ITT writers only Americans care about
>>25428619I refuse to believe anyone outside of America cares for Steinbeck.
>>25428637We had to read Of Mice and Men in secondary school in the UK. It was a good book desu, I want to read more of him when I get the chance
>>25428642Britishers are a bunch of ameriboos tho.I don’t think other literate countries care about american authors like steinbeck, mccarthy, vollman, pynchon, mcmurty, denis johnson, david foster wallace, and others like them.
>>25428745Polack here, Steinbeck and Corncob are very popular. Our goodreads equivalent sez that they're more popular than Homer, Dante, Milton, Melville, Joyce, Faulkner, Proust. Not as popular as the Russians or Marquez obviously. Pynch is niche, "more talked about than read" according to his translator. Though still more popular than Virgil for some reason, no idea why he's so overlooked.
>>25428619Unfortunately his seven dreams series will be limited to dream only. He's recently clarified that he will not be finishing them, he has cancer, and is dying.I like his writing. It's unapologetic, kind of indulgent but very good nonetheless.
>>25428745we don't care about any of those writers except Steinbeck t. britisher
>>25428619Of Mice and Men was pretty fun. I am also a bong who studied it in school. It was the only book that the black kids enjoyed learning about, even if the teacher did say nigger once or twice.
>>25428810Poles love stories in the vein of "life is bad, and people are even worse" (Steinbeck), yet their Slavic soul also craves cheap miracles and idyllic bliss (Márquez).Of course, it is not that Steinbeck and Márquez are shallow; rather, the Polish reader interprets them at the most superficial level—often filtered through our own insularity. That is why Poles fail to understand Pynchon, or indeed anything that lies beyond their narrow horizons.>>25428619I’m not sure if even Americans care about Vollmann. He is arguably the most European of American writers—something that, in turn, isn’t understood in the US.
This guy sucks l o lSad to see all the steinbashing in this thread though, Of Mice and Men is pretty good, and has some nice intertextuality with Robbie Burns' To A Mouse.We seem to only cover 3 works of American literature in the UK: Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockonbird, and The Great Gatsby. I think it's a shame we rarely cover any work from Faulkner, Shirley Jackson, Edgar Alan Poe or Hemingway.I also got to cover The Road for my A Levels because my teacher was based and wrote his PhD on Cormac McCarthy.>t. Britbong
>>25428619 I stood upon the hills, when heaven's wide archWas glorious with the sun's returning march,And woods were brightened, and soft galesWent forth to kiss the sun-clad vales.The clouds were far beneath me; bathed in light,They gathered midway round the wooded height,And, in their fading glory, shoneLike hosts in battle overthrown.As many a pinnacle, with shifting glance.Through the gray mist thrust up its shattered lance,And rocking on the cliff was leftThe dark pine blasted, bare, and cleft.The veil of cloud was lifted, and belowGlowed the rich valley, and the river's flowWas darkened by the forest's shade,Or glistened in the white cascade;Where upward, in the mellow blush of day,The noisy bittern wheeled his spiral way. I heard the distant waters dash,I saw the current whirl and flash,And richly, by the blue lake's silver beach,The woods were bending with a silent reach.Then o'er the vale, with gentle swell,The music of the village bellCame sweetly to the echo-giving hills;And the wild horn, whose voice the woodland fills,Was ringing to the merry shout,That faint and far the glen sent out,Where, answering to the sudden shot, thin smoke,Through thick-leaved branches, from the dingle broke. If thou art worn and hard besetWith sorrows, that thou wouldst forget,If thou wouldst read a lesson, that will keepThy heart from fainting and thy soul from sleep,Go to the woods and hills! No tearsDim the sweet look that Nature wears.
>>25428965I suspect this is a holdover from the days when the CIA promoted "all-American" writers in Europe. Hemingway would have fit the bill thematically, but he was a commie and was instead promoted behind the Iron Curtain (along with a few other forgotten foggies like Upton Sinclair or William Wharton).>>25428969Yes! Him and Henry David Thoreau. Apart from the Americans, no one can read this drivel.
Ok, so if the usual meme’d american writers suck and irrelevant, who should I read then?
