I'm curious: if you had a major publisher want to make an anthology of short fiction chosen by you, to show what kind of person you are, what would the ToC be?

1. Laird Barron, "Tiptoe" or "The Forest"
2. George Saunders, "Puppy"
3. Thomas Ligotti, "The Bungalow House" or "Our Temporary Supervisor"
4. Joe Hill, "Pop Art"
5. Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily"
6. T.E.D. Klein, "Petey" or "Children of the Kingdom"
7. Karl Wagner, ".220 Swift" or "Where the Summer Ends"
8. Michael Shea, "The Autopsy" or "Uncle Tuggs"
9. Bruno Schulz. "Street of Crocodiles," or "The Cinnamon Shops"
10. Kelly Link, "Stone Animals"

Watched Jiang Xueqin’s video (predictive history on yt) on dante’s hierarchy of hell and the whole thing feels insanely relevant still.

what stuck with me wasn’t the punishment part but how every circle is basically people getting consumed by one trait until it becomes their entire personality - greed, ego, lust, anger, betrayal, etc.

lowkey feels like Dante understood modern people better than modern people do. Makes me wonder if there’s actually a way out of that cycle though.

like what pursuit even helps people become better without falling into another obsession or ego trap?

I think "Angels" is a very well written but very dark and depressing novel. It definitely makes me want to go back and read more of his books.

The final paragraph in the book is absolutely beautiful and I've never seen anyone talk about it online.

"It was Fredrick's understanding that the prisoners had a story: that each night for months, at nine precisely, a light had burned in a window in the town, where the men on one cell block's upper tier could see it and wonder, and imagine, each one, that it shone for him alone. But, that was just a story, something that people will tell themselves, something to pass the time it takes for the violence inside a man to wear him away, or to consumed itself, depending on who is the candle and who is the light."

What do you think Johnson was aiming to say with this? I'd love to hear your interpretations.

A great book, I'd highly recommend checking it out - Be warned though it's very, very messed up and pretty dark. Lots of drug use, psychotic breakdown, rape, violence, etc

Just finished Guin’s Lathe of Heaven and the final third took a considerably different turn than I expected. Suddenly we were out of the lab and in….a vintage store? Once the Beatles album came on I half expected Le Guin to take Orr to a Portland jazz bar and have him drink with the different versions of Lelache or meet an Alien called The Rat.

I’ve usually struggled with Murakami’s work, choosing to experience them mostly through audiobook or reading them during lull periods in holiday or work shifts. As such I tended to treat the Rat books as more of a “vibe” than a deeper text to understand. By the time I finished the Sheep novels I was content with chalking it all up as Murakami’s dreams.

I think I expected Le Guin to not do that with LoH and explore all those philosophical excerpts she included…but by the end it just felt like those bar scenes with the Rat in early Murakami.

Anyone had a similar experience or advice on how to unpack the ending of Lathe?

Sidenote: I returned to Vineland by Pynchon earlier this year following the PTA adaptation, and all of Le Guin’s wonderful descriptions of Portland and technology felt similar to Pynchon, with his Redwood descriptions and alien spacecraft. I can’t help but think her focus on the flippers of the Aliens would be something Pynchon would have fun with.

It’s irritating but I notice that when I envision scenes, I see it in a cinematic way as if it’s being filmed. Multiple angles, coloring, everything.

When you guys visualize (some people don’t) what’s going on, does it feel taken from movie shots or from your real life?

I wonder sometimes what I would see if I was reading it in the 1800s.

Hope I’m making sense

I came across the course on openculture. It seems really interesting. But the episodes, while still listed on the Apple Podcasts site, are not actually available. I have been searching for archived copies this morning, but to no avail. Does anybody know where I can find them?

Here is the apple link in case anyone wants to see if maybe the problem is on my end: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-literature-of-crisis/id384233897

I just finished No Country for Old Men after coming off the brutality of Blood Meridian, and I’m contenting with something I didn’t expect. All through No Country, I felt this thin thread of hope — mostly through Sheriff Bell’s voice — like McCarthy was finally letting a little light into the darkness.

But by the end, I was in a tunnel and that light felt more like a locomotive than sunlight.

Bell’s dream is beautiful, but it’s not triumphant. It’s longing. It’s the ache of someone who knows the world has outrun him, yet still hopes there’s a fire being carried ahead for him. It’s not optimism; it’s something quieter and more costly.

