/lit/ - Literature

>>11199210
>disclaimer: henry james actually looked like this

>>11199210
>never get to see your doppelganger become a fascist dictator

Why even live

>>11199210
Daisy Miller

>>11199210
the turn of the screw

You need to read James is somewhat approaching chronological order as his late masterpieces can be inpenetrable if you haen't already got used to James's style.
Start with Daisy Miller, The Europeans or Washington Square, then move through his bibliography. Don't necessarily read everything but try to have a couple of books from each decade.
Once you've got used to him, go for The Ambassadors, Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. Those three are his masterpieces, and among the greatest novels written by anyone. They push the conventional linear novel and conventional prose to it's absolute limit. The modernist innovations were an attempt by Joyce, Woolf etc to achieve the immersive effect of those late three novels without having to autistically manage prose to achieve the effect.

>>11199210
Start where it ends, in the fucking bin.

>>11199933
Couldn't have said it better myself. Finish up with Edel.

>>11199950
>Edel
I've always been intimidated by the full five volumes. Is it worth it? Or buy an abridgement?

>>11199961
If you think it's too much you can't really go wrong with the abridged. I'd recommend the full thing but the abridged would be a good trial run to see if you'd be interested in the whole shebang.

with the superior brother

why does he look like a white mussolini?

>>11200000
Thanks. I should probably take the plunge, though it will take a bit of digging on the second hand section of amazon.
>tfw so few Jamesians on /lit/ I'm pretty sure I know you from previous threads on the Master. We just need to wait for that guy with the pasta (from Nabokov?) about why Portrait sucks because it's too melodramatic with only one fully realised character

>>11200000
based

>>11200113
As all small groups do, we must stick together.

>>11200000
Checked!

How is The American Scene?

>>11200181
From what I've heard about it, it's a pretty damning critique of American materialism. It's also supposedly racist.

>>11200010

This.

>>11200129
>wwn all meet up at mysteriously tense social gatherings and have highly wrought conversation, rife with ironic double meanings and tragic ambiguity, before a misunderstanding caused by maddeningly indirect speech, forces, perhaps one of us, perhaps all, reluctantly, and with a regret bordering on the sublime, to decide, and perhaps even in the moment of decision realising the error, that the /James/ meet up was a mistake.

>>11199210
Thats Mussolini you retard