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/lit/ is for the discussion of literature, specifically books (fiction & non-fiction), short stories, poetry, creative writing, etc. If you want to discuss history, religion, or the humanities, go to /his/. If you want to discuss politics, go to /pol/. Philosophical discussion can go on either /lit/ or /his/, but those discussions of philosophy that take place on /lit/ should be based around specific philosophical works to which posters can refer.

Check the wiki, the catalog, and the archive before asking for advice or recommendations, and please refrain from starting new threads for questions that can be answered by a search engine.

/lit/ is a slow board! Please take the time to read what others have written, and try to make thoughtful, well-written posts of your own. Bump replies are not necessary.

Looking for books online? Check here:
Guide to #bookz
https://www.geocities.ws/prissy_90/Media/Texts/BookzHelp19kb.htm
Bookzz
http://b-ok.cc/
http://libgen.rs/
Recommended Literature
http://4chanlit.wikia.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading
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>>
Are you incapable of making decisions without the guidance of anonymous internet strangers? Open this thread for some recommendations.

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>is a raging alcohol in your path
How am I supposed to take any of his writing to heart?
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>>23330151
>How am I supposed to take any of his writing to heart?
By thinking about it and synthesizing the parts which make sense to you while discarding the parts that don't... same way anyone who isn't an intellectual sloth interacts with any other ideas from any other source. I haven't even read Watts and have no strong feelings about him one way or the other. I'm just asking you to be more curious and rigorous in your thought instead of simply trying to find a thinker whose thoughts you can slurp up in their entirety from the spigot.

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Trevor was six foot three. He was clean and fit and confident. I’d choose him a million times over the hipster nerds I’d see around town and at the gallery. In college, the art history department had been rife with that specific brand of young male. An “alternative” to the mainstream frat boys and premed straight and narrow guys, these scholarly, charmless, intellectual brats dominated the more creative departments. As an art history major, I couldn’t escape them. “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook. Beer bellies and skinny legs, zip-up hoodies, navy blue peacoats or army green parkas, New Balance sneakers, knit hats, canvas tote bags, small hands, hairy knuckles, maybe a deer head tattooed across a flabby bicep. They rolled their own cigarettes, didn’t brush their teeth enough, spent a hundred dollars a week on coffee. They would come into Ducat, the gallery I ended up working at, with their younger—usually Asian—girlfriends. “An Asian girlfriend means the guy has a small dick,” Reva once said. I’d hear them talk shit about the art. They lamented the success of others. They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror. They were all on Klonopin, was my guess. They lived mostly in Brooklyn, another reaoson I was glad to live on the Upper East Side. Nobody up there listened to the Moldy Peaches. Nobody up there gave a shit about “irony” or Dogme 95 or Klaus Kinski.
“The worst was that those guys tried to pass off their insecurity as “sensitivity,” and it worked. They would be the ones running museums and magazines, and they’d only hire me if they thought I might fuck them. But when I’d been at parties with them, or out at bars, they’d ignored me. They were so self-serious and distracted by their conversation with their look-alike companions that you’d think they were wrestling with a decision of such high stakes, the world might explode. They wouldn’t be distracted by “pussy,” they would have me believe. The truth was probably that they were just afraid of vaginas, afraid that they’d fail to understand one as pretty and pink as mine, and they were ashamed of their own sensual inadequacies, afraid of their own dicks, afraid of themselves. So they focused on “abstract ideas” and developed drinking problems to blot out the self-loathing they preferred to call “existential ennui.”"
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>>23330099
Both men and women with that kind of character are rare.
>>
>>23330082
> why would somebody say they like "smaller" if they had no comparison?
Women are logical like that. But yeah I don't know. I would assume she said something along the lines of "I'm perfectly satisfied with my bf's average dick" and got proven wrong later.
>People hold on to their feelings
Oh yeah absolutely. She told me that even though she's married and expecting a child soon, she sometimes daydreams about how later in her life she'll cross paths with that ex again and be with him.
What I meant was it's not her ex that gave her those preferences. Her husband right now is the opposite personality-wise (still a huge chad though, but the outgoing type rather than the dark and brooding type) and she's happy with him too.
>before she had sex
Badly worded, I meant that from what she told me she's always felt attracted to that specific kind of guy even as a teen when she experimented and so on. It was never ambiguous and her tastes didn't change.
>queen bees conform to some extent
Yes. She's not a huge nonconformist or outlier, but she does word her preferences openly even though they are sometimes unpopular or not the "cool" thing, which is more than you can say for the overwhelming majority of women (or people, even). That's the thing though, being a turbostacy she can socially afford to be a dork and it's cute or even reinforces that charisma.
>>
>>23330087
Agreed. Many """"chads"""" are actually pretty fragile. It has to be nice in some ways to have much given to you on account of looks and charm. The downside is that, like anyone else who doesn't really have to work for what they get, you don't develop skills other people do. Incels have a really shallow idea of what it actually means to be a man. They think it's all fun and games and sex and partying. Life is rarely so kind to anyone for any period of time. A """"chad"""" has probably struggled less in life than most, but that tends to mean their problem-solving skills aren't up to par and they aren't as emotionally and mentally resilient as people who are experienced with struggle and have actually worked on themselves (unlike incels who lay down and rot while blaming the world). Everyone is insecure at times. Chads are just better at hiding it behind their chiseled jawlines and designer clothes. Don't trust social media.
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>>23330127
I only have one more thing to suggest before I go. Sometimes people just associate the good feelings they had with concrete markers of what they were associated with. e.g., what their first love was like, what their best romantic partner was like, what they grew up with when life was peachy, what captured their fascination when they were maturing as teenagers, etc. People spend a lot of time chasing what they had in hopes of replicating it instead of figuring out what's actually good for them.
>>
>>23326020
>would come into Ducat, the gallery I ended up working at, with their younger—usually Asian—girlfriends
seething
"de aap komt uit de mouw" as we say in dutch