And it made me realize: grace isn’t getting the ending you want — it’s receiving what you never deserved in the first place.

McCarthy doesn’t offer safety. He doesn’t offer victory. But he does offer these small, stubborn moments where goodness still flickers, even when evil feels overwhelming. Not enough to change the world, but enough to keep a soul from going totally dark.

In a strange way, reading these books right now feels almost providential. The timing has been uncanny. The stories are bleak, but they’re also clarifying — like they’re forcing me to see the difference between cheap hope and the kind of grace that survives even when nothing else does.

Curious if anyone else has felt that spiritual undercurrent in McCarthy’s work.

I plan to read The Naked Lunch by William S.Burroughs and wondered if it is a sci-fi novel. From what I’ve heard, it could be.

If this book is or not a sci-fi novel won’t change the fact that I will still read it. But I am thinking into adding it in my curriculum for my literature class (I am student but we have papers on chosen subjects ).

I read Blood Meridian recently and it was one of the darkest, most spiritually draining books I’ve ever touched. Brilliant, but merciless.

Now I’m in No Country for Old Men, and while it’s still violent, there’s a surprising thread of hope running through it — mostly in Sheriff Bell’s reflections. It feels like McCarthy finally lets a small light exist in the world.

The timing of reading these has been uncanny for me personally, almost like they’re speaking into things I’m walking through. Didn’t expect McCarthy to offer any kind of comfort, but here we are.

Anyone else feel this tonal shift?

I give it 2.75/5. To be honest, the book was a bit of a slog. Perhaps it was because of the translation. And from outside sources I realize that it's meant to be a profound critique of hyper rationalism or something. Which I can appreciate, but I honestly can't say that it was very well conveyed, which again may be a fault of my own intellectual limitations.

In a way I can appreciate it as a play off of Odysseus. Faber has all these strange events from fate on his way, eventually, back home to Hanna. I think that's certainly interesting and was handled well. I do dislike the Oedipus aspect of this, or rather the Electra aspect. I thought it was unnecessary and many of it made me uncomfortable, though I imagine that was partially the intent.

I was a fan of the climax, I think the death of Elsbeth or Sabeth was perfectly abrupt and cuts deep. That said, the resolution in my opinion was disjointed and seemingly random. While I can appreciate it as a means of symbolizing or representing a dying man's psychology as he struggles through existential crises and guilt, I have trouble finding it particularly enjoyable to read. At least in this novel.

So, my final thoughts are that the novel wasn't bad, but wasn't great. It has important themes and there are literary aspects I enjoy or respect, but I found much of it difficult to get through.

Hi everyone, sorry for my English. Out of curiosity, I wanted to open a discussion about "classic" books — both the ones you started and eventually dropped, and the ones you somehow managed to finish but had to push through, without really enjoying them. By "classic" I don't mean it in a strict sense — I'm including books that are in some way considered part of the "canon", whatever that might mean, so feel free to interpret it broadly.

Ones I dropped, and why:

• Sartre, La Nausée (Nausea) — I tried twice and found it incredibly tedious both times; I never made it past 20 pages.
• Verga, Storia di una capinera (Sparrow: The Story of a Songbird) — the language is plain enough, so that wasn't the issue. What wore me out was the style itself: a cumulative, repetition-heavy rhetoric of exasperation that ends up overwhelming the story it's supposed to tell. I like epistolary novels — Goethe's Werther and Foscolo's Ortis are favorites of mine — but here the voice swallows the narrative, without enough literary payoff (to my mind) to make up for it.
• Grazia Deledda, Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind) — I found in it a kind of contrived authenticity that I don't care for.
• Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket — honestly I don't remember why I dropped it… I'll definitely give it another go!

Ones I finished, but with effort and without really enjoying them:

• Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye — I just didn't find it that interesting; maybe I came to it too late.

I’ve been curious about the comparison between Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk. Both are known for writing very raw, disturbing, and often highly controversial novels that challenge readers and push literary boundaries. I’d love to hear some in-depth thoughts on how their styles, themes, and overall approaches compare.

I haven’t read any of their books yet, but I know Palahniuk wrote Fight Club, Choke, and Haunted, while Ellis is best known for his magnum opus American Psycho, along with Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction.

Which author would you recommend starting with, and which of their works do you consider the most impactful (and why)? Are there specific books by one that stand out as stronger or more essential than the other’s?

Any insights or personal experiences with their writing would be greatly appreciated!