>>25428986If you like genre fiction, anything at all by Philip K. Dick
>>25428986
Is Walt Whitman worth reading? He seems to get referenced a lot in US media but nobody seems to read him outside America which is usually a telltale sign.
>>25428619Never really heard of Lew Wallace outside of the US.
>>25428637German here. He's popular
Americans live in a bubble. And larping online 3rd-worlders just parrot shit, and thinks McCarthy is the greatest writer ever without ever reading any of his stuff.
>>25429070There is in him an unmistakable genius, though it is often hidden beneath much that is crude and repellent. His writing is full of an animal mysticism.>Ages and ages, returning at intervals,>Undestroy'd, wandering immortal,>Lusty, phallic, with the potent original loins, perfectly sweet,>I, chanter of Adamic songs,>Through the new garden, the West, the great cities calling,>Deliriate, thus prelude what is generated, offering these, offering myself,>Bathing myself, bathing my songs in Sex,>Offspring of my loins.
>>25428992Reddit told me his prose is bad.
no one cares about to kill a mockingbird lets be honest
>>25428619>ask my literary siblings and parents>no one know who he his nor IJfell for the meme, they all have lit degrees im a stemmy
>>25428637I live in America and I can't stand the guy
>>25429096What Americans do you personally know?
>>25428979Your idea of drivel is very odd
>>25428637He's who I immediately thought of but I still like him
>>25429189people with lit degrees know who he is but he is a meme in the sense that he's taken most seriously by casual readers
>>25429296So which authors do lit degrees take seriously?
Funny that you can name and argue about American authors only Americans care about when literally every other country is full of authors absolutely no one cares about or can even name. Non-Americans coping and seething per usual
>>25429186>no one cares about to kill a mockingbird lets be honestAmericans might think that Uncle Tom's Cabin is an important part of their history but no other country cares about Uncle Tom's Cabin and they would not care even if it burned to the ground with Uncle Tom inside it.
>>25429388Uncle Tom's Cabin and its derivative works were popular all across Europe for decades. There are statues of its characters in European cities. You can find approving references to it in European books well into the 20th century. You're full of shit
Pynchon is seen as something of a weird american curiosity and Gaddis is very little talked about, if at all. Delillo is only slightly better in that regard. DFW is roughly in the same tier as Pynchon, Infinite Jest recently got a translation but he is hardly the target of much attention.The pre-war Americans fare rather well, however. Not all of them, though, Henry James is quite unpopular. People don't really know what to make of Robinson Jeffers and Wallace Stevens.I never heard anyone talk about Vollmann.
>>25429312sebald and carson
>>25429411>Sebald studied German and English literature first at the University of Freiburg and then at the University of Fribourg in SwitzerlandHilarious.
>>25429401I thought Jeffers and Henry James would be decently popular.
>>25429070>Is Walt Whitman worth reading?... nobody seems to read him outside AmericaMostly because he's been so thoroughly metabolized that Whitmanic work doesn't even read as Whitman-influenced anymore. Absolutely worth reading. Start with >Crossing Brooklyn Ferrythen move onto the great elegy for Lincoln>When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom'dand then the proto-surrealist Whitman>The Sleepers [1855 edition, then the Death-Bed edition]before you read Song of Myself. At least, that's the order I'd recommend. Whitman wrote a ton of poetry, and the bad poems are genuinely embarrassing to read (thinking of Song of the Broad-Ax, thinking of Beat! Beat! Drums!) but the good stuff -- like "Drum-Taps," his poetry about the US Civil War, or "Calamus," his poems about faggotry -- is immortal
DFW
>>25428637East of Eden is huge right now. I see Europeans of all kinds talk about him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Benjamin Franklin
>>25429694Ancient americans were basically europeans.
>>25429432>wikipediaoh you're brown kek
>>25429498Online?
>>25428979Thoreau, and Walden specifically, has a surprising amount of traction with the sort of "spiritual" non-religious in-touch-with-nature crowd where i live, even though i don't think hes particularly good.
>>25429498EoE was an Oprah Book Club selection, it's been huge for years
>>25429727What’s good then, anon? Baker’s Peregrine?
>>25428637I hate women, love from South Africa.
