Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 4014. page

I have no idea what that picture is of (I assume your submittal to publishers) but I absolutely love flash fiction. It's a short story that cuts out the middleman and gets right to the point. Sort of like sex with a chick that knows how to push your buttons; you go deep and fast, bust a nut, enjoy the afterglow, and you go again.

I don't mean to insult you but have you ever thought that maybe your work doesn't fit the niche that the publisher in trying to fill? I'm not saying your writing isn't good but what if it just isn't what they're looking for?

>>7875548
What kind of works are you submitting?

>>7875596
I love it, too. The problem I've found with other writers in the genre is that they feel the need to drastically up the stakes in order to convey profundity in a very brief number of words. So every third or fourth flash fiction story is about someone dying, or someone getting cancer, or things of that nature. It annoys me to no end. People mistakenly believe that because their time with the reader is so limited, they can just "fast-forward" to an emotional connection by making the story SUPER SAD right off the bat, and it just comes off as forced and flat.

it was addiction

>>7875362
What the hell is up with all the hedonist posts lately?

>I suppose

No it's not hedonism. Once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

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>>7875016
Anything from Joe Hill

>>7875475
He's Stephen King's son, isn't he?

Anyway, check out Thomas Ligotti, he writes a bit similar to Lovecraft, but less "monsters"
or Jack Ketchum if you want more brutality

>>7875482
Yup, he is. His stuff is much better than his pappy's current output.

>>7874536
Read almost all of them and had trouble understanding all the ranks and sky pirate visuals and purifying crystals. I was in like 2nd grade or some sheeeit. This fosters some serious fantasy at a young age. Gotta have it/10

>>7874536
My brother had all those books. I never read them.

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>>7874550
Yeah, I started reading these when I was a preteen, so it was a lot easier for me to understand them, but fuck if it doesn't seriously spark your imagination at any age. Like, what the fuck is a muglump? You keep hearing about them and you have no idea what one is, you just know where they live and what they do and then you fucking SEE one of those fuckers and it's like, that is not what I thought a muglump is. It's way worse.

>>7874558
I highly recommend them. It's one of those book series that takes everything you know about the human world and goes "Whoops, there it goes". Rocks fly. There are whole forests where time doesn't pass. Trees sing when you burn them. It's really trippy.

>>7874018
>Pushkin
>foot notes
teehee

>>7874018
There was once a poor knight living
All alone in the wide world;
His appearance grim and livid,
But his spirit true and bold.

He once saw a saintly vision,
Something dazzling he did see,
And profoundly the impression
Cut into his memory.

For Geneva bound, he tarried
By the road; beside a cross
He beheld the Virgin Mary,
Mother of the Holy Christ.

Since that time, his soul on fire,
He at females never glanced;
Til his dying day drew nigher,
Didn’t address them ever once.

Since that time, an iron lattice
Never lifted from his face –
And the scarf gone – where the neck is,
Hung a rosary in its place.

To take prayers to the Father,
Or the Spirit, or the Son,
Was, it being an odd thing rather,
Something he had never done.

He would spend his nights entire
Bowed before the Virgin’s brow,
Weeping quietly – with dire
Tears, that melancholy flow.

Full of faith, enamored dearly
Of his pious dream, with blood
Ave, Mater Dei clearly
He inscribed upon his shield.

While the cavalry of errants
Through the Palestinian plains
Ran at trembling adversaries,
Calling the beloved names,

Lumen coelum, sancta rosa!
He called louder than the rest,
As the Muslim threats came closer
To his head from every nest.

Then, returning to his castle,
Lived, with no one by his side.
Still enamored, still bedazzled,
Uncommunioned he died.

As he readied to expire,
Lo, the Evil Spirit came.
Keen to, as the time drew nigher,
Drag his soul into His realm.