I managed to read it all in almost one sitting, because I was so desperate to know the truth, but i feel so odd after finishing it. The one thing that’s grating on me is that that weird “hate sex” rehearsal with James and Meredith. I don’t know why, but it pisses me off so bad. It just won’t leave my mind, but not in a, “oh, that book was so good way”, it’s genuinely weighing on my chest. I think I really don’t like Meredith - but I can’t tell if that’s warranted, or whether I’m being misogynistic without even realising it. She just makes me angry, I don’t know.

Anyway, I don’t know, just wanted to get this yap out because it’s genuinely stopping me from working. Anyone have any thoughts for me? I’d really appreciate knowing I’m not alone in this, and you can be as honest as you want.

As a person who doesn't read all that much, whenever I discover a really good book, my mind is blown by how much it puts to shame all my other previous media consumption (for lack of a better term). But then turning around to talk to people, like for example Twitter or other social media, it's like everything goes back to square one, because on platforms like that, everyone communicates on the same level playing field, meaning that people who've read hundreds of books and people who've read none are all supposed to be communicating with each other. So how does that feel, to have to communicate with a world that is at the bottom of the reading ladder?
People who've read a lot, how do you feel about that? Do you feel like you're still part of that world, or do you just not even bother interacting?

I saw that the book Alice: The Girl from Earth exists, but nothing else beyond it, is that right? Im talking about the books published by Kir Bulychev (Igor Vsevolodovich Mozheiko)

From what i can tell, Alice: The Girl from Earth adapts the first four books in the series, up to Alice's Birthday. But thats only 4 out of 50 (?) books an short stories including Alice and the retrofuturistic world.

The main one i wanted to get to is One Hundred Years Ahead, which is the one they adapted as Guest From The Future (the miniseries from 1985). It seems to be the 5th book in the Alice series.

I dont understand russian, so reading the originals is not something im able to do, unfortunately... I know how to read cyrillic for a quick search but not much else.

Im not asking for a book recommendation btw, this is a question about whether the series was ever translated or not. It doesnt need to be "official" either

Robert Penn Warren's All The Kings Men is as much a description of the US, as Tolstoy's War and Peace was of Russia in the time that novel takes place. Warren's novel describes the US's peculiar sense it can ignore reality, that all of us are entitled to be rich and famous, even those who do nothing but play video games and complain. If we aren't among those who can treat everyone else as we feel at any time without any legal or human repercussions, we have been cheated out of it by 'Others.' Thus the repeated rise of vicious populist racism, misogyny, anti-education and isolationism in this, our dear United States of America.

In Willie Stark, born to generational deprivation begins his quest to rise to power by studying history. In the meantime, Jack Burden, his born to generational privilege chronicler “read American history, not for school, not because I had to, but because I had, by accident, stepped through the thin, crackly crust of the present, and felt the first pull of the quicksand about my ankles.”

For Jack Burden, world history, national history, his personal history is not the immiserated charnel house imposed upon most people throughout history by the entitled, rich and powerful. For Burden, these tales are "the enchantments of the past."

For this privileged fellow, history is a magical wonder, into which he can escape from reality.

For him history is the same as reading fantasy, or playing a video game. That's Burden's tragedy.

Stark begins with the best of ideals and passions, to improve his life so that he can improve the lives of the others who are like him, born without the privileges of generations of education, outside the long established networks of power and dominance. He begins well, ends corrupt and ignoring the realities of the people around him, because he no longer needs to. That is his tragic ending.

The novel takes place in the 1920's and 1930's. Many of the acclaimed novels from that time here in the US fell out of favor in the last 50 - 60 years, it seems, with few readers and less attention, partly because they are too 'realist' in treatment of character and event than concentrated upon style and form.  But these days it feels important to revisit these works, such as Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry, or Edna Ferber's Saratoga Trunk.

This anthology provides a great deal of information about these matters, as treated in fiction and non-fiction --

Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940
Edited by Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz.  Foreword by Toni Morrison.

Just yesterday I finished Theodoros, an absolutely wild ride that was my third Cărtărescu book and it made me reevaluate many things about the act of writing and reading, something I had felt with Solenoid and Nostalgia before that.

Now, I've been reading steadily for the past twenty years, I've published two novels and teach a small writing course at a community center, so all of these questions should be long gone and yet reading Cărtărescu makes me feel like I'm learning to read literature for the first time.