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https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books

The U.S. publishing industry is driven by celebrity authors and repeat bestsellers, according to testimony from a blocked merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. Only 50 authors sell over 500,000 copies annually, with 96% of books selling under 1,000 copies. Publishing houses spend most of their advance money on celebrity books, which along with backlist titles like The Bible, account for the bulk of their revenue and fund less commercially successful books.
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i bet all the top sellers are white men and the flops are all those young adult poc books
>>
all the money is in children's books. schools are forced to buy those things. therefore there be gold in yonder hills
>>
>>23324365
have a friend who is a very successful author sell pulp fiction stuff on amazon basically. he says the majority of his profits actually comes from kindle/amazon subscriber fees which is paid by pages read since his books are included with kindle subscriptions. He sells most of his ebooks for $1-5 or box sets for $20 or so. I think u can buy print on demand copies, but he doesn't have anything at all in stores afaik. No publisher and he made his book covers using blender and photoshop, which was funny since he could easily afford a graphic artist I would think.

this is prob the best model for writers if you can write something ppl would read, i only write esoteric philosophy so not for me
>>
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>>23324365
Give up
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>>23324718
we are currently in the 'weak men make bad times' turning. its the golden age of dragshows and social decline however

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>there's this guy and... get this
>BUREAUCRACY

amazing
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>>23326332
kek
>>
>>23329231
Trust me. Us opinion-havers can recognize each other very easily.
>>
>>23329215
No, but I think I've read about it somewhere. I should read it sometime. My evaluation of Kafka's daddy issues is based solely on his stories where a father character is present like Metamorphosis and The Judgement
>>
>>23323041
I've never liked Kafka, and I've never liked Lovecraft, and I associate the two. I like the concept of cosmic horror generally, but not the way these two do it, I think it's too off putting, something about the vibe is off. I admit I haven't read much but I thought The Fly was dumb, I felt like I had to shower after I read it.
Am I a fucking retard?
>>
>>23330148
>daddy issues
Wow what a biting and totally not arbitrary reduction of Complex Thing into Simple Thing!