>>25429694Benjamin Franklin?>Honor of the New World and of Humanity, This lovable and true sage guides and enlightens them; Like another mentor, he conceals from the common eye, Under the features of a mortal, a divinity.
>>25429709Yes. I am American but I watch European book influencers. East of Eden is one of the few 'old' books I see them read. Alongside, like, 1984.
>>25428745pynch is decently well-known in japan (i can name at least two anime where he's been referenced lol) and i've met people who are really into american po-mo (barth, barthelme) and even vollman, though i don't know how much of his work has been translated. steinbeck is commonly found in bookstores and not niche at all if you're into american lit. never seen denis johnson or mccarthy but who knows. weirdly enough i don't think Infinite Jest has ever been translated to japanese, surprising given its meme status in the US. so i think DFW is probably the best example of "huge in the US but literally who abroad"
>>25429816also apparently Ligotti has just been recently translated into japanese, albeit only a "greatest hits" selection. still pretty cool. i think his brand of horror is not too specifically american, though king is huge over there so w/e
In terms of worldwide popularity, stephen king must be no. 1 american writer, right? Because of the movies.
>>25429401>Pynchon is seen as something of a weird american curiosity and Gaddis is very little talked about, if at all. Delillo is only slightly better in that regard. DFW is roughly in the same tier as PynchonNot just pomo, make that all "literary" American writer that started in the 2nd half of the 20 century. Deservedly so.
>>25429902Who are the european equivalent of these people?
>>25430545They dont have equivalents. Its all self-indulgent autofiction or writing about the Holocaust. But they still think theyre superior to American literature.
>>25430545It's artificial to ask this because few outside the US or at most the English speaking world interpret "postmodernism" in literature in the way it is used in the US. There already wasn't a modernism to be become "post" of. Of course Anglos might say that Proust or Apollinaire or Musil were modernists but that's a label/category those people would have been surprised by and would have rejected. Perhaps the closest things were the surrealists in France although that precedes pomo and was an influence on it, and the theatre of the absurd in the same place in the 40s-80s (with Beckett writing both in Ireland and France and being a common link since he's considered both an absurdist and postmodern). There were plenty of non pomo experimenters in fiction in that time (say Queneau, Calvino, Robbe-Grillet, etc).
>>25430639>There already wasn't a modernism to be become "post" ofliterally, what?
>shallow attempt to be relevant by pretending to be transworst hack shan't be reading
>itt: browns
>>25430639>There already wasn't a modernism [in Europe]Literary modernism is quintessentially european, while America's contribution to the movement remained notably but peripheral when compared to say France and Britain.>the closest things [to modernism] were the surrealists in FranceYes surrealism was a modernist art movement, originating in France. So too was Cubism. Then we have Dada from Switzerland, De Stijl from the Netherlands, Bauhaus from Germany, Futurism in Italy, and so on. Then we have modernist literary movements like Imagism and Vorticism in the UK, symbolism in France, German expressionism, and so on and so forth. THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP. What does modernism mean to you if you think it's american l_o_l?
>>25430545>>25430572For starters, good luck understanding postmodernism without european thinkers like Barthes, Derrida (press S to spit), and Foucault. More recently, philosophers like Slavoj žižek.To only name British postmodern texts:- The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing- Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter- Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
>>25428619Abraham Lincoln.
>>25429204I know an air force mechanic stationed in my country. and my english teacher was a mormon
>>25428619He takes being pathetic to the limit. This is anti-American ethos. Why does he do it?
>>25431303If youre trying to put Ian fucking McEwan up there with Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy then I would say Im right there is no Euro equivalent for them. Gotta be honest I havent even heard of Angela Carter but shes called a feminist in the very first sentence of her Wiki article so I shant be inquiring further.
>>25431360Pynchon doesn't belong there. McEwan is significantly more popular everywhere, perhaps Delillo doesn't belong there either>>25430639Beckett, Nabokov and Borges were all late modernists
>>25431360Enduring Love is merely a prominent example of postmodernist novel that came to mind, i leave it's quality for you to judge. I'd add that if you avoid reading any Angela Carter, then you're only doing yourself a disservice.
>>25431360>Umberto Eco>Italo Calvino>Milan KunderaThere you go anon