Saying, he has said no prayers.
Saying, he has held no fast;
And not properly made passes
At the mother of the Christ,

But the Holy Virgin pleaded
For his soul before the King,
Letting into Heaven’s kingdom
Her beloved paladin.

>>7874041
yeah didn't he violently masturbate to feet? like he wrote a snuff poem about it?

>>7895649
They are incredibly awkward to read and should only be implied.

I literally put the book down if this happens. Same with any requited declarations of love or anything involving two people being affectionate towards each other. It just pains me too much to read a this point. It started with music and my unconsciously turning off or switching to another song when the lyrics were about being in love and so on. Then I realized what I was doing and why I wasn't enjoying music like I used to. This has since spilled over to literature, movies and even 4chan posts. If someone posts about their girlfriend or something my instinct is to instantly convince myself that they are lying and then to close the thread. It really is a form of torture to have to exist in a culture where romantic affection is granted the highest value. I literally only choose books to read now wherein I know in advance that the protagonist does not experience romantic affection.

Cloud Atlas

I read up to Sloosha, at which point I realised the author legitimately thought he was being clever, and I just couldn't bear it any more.

The Guild of the Wizards of Waterfire by Iain Reading with no trace of a doubt, I'm certain there's worse books out there but this one is my kryptonite. I found a copy of it on a convention floor, I tried returning it but nobody bit so I kept it. I've been reading a lot of younger fiction as its a genre I'm interested in writing for, but nothing will ever compare to the blithering shitpile that this book tries to pass as published material. I've finished books I hate just to say that through and through they are terrible, but this... this was different. This was a strange breed of awful. I don't even touch books printed like this anymore, THATS how bad it was. That being said, I have another book from that convention, also free: Eden's Secret Ore. Its FF7.

From what I remember, The Guild of the Wizards of Waterfire started off with an infodump "laced" through the introduction, that is: one meaty paragraph of worldbuilding and a couple sentences of book with little concern on how well it meshed. No, not in any particularly artful way either, the first two paragraphs are starters of their own, and the fucker flips narratives like a fish. Anyways, the whole magic of the universe is about balance, but mixing a certain two elements makes a very strong magic while basically everything else does jack shit. There's something about having to need a certain amount of people in the guild or they must break up, but its been 2 pages there's no stakes and I don't care if they break up or not.

Once the great dump is out of the way, prepare for another one. A character the reader doesn't know is revealed to be dead (I already don't give a shit) and the other characters the readers have known for ~500 words grieving, and... yeah, I still don't give a shit? To make matters worse, he's still dropping paragraphs about the world. Things get spotty after this in my memory, a chapter of the MC crying alone in her hidey-hole, and then chapter of her being late to school just like in the animes, I remember bits and pieces but I slammed that book into the garbage when the love interest was hailed as a fucking genius for saying "hey, what if we made a modern day romeo and juliet play?".

God, the worst fucking part was the fact that these elemental-wielding wizards used gemstones as a catalyst, the stones had a small amount of element inside of them (literally 'pure water from an iceberg' or something) and to use magic the kids had to squeeze the gem until a microscopic particle of the element came out. My suspension of disbelief was obliterated.

And before anyone calls it a 'kid book', I talked to the author that day while the book was in lost and found and I asked what age range his books are for. He said from "10 to 20". There's absolutely no way a 20 year old would find any joy in this whatsoever.

That being said, pick up a copy and see how far you get. I got to page 66. 2$ on Amazon kindle!

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>>7895546
The Brothers Karamazov

It was so long and slow and nothing important ever seemed to happen.

>>7893089
New Sincerity is the policy of an emotional reactionary. Wallace spent most of his time eviscerating posturing and jaded young people hopped up on irony--in other words, leftists.

He was very tolerant of homophobia in his novel Infinite Jest. Most characters, even author stand-ins like Hal, casually use phrases like 'faggy' to refer to things they don't like. Homosexuals are portrayed as degenerates and objects of disgust. He refers to progressives as Hillary Clinton-supporting granola cruchers. He was extremely fond of his Midwestern upbringing, and his 9/11 essay for Rolling Stone betrays an appreciation for national pride and unity. He attended church regularly.