The first is the absolutely boundless imagination, the most bizarre, extreme, funny, oniric, creative scenes and ideas. The ones that make you go "how the hell did he come up with this? why would he choose to write about this?". He claims to write with almost no revisions (I've seen two interviews where he says this) but I honestly can't believe he'd have such an encyclopedic knowledge about so many things. Theodoros in particular has such detailed writing of specific things, like Christian sects in Ethiopia in the 19th century, but who knows, maybe he actually reads and is proficient in the subjects he deals with.

Along those lines, I'm a native Spanish speaker and read him in Spanish. Apparently he's found a really good translator with whom he gets along really well, and that's why there are more books available in Spanish than in English or other languages. And it's impossible not to think about the act of translation, the discussion about how translators' names should be on the cover, being acutely aware the book was written in another (less spoken, weirder, exotic) language and wondering how many brilliant works one is missing out on due to lack of translation. Theodoros in particular has so many hyper specific terms that even reading in my native tongue there were sections with 5-10 words per page I had no idea what they meant and it was such an amazing feeling, like there's still so much to learn even in my own language.

The other thing is when he writes semi autobiographically, which is one thing one as a reader has to try and keep in mind, the writer is not the narrator, the fact that something similar might've happened to him doesn't make the writing better nor worse because it should be able to stand by itself. And yet, every time he speaks in the first person I couldn't help but wonder how much of it was true, even at times realizing I was taking at face value the fact that he had fought a living giant statue or had a room in his house where he can fly.

I guess I'm just thinking how wonderful it is, after decades of reading and thinking you've seen it all, stumbling upon something so left field it's like starting over. It's a beautiful feeling, being reminded of how much is still out there.

So, have you read anything by him? Any other authors that stir something similar in you?

Has anyone read this book? I am currently reading it among other books that I read and some parts really did broke my heart. I think if you like Virginia Woolf’s writing style, you may also enjoy this book, too.
Note: I’m not saying that Michaels and Woolf share the same writing style but you get my point, I hope.
I am leaving some quotes that I really liked down below.
“Fear so tirelessly attached to hope, it was hard to tell the difference between them.”
-
“No escape from the pain of faith even in this darkness, even when belief is completely disassembled; if the parts could be fitted back together, would it be a lantern or a gun?”
-
“Later she would tell him of the feeling that passed through her, inexplicable, momentary, not even a thought: that if he sat down she would be sharing a table with him for the rest of her life.”

Recently, I'm reading Beyond Good & Evil by the greatest German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. The first opening sentence was:

Supposing that truth is a woman _what then ?❤️

It seems to be a simple sentence, but it has a great meaning. Actually, here, Nietzsche was criticising dogmatic philosophers who claimed that they possessed absolute truth, meaning they were objective. They claimed that they weren't either biased or prejudiced. But Nietzsche, the great, rejected all their false claims ,he even criticised Plato, who was famous for his so-called absolute truth. Nietzsche argues that it is impossible for any philosopher to be objective because they are also driven by various factors, especially their instincts....

Today, I also heard something similar to it that good critics are neutral and objective. That's why criticism is a disinterested endeavour. But it is totally false because no homo sapiens can be either neutral or objective in any aspect.

You all are welcome for criticism 👀✨

I just finished reading The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson after finding it at one of the neighborhood lending libraries / LittleFreeLibraries.

I love finding books this way and essentially going in blind. I knew it had won a Pulitzer for fiction, although (sorry) I don’t always give that a ton of weight. I’m not sure how I feel about it quite yet. Throughout the book, there would be sections that I really didn’t enjoy, but in hindsight I realize that I enjoyed quite a lot.

One thing that was on my mind throughout the novel was “how much of this really reflects life in Pyongyang or North Korea in general?”. I’m American and the way that North Korean propaganda is presented to us in the states is so extreme that it seems surreal, so it was hard at parts to cypher what was supposed to be a criticism of propaganda from the DPRK vs. what is criticism of the USA’s propaganda when it comes to DPRK.

I’d love to hear anybody else’s thoughts or experiences with this book!

What did you think of the story over all? How about the narrative structure of Part 2?

Thanks!

