 1975 “Selected Letters” contained every word. In 1909, Joyce had implored Nora to “be careful to keep my letters secret.” Stephen viewed the letters’ publication as a transgression against his family.
>[Then] Stephen announced that he had destroyed all the letters that his aunt Lucia had written to him and his wife. He added that he had done the same with postcards and a telegram sent to Lucia by Samuel Beckett, with whom she had pursued a relationship. “I have not destroyed any papers or letters in my grandfather’s hand, yet,” Stephen wrote at the time. But in the early nineties he persuaded the National Library of Ireland to give him some Joyce family correspondence that was scheduled to be unsealed. Scholars worry that these documents, too, have been destroyed.
>Stephen has also attempted to impede the publication of dozens of scholarly works on James Joyce. He rejects every request to quote from unpublished letters. Last year, he told a prominent Joyce scholar that he was no longer granting permissions to quote from any of Joyce’s writings.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/06/19/the-injustice-collector
Dude should die soon. Seems like a faggot.
I can understand his desire not to have those letters to Nora published. I mean, those have some /d/ and /trash/ level shit in them. I can appreciate him wanting to protect his grandfather's reputation.
On the other hand, the fart letters don't seem to have HURT Joyce's reputation. And I don't really like him intervening in scholarly study of Joyce.
>>9410912
Disgusting libcuck pervert desu. Should be erased from the white canon
>everyone I don't like is a nihilist lmao
>>9410890
redpill of white masculinity
>>9410890
yes, literally
>every philosophy I don't like is life-denying rofl
>be Pearl S. Buck
>be American
>live in China for most of your life
>write novels in English about China
>become immensely popular and win both a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize
>nobody gives a shit about your books anymore because they don't really belong in either Chinese or American literature classes at universities
Who are some other authors who got fucked by academia by having fluid national indentities?
Do you think she sucked Chinese cock?
Kafka is often not included in Czech lit classes because he wrote in German. I don't know if he's ignored in German lit classes or not, perhaps someone knows.
>>9410846
>>become immensely popular and win both a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize
I'm interested in stuff like this, where a writer is immensely popular for a decade or two, and then a few decades later they're virtually forgotten.
Mickey Spillane had 7 out of the top-ten selling books ever at one point. Nowadays he's known only to crime genre enthusiasts, and most of them don't read him (he wasn't very good).
MOTHER, IT IS MEgreger
*CRASH* went the plate of pancakes
oh man i haven't read this yet why did you have to spoil it for me
>>9410820
I really like that this person is facing away from the camera, so we can assuming nothing about their race, gender, age, etc. Just cockroach oblivion.
reminds me of Jean Baudrillard's photography a little.
This book makes blood meridian look like a one dimmesnional pile of pooh desu senpaitachi. I also see where Pynchon got a hankering for making sweet character names. Has anyone read the other books in the series?
I've been trying to find it for a long time
>>9410759
I really like the aesthetics of that book cover.
Is it actually about magic cowboys though? I think i'd hate that. Dark Tower was obnoxious.
>>9410878
Magic cowboys? Wtf are you talking about. The blurb by pynchon?
What did he mean by this?
>look at me i'm edgy
Nothing more
>I HATE MONDAYS
>>9410745
Heaven is yourself?
What are all the books I should read before jumping into the Divine Comedy?
Finishing the Aeneid right now and I've already done a full read through of OT/NT
It's not really necessary, Dante has more shit than you will ever recognise either way, and you'll absolutely need annotations.
Uhh, maybe Homer, Plutarch (?), some kind of basic familiarity with the Roman revolutionary period (130s BC - 100 AD) might be good?, Petrarch would be good
(Divine) Comedy option: read some of Schevill's academically outdated but perfectly decent history of Florence, mostly the parts up to and including Dante himself.
European Extreme: Read Hans Baron's Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 500 pages of dense philology
>>9410779
Thanks m8.
Any recommendation regarding translation and annotations? Which edition is your favorite and which is best for someones first read through?
>>9410779
don't listen to this faggot. i read the divine comedy in highschol with no annotations or background knowledge in literature besides Homer and I was fine
dante is a good writer just read his words, don't approach it like some secret code.
lit has the worst capacity for actually reading
Starting with the Greeks: How important is it that I read the Robert Fagles translation as opposed to the free Edward Earl of Derby translation?
>>9410710
Lattimore you bampot
>>9410710
>Δεν μπορεί να διαβάσει Ελληνιkά
>>9410710
I'm reading lattimore atm.
Fagles seemed real fucking dumbed down but I'm enjoying the lattimore
What the fuck was his problem?
>>9410625
He tells you directly in part 1
Probably autism
>>9410625
He didn´t respect himself.
http://booksatruestory.com/2016/08/23/book-review-don-quixote-miguel-cervantes-saavedra-edith-grossman/
>>9410598
>y-you're not supposed to enjoy something in this way!
>>9410615
I don't see anything wrong with this.
>>9410800
But on the other hand, getting caught up in a narrative will mean you understand a lot of a book's important things, even if you don't do it consciously.
>If Don Quixote was going to be written today, it would be about video games rotting someone’s brains and they tried to bring the rules of video games into real life
Actually it'd probably be written about some guy who watched too many cowboy movies and then thought he was The Man who Had No Name. Chivalric romance was pretty dead by the time Cervantes got around to writing his book.
I've been referring to this chart and apparently the P&V translations of Dostoevsky is shit. Is this a good translation for C & P?
https://www.amazon.com/Crime-Punishment-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/dp/0199536368
>>9410576
this chart is garbage, the guy who made it read noen of those books and just namedropped some shit he saw on /lit/ as he admitted in the thread
>>9410576
They aren't shit. That's just a reaction to all the marketing hype they got. There are definitely better ones though. Don't know about that one, but OWC tend to have reliable translations. I like revised Garnett and have always found her style to be very appropriate.
Russkie fags:
1. Is Garnett acceptable?
2. Tell me about Matlaw. I have his volume of Chekov's short stories.
>Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax!
What did he mean by this?
>>9410562
he was literally frogposting
I think no one but him will ever know, if even that
Am I a bad person for listening to audiobooks?
I love reading and have a ton of books I want to read but I struggle to make and find the time.
I had planned to read a lot this year but so far I have only read two books this year. TWO. Im not even halfway done with the third book Im reading right now that I've been trying to get through for about 3 months now thanks to school.
:(
Do you guys listen to any audiobooks?
>>9410547
Its fine as long as you read the book separately from listening to it. Honestly, imo, the prose is always better when read aloud
>>9410547
how long were the two books?
>>9410547
h o w l o n g w e r e t h e t w o b o o k s ?
is it possible to create something that you aren't a little embarrassed about?
>>9410513
No. Good art reveals a piece of yourself. It's incredibly difficult not to feel a little self conscious about it at first. If you don't feel that way your work is probably just superficial trash. Even if you do feel that way it's probably superficial trash, but I digress.
>>9410513
Yes, but in order to do so you have to be the best guy in your medium. Petrarch, Michelangelo, Beethoven: they could pull it off and they knew exactly why and to what extent they were infinitely superior to their competition.
Either achieve that level of perfection or be dumb enough to not see the flaws in your art (just eat paint chips every once in a while)
>>9410544
>I seem to you to have written everything, or at least a great deal, while to myself I appear to have produced almost nothing.
Petrarch
>Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.
Michelangelo