He would probably tell you that he was apolitical or possibly a moderate, and he certainly wasn't a card-carrying Republican, but I think he had an appreciation for conservative values even if he felt they couldn't always hold up.

This is nothing but speculation though, and mostly irrelevant to his work

He was probably a centre-leaning democrat. I read in a Vice obituary that he classed himself at one point as a member of the communist party of America and, if franzen is to be believed, he voted for Reagan because his neoliberal policies would hasten the downfall of capitalism in America.

In Up, Simba, while enchanted with McCain's personality, he wrote that his [1] jingoism and gun rights activism was kind of scary, and with regards to abortion, I think it was in a supposedly fun thing to do that he believed abortion to be morally wrong personally, but it was morally wrong also to restrict another person's access to abortion, so essentially he was pro-choice. He also demonstrated a kind of disgust with the identity politics burgeoning in the university system while he was at pomona, writing in the essay on wittgenstein he thought that seedy upper class business men would be delighted to see leftists fight over whether to call the poor "economically disadvantaged" or w/e and that it'd make being poor sound better and thus make people less sympathetic, and was even written up one time for basically sitting down and telling a kid "hey so it's not fair and totally sucks but to make it in academia you can't write like a nigger" [2]

By the time he got interviewed by that deutschland cunt, which i think was in '03 and his last public interview, he resigned from politics as they were too upsetting. He'd probably be a Jim Webb democrat if anything at this point, maybe he'd be interested in the alt right, and I think he'd probably be horrified at the level of censorship and hedonism demonstrated by the modern left, but we can only speculate.

[1] McCain's
[2] Obviously in different wordings

>>7893159
>and, if franzen is to be believed, he voted for Reagan because his neoliberal policies would hasten the downfall of capitalism in America.
That would make sense to me. I can imagine him as a socially but not as a fiscally conservative.

99% of authors give you a book that when you reach the last page, that's it, it's over, and you put it back on the shelf. Wallace, though, gave us an infinite jest, that goes round and round, never ending, never reaching a conclusion. So I'd say it's his generosity.

Because of that oracular foresight he stole from DeLillo.

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>>7894652

LMand but s O

>>7892030
Fuck off, pretty boy

>Caesar died holding a scroll alerting him to a plot on his life, he hadn't the time to read it
Positively absurd.

>>7892033
I don't get the Camus-is-super-handsome meme. Is it only in comparison with Sartre?

>>7891047
Frost?

Whitman?

>>7891047
Bane?

>>7878813
I think of two very unlikely people to meet and then force them into something really hot.

Speaking of.

Last thread I was discussing with an anon what kind of conflict I could bring into a novel about a devout young man who submits to a BDSM Dom and thus has his world view and beliefs tested.

Keeping that open.

>>7878821
Not everyone writes erotica, anon

>>7878853
Sex is simply the climax of two people becoming entwined beyond all expectation.

Conflict getting too heavy? Just fuck it out.

I have a degree in philosophy and I'm a barista.

>>7893018
I model for mainstream clothes shop catalogues and websites

>>7893018
I teach literature to undergrads at a university. I also do academic research and publish articles. I also fuck around on /lit/ between meetings with my students.

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im so gay for folio society

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The Everyman's Meditations is one of my personal favorites.

>>7892606
Not a huge fan of that one in particular, but most Folio books look amazing. Shame they cost a fortune for 3rd world Europoors like me.

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I'm a big fan of these covers for Gravity's Rainbow.

>>7892606
Folio do some really great ones too, I love the Dubliners cover

I can't wait! Thanks for sharing, I am huge fan of Johnathon Franzen!

i never actually read anything by him, i just buy his books to cause Jennifer Weiner asspain

"irony was a mistake" -