/lit/ - Literature

You might like Machado de assis. Read whateveryou canget of him.

>>22255987
Good shout!

>Let’s turn to a comic novel written in 1880 by Brazil’s Machado de Assis. Tell us about it and how you came to love this work.

>Well, I just got it in the mail one day. Some stranger in Brazil sent it and wrote, “You’ll like this.” Because it’s a thin book, I read it. If it had been a thick book, I would have discarded it.

>I was shocked by how charming and amusing it was. I couldn’t believe he lived as long ago as he did. You would’ve thought he wrote it yesterday. It’s so modern and so amusing. It’s a very, very original piece of work.

>The book turns mortality and amorous adventures into comedy and is infused with an ironic pessimism that seems familiar from your films. How did it influence you?

>It’s not that it influenced me; it resonated with me, in the same way as when I see movies by Ingmar Bergman. They mean something to me because of his preoccupations and his view of life. It rang a bell in me, in the same way that The Catcher in the Rye did. It was about subject matter that I liked and it was treated with great wit, great originality and no sentimentality.

>>22256067
Yes, I really like that book, the mc is a motherfucker, but he is funny, I even got a tattoo of it.

>>22255983
Phillip Roth

>>22255983

absolute madlad raped a child and married his daughter

>>22255983
Does anyone have better prose than Woody Allen?

>Anyone who has ever thrown a lit match into the hold of a munitions tanker will bear me out that from the smallest gesture a great many decibels can be coaxed. In fact, a maelstrom of fairly seismic proportions occurred in my own life just a few weeks ago precipitated by nothing larger than a succinct billet-doux slipped under the door of our townhouse. The lethal flyer announced that a Hollywood production shooting in Manhattan had decided the outside of our home was letter perfect for the celluloid bubba meisha they happened to be sauteing at the moment and, should the interiror pass muster, they would like to use it as a location. Preoccupied as I was at the time by certain Wall Street mergers that affected my substantital position in pyrite, I accorded the proclamation the same urgency reserved for Chinese take-out menus and cosigned the scrawl to our circular file.

>It seemed like Mike Tyson's estate was being sold, and the champ's fiefdom was nothing short of Xanadu. It boasted eighteen guest bedrooms for those occasions, I suppose, when two baseball teams drop over unexpectedly. It had thirty-eight bathrooms, as Tyson apparently does not like to pouud on the door screaming, "Are you ever coming out?" There were seven kitchens, a waterfall, a boathouse, a disco, a huge gym, and a larger theater. The original asking price was twenty-one million federal diplomats, and either the buyer was an accomplished hypnotist or the premises lacked some essential ingredient like a missile silo, because the principal was somehow sweet-talked down from twenty-one million to a more demure four.

>Capricious is the life of the dedicated mummer, and while my portrayal of Waffles last month in Uncle Vanya got a nice mention in Aficionado, the cigar magazine, no one's breaking my door down. Of course, I realized decades ago when I chose the muses over a cushy sinecure aboard my father's roach extermination truck that a life dependent on auditions might very well include malnutrition.

>>22256154
more of Woody Allen's prose

>What a morning. I had to pop two Valiums to zone out the monarchs, graylings, and cecropia moths that were using my stomach to practice aerial maneuvers. My first actual assignment as a reporter, and it's this fantastic coup. Why would Hollywood's most charismatic actor, Bolt Upright, who eschews the limelight a la Howard Hughes, grant an interview to an unknown nineteen-year-old with shoulder-length blond hair, long tanned legs, Ming Dynasty cheeckbones, a great top shelf, and an overbite that wreaks havoc with the Y-chromosome crowd? If this Sun Belt Casanova has any idea of hitting on me like the myriad hapless starstruck tomatoes he's drilled, he's got another think coming. My goal in life is serious reportage, and I'd frankly rather go one on one with Joe Biden or the Dalai Lama, except those highfalutin face cards never wrote back, while Bolt, who accidentally lamped me last month in Playboy's nude spread on the best-built Columbia journalism majors, not only answered but scented his reply.

>>22255987
>>22256080
FYI: This guy is one of the dumbest posters on /lit/. Take his recs with a grain of salt.

>>22256154
This isn't very good, anon.

>>22256161
>le tattoo
>le bad
Ok, le bible, thanks. Now, my IQ increased and I'm a bibletard like you.

>>22255983
You should read, If you want to killyourself,why don’t you kill yourself, by pessoa

>>22256099
Lmao

>>22255983

Did he ever his love story about him and Soon Yi?

>>22256327
Strangely no. It would have been a good movie.

>>22256084
I've read Portnoy's Complaint

Any other suggestions?

>>22255983
>Looking for stuff about New York intellectual life, Jewish neuroticism etc with a touch of humour.
try reading something from dorothy parker or fran lebowitz

>>22255983
Salinger? :)

>>22255983
I'd suggest David Sedaris' essays. He's way less neurotic than Allen. He's gay (idk if you're the kind of anon that gives a shit or not) but I think he's much funnier and , unlike Allen, his prose is actually well-styled.

>>22255983
Freud stuff, get Freud's lectures are pretty /lit/

>>22255983
any pedophilic content from the 70s

>>22257463
Where to start?

>>22257948
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Psychoanalysis
I have to finish reading them, I was reading one that my mom had it here but it is missing some pages.

>>22255983
Mein Kampf.

>>22255983
Paul Auster is a great jewish writer. His books explore psychological themes and many of his characters could be described as quite neurotic. There's some humor in his books but not in abundance. I'd start with his first and most critically acclaimed novel The New York trilogy.

>>22256189
embarrassing response, honestly

"Moon Palace" by Paul Auster
"Sabbath's Theater" by Phillip Roth
Anything by David Sedaris or Kafka
Not a book, but the Jewish-American neuroticism/guilt that interests you is satirized and vilified in "Beau is Afraid" if you're looking for a new movie to watch. It's like if Portnoy's Complaint was written by Samuel Beckett.

>>22256852
His other books

Would you mind posting which “Allen-like” books and movies you enjoy so I can avoid them? I’m not memeing. His neurotic, narcissistic and self-deprecating style just bothers me and I would like to steer clear away from it.

>>22255983
Houelle Houelle Houelle

>Woody Allen

>>22255983
>that smog

Jesus, what a shithole. Looks like the smoke we had from wildfires a few weeks ago, but permanent.

>>22258320
Woah, cool it with the anti-semitic remarks.

>>22255983
The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant. A 30-something "career student" grows bored of the academic life and decides to work as a building manager for his slumlord brother. There's a bit of slapstick humor to it but it's also a very moving book.

>>22258320
Not sure I like this comment, goy. What are you trying to say here?

>>22258336
That picture is from at least 40 years ago, cities were indeed dirtier and less healthy than they are now

>>22256154
I like this

>>22258557
Yes, I know. I am reflecting on how stark that difference is.