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"I Get Weird" edition

Previous: >>23306393

/wg/ AUTHORS & FLASH FICTION: https://pastebin.com/ruwQj7xQ
RESOURCES & RECOMMENDATIONS: https://pastebin.com/nFxdiQvC

Please limit excerpts to one post.
Give advice as much as you receive it to the best of your ability.
Follow prompts made below and discuss written works for practice; contribute and you shall receive.
If you have not performed a cursory proofread, do not expect to be treated kindly. Edit your work for spelling and grammar before posting.
Violent shills, relentless shill-spammers, and grounds keeping prose, should be ignored and reported.

Simple guides on writing:
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHdzv1NfZRM

Comment too long. Click here to view the full text.
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>>23330085
who extra cares.
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>>23329477
My attention span is too short for prose. How would you guys add to a scene like this?

Jim was sitting in the car, listening to music, when a woman tapped his window.
“This is a handicap,” she said.
“What?”
“This is a handicapped parking space. You shouldn’t be here.”
“Oh, I’m crippled. You can’t see it, but I’m missing a leg.”
“Sir, you need to move your car. This space is for people who need it.”
“I telling you, I am handicapped.”
“You’re being obtuse. You need to move your car right now or I’m calling the police.”
“The police? I’m missing a leg, lady. What more do you want from me?”
“Sir, this is your last warning. I’m dialing 9-11 right now.”
“Oh, for the love of—here, I’ll show you!”
Jim opened the car door and stepped his prosthetic leg out. He froze when a sharp end of a knife poked him.

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So I've been dividing my story into five parts, each with a short (couple pages long at most) in-universe document.
>1. See below
>2. A letter
>3. Part of an act from a play
>4. A journal entry
>5. A poem

I am however struggling with coming up with the first one. It's obviously the most important one, so its job is to hook any potential reader. I was going to do a letter, or a recording, but I dislike what I've come up with so far. I'm thinking about turning 360° and walking away, and instead of a text for the first part I'll do diagrams, explaining part of the world's weirdness. In-universe they'll be student notes from a character, then straight on to the story. What's you're take on it?
>>
>>23330097
I do wish there's an easier way to make small corrections.

Jim was sitting in the car, listening to music, when a woman tapped his window.
“This is a handicap,” she said.
“What?”
“This is a handicapped parking space. You shouldn’t be here.”
“Oh, I’m crippled. You can’t see it, but I’m missing a leg.”
“Sir, you need to move your car. This space is for people who need it.”
“I telling you, I am handicapped.”
“You’re being obtuse. You need to move your car right now or I’m calling the police.”
“The police? I’m missing a leg, lady. What more do you want from me?”
“Sir, this is your last warning. I’m dialing 911 right now.”
“Oh, for the love of—here, I’ll show you!”
Jim opened the car door and stepped his prosthetic leg out. He froze when the sharp end of a knife poked him.

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>>23330137
well at least its interesting and to the point

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What are you reading? I'm reading Ernst Cassirer until I pass out at 3:30AM
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>>23328885
On Killing

this shit is depressing. knew it was gonna be, but didn't think it would hit this hard. maybe it's the alcohol.
>>
>>23329039
>posts about his homies in a thread for no friends having motherfuckers
>>
>>23329415
He’s continental for sure but his Kantianism binds him a bit to the Anglo tradition which is probably why he was like that.