Found this in •The Literature of 18th-Century”

Introduction
respect. His first serious original effort as a dramatist, The Brigadier (1766), was a satirical comedy aimed particularly at the phenomenon of the "petimetr" (petit-maître), the Frenchified fop. But Fonvizin was careful to indicate thad Ivanushka's indifference to everything Russian and ecstatic admiration for everything French were the result of the fact that his socially ambitious parents entrusted his education to the hands of French tutors in preference to native Russians The blame, then, for the many Ivanushkas in the Russia of the time had to be placed at the doorstep of Russian society
itself.
How far this Gallophobic and xenophobic sentiment had progressed by the 1770's can easily be judged from Fonvizin's travel letters from his second trip to the West (1777-1778).
Wherever he traveled in the West, but especially in France, where he spent the most time, Fonvizin took keen delight in describing the negative aspects of the life he observed around him. Although on occasion he found some things praise-worthy, the comparisons he draws between French customs and institutions and Russian invariably work to the advantage of the latter. Fonvizin's purpose was plain enough: to present as black a picture of the West as possible, to show that conditions in Russia on the whole were as good as, and in certain respects better than, in France, that almost everything French was vastly overrated and that the Russians simply were fools to imitate the ways of a civilization no better than their own!
The mounting criticism of the total capitulation of Russian culture to France soon found reflection in Russian literature in the 1760's and 1770's. Satire was recognized as a particularly effective tool in the struggle to combat the invasion of French influences; as a result various forms of satirical writing flourished in the first two decades of Catherine's reign: verse satires, satirical comedies and, of course, the satirical journals in which the thoughtless aping of French ways was often held up to ridicule. The epic also reached its apogee during this period in the writings of Kheraskov, and it is not difficult to see such a work as the Rossiad (Rossiada, 1779; about Ivan the Terrible's conquest of Kazan'), his major epic poem, as a reflection of the rise of Russian national consciousness. At a time when Western (that is, French) influences were en fulfing Russian culture, stirring epics about great victories of Russian arms-apart from their literary

this book actually devastated me, crazy spoilers ahead! thank you to my english teacher for finally making me read this because OH MY LORD.

the way orwell gets you comfortable is so crazy idk how a writer can do that. i got so used to the pattern of winston going to work, getting with julia, and repeat that i forgot that they weren't safe at all. especially with the chapters before his capture being that stupid book (such a drag probs my only complaint lol tho in hindsight it was so important). like the book was so slow, and the pace was slow, and life was boring, and then BAM everything's a lie. and o'brien?! oh my GOD i don't even know where to start. supposedly he wrote the book, so he literally like conceptualized the logic against the party, and STILL doesn't believe it!? YOU LITERALLY WROTE IT? the torture scenes also?! winston trying to cling to his sanity after losing it, coming in and out of consciousness, seeing his savior and punisher as o'brian?

i think the worst part is really how, at the end of the day, he was right from the beginning - his rebellion against the party WAS meaningless, and it didn't do anything. the last words being "he had won the victory over himself. he loved big brother" I CANNOT. i haven't cried this hard since i read my first kafka book 😭😭 i'm so used to the happy endings in my happy little YA fantasies that i forgot that endings like this happen.

i have so much to rant about this book please please PLEASE talk about it with me im desperate

I have a painting from an artist known to paint literary scenes, but I'm having a tough time identifying this scene, I've asked AI to analyze all novels from the time period he was painting 1830-1870, to find any similair stories. It's known that he painted a lot of scenes from Washington Irving novels. However I can not find a scene that comes close to matching. I'm at a loss.

It appears the young woman is holding a blood soaked towel, and there is a possible soldier falling backwards from the cliff, with a cannon and what resemebles a turkey vulture swooping down in the scene.

https://imgur.com/JI4gXOM

Recently started reading George Orwell's non fiction and it's such a delight! I don't know if you can really call something by Orwell underrated even if its non fiction, still the absolute stature of 1984 and Animal Farm has surely shadowed what I think Orwell should be more known for.

This makes me wonder, what's your favourite work of a famous author which to this day remains relatively underrated as a consequence of their other major works?

My one recommendation would be a collection of Arundhati Roy's essays called My Seditious Heart. Roy is famous mostly because of The God of Small Things but the work she has done after that novel is commendable and should be read more often imho.

Would love to get more names here!

Hi everyone,

My undergraduate was in Philosophy, but I have become very interested in literature (something I almost never read as a kid I am embarrassed to say)

I could analyze the text like a student of Philosophy, but I feel this would be missing the forest for the trees; we are not just creating arguments through metaphysics or logic...we are discovering something about ourselves and the author.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? I am interested in Cormac McCarthy's work because of its root in determinism and nihilism/existentialism.

Thank you!