That being said, it wouldn’t stop me from reading him and a lot of my writing is probably motivated by spite as well, if we’re gonna be honest. Despite what Nietzsche affirmed almost every thinker is motivated towards the unmaking of something else.
>>
>>23329039
>Listening to some weird NiN-meets-Brave-Little-Abacus EP that I like a lot
Industrial emocore/math rock? Offbeat.
>>
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Reading this. About 80 pages in.
It’s mostly him ranting about how much better France is than the US
Nazis just chased him out of France then Greece
He seems like a bit of a boomer so far

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Temple by the Sea edition

>Recommended reading charts (Look here before asking for vague recs)
https://mega.nz/folder/kj5hWI6J#0cyw0-ZdvZKOJW3fPI6RfQ/folder/guIyhAzS
>Archive
https://warosu.org/lit/?task=search2&search_subject=sffg
>Goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/1029811-sffg

Previous: >>23314259
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>>23330084
>because it's not possible to like something that's bad
thats literally what he fucking meant though
>>
>>23330090
Says who?
>>
>>23330091
me retard i literally just told you
>>
>>23330141
>me retard
You can say that again.
>>
>>23330143
hurr durr wheres your point? no argument?
fine, i accept your concession

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What the fuck, it's just a love story
Spoilers in my next post but I'm massively disappointed
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>>23328835
wot? I never even implied Gatsby was the vain one. I was clearly referring to the people who didnt show up
>>
I've been thinking about this lately, and I think the main reason it's dried up into irrelevance (outside a specific breed of litfag) is because the whole 'This looks exciting on the outside but is hollow in the inside" hook has dried up. Over the past hundred years the media image of "isn't it FUN to be rich?" has escalated to the point where Gatsby might as well be that neighbor in the slightly-fancier house down the street.

Gatsby is """rich"""? Where's his superhero hideout? His Hollywood friends? His private zoo of tigers and chimps?
>>
*sigh*another plotfag filtered
>>
Citizen Kane does basically everything better and I'd even go as far as to call it a better novel, since it adopts novelistic conventions.
>>
>>23329641
It really does. That and Fellini's 8 1/2. I feel that movie needs to be mentioned too.

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/wwoym/ write what's on your mind
high trust edition

previous >>23324263
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>>23328678
Cause conquest means civilians are being targeted, women are kidnapped killed and raped, thousands of children for the new generation are dying. The deliberation of it all makes it a cleansing and something deeper than war, though im sure you know that already
>>
>>23329945
I get what you mean, but would rather always be something rather similar. By contemporary planetary standards I live extraordinarily well. My paternal grandfather lived to 98, and whether or not I live that long in chronological terms, I've already done better in terms of pleasant experience.
>>
>>23329947
Fuck me, but I can't get by on less than a quarter pound of meat, red or white, per day. Not much of a fan of ice cream cream or milk, but when it comes to chocolates and cheese, I'd almost rather be dead than do without.
>>
>>23330093
*still a skinny bastard, who knows why that is.
>>
>>23329949
90% of native North Americans, about 200 million of them, were wiped out by diseases introduced by Europeans, almost entirely in ignorance of both parties involved. It has no parallel to what you're trying to draw.

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just horny? Seems like he gets constant criticism for "misogyny" but I don't put stock in that given how they say that about anything mildly critical of a character whose a fucking woman.

I read a few pages into 1Q84 and I definitely see the horniness. Is that what is being negatively reacted to?
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>>23329937
These arguments and refutations have no meaning. You are exploiting a gospel which you don't believe in and never understood to win an argument on 4chan. The righteous know that they so. Humility is not a matter of self-abjection or self-hatred. To be humble is to be like Christ. Paul was already a Judaizing force.
>>
>>23329948
>Paul was already a Judaizing force.
You lose, LARPer
>>
>>23329956
I don't quite understand these internet acronyms, though they seem to be used in an almost random fashion. You are carried up by the pride of your heart, doggedly committed to a belief in nihilism and a belief in female depravity, extracting whatever pleasure you can from "winning" meaningless online arguments--and I am supposed to care to refute you. You should pause and consider if this is really all there is to life, or if you are not perhaps missing out on reality.

The main point I made at the beginning of this, which is less a precept of religion than an empirical fact, is that women who hate men are inevitably sluttish and slavish to male attention, and men who hate women are inevitably attracted to whores. On the other hand, chaste men and women have naive views about their gender counterparts. You appear to among the men attracted to whores, and who hates what he most wants to exploit.

Logging off the computer now, good night to you.
>>
>>23329973
You aren't even a Christian, you're part of some anti-"judaizer" /pol/ LARP. Farewell.
>>
>>23329876
Why is that? Is he just not essentially Japanese enough for the Japs? What makes him resonate with the Westerns more?

>Plato, and all other ancient authors, supposedly had opinions not in line with liberal democracy.
>BUT this is only because they would've been persecuted if they stated their true opinions, and we can tell what their true opinions were by esoteric reading.
>Now how do we do this? I'll just invent whatever I want them to be saying and you'll listen to me. So yes, Plato was a liberal democrat.
lmfao how did this dude convince anyone
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>>23328519
No! You have to give me a specific line that totally encapsulates what you've said. You can't just discuss ideas, you can only pass quotes around! Now give me the quote!
>>
>>23328519
>>23328524
>i can't prove muh feelz so i'll just lie by false generalization, then if you call me on it, i'll bitch about you being a pedant
>>
>>23328283
If that’s not the case then where did it begin? Liberal democracy had to begin somewhere. I’m definitely not saying it began with Plato at but someone had to secretly think, “gee, having slaves might be a bad idea”
>>
Honestly, I don't get the idea that Strauss is a big fan of liberal democracy. I don't think there's another "mainstream" academic who gets closer to straddling the line between approved thought and entertaining extremism than him. I can't think of a bigger 20th century pipeline for conservative to far right metapolitics than him.
>>
>>23328367
But he's right though. Strauss literally made philosophy as a Jewish cult in which every philosopher has a boner for "free society" but remains silence like a crypto-jew.

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'Start with the Greeks' was not a meme afterall. The Greeks seemed to have knew it all.
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Why would I read anything written by a faggot kike?
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>>23326294
Aristophanes clearly talks of pale skin as skin not burned by the sun. As women were restrained to their homes, they have pale skin, whereas a man, training in the nude will obviously have a bronze, sun-burned skin in greece. This is consistent with him mocking men who cover themselves up in the nude etc. He was a firm believer in the athletic spirit of athens.

How is anything youve pasted related to race? Yes, having a tan is a sign of masculinity as it means you engage in physical activities.
>>
The Brown Age Mindset
>>
>>23328535
This is like saying "My grandpa was one of the perpetrators of the Katyn massacre, he's on the left in this photo"

Very good thing to be proud of
>>
>>23328308
that's why its called a dissertation :^)
you are leaving out the context of why this is mentioned, the argument that breeding, marriage and matchmaking were common topics to casually bring up upon meeting someone. Something that is more or less taboo or at least shamed upon today.

Sebell comes off as the academic fraud for ignoring this context and nit picking over literal interpretations.
>Define "principle concern" for me, huh? smug-wojak.jpg Can't do it? HA gotcha!

you have no substance or argument if semantics is all you have to bring up

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Books for someone who's scared of intimacy?
>>
>>23329410
In order to coddle yourself or grow out of it? Be more specific.
>>
>>23329416
Grow out preferably
>>
Thirst for Love by Mishima ;)
>>
White Nights, by Dostoevsky.

His book is dropping in 1 year. Who tf ready?
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>>23327708
Homo-fascism
>>
>>23327927
No, Keith doesn't think Russia can save the west. I believe he has posted about Russia's degeneracy etc before.
>>
>>23328199
Yes, it's called being a grifter.
>>
>>23329527
see >>23330126
>>
>>23327935
>but thinks niche traditionalist evolian politics and metaphysics will enact change beyond a few discord servers
He used to be like that before when his yt channel was growing. His theorycel phase if you will. Now he's doing online-activism by posting about typical rw talking points about anti-immigration and noticing Jewish power. He's been retweeted by Elon Musk.


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