Highbrow literature in modern english

[spotty]

I'm starting to burn myself out for a while on 19th century literature.
The thing is I wan't to read intelligent books with depth, not fluffy 'popular' fiction. Though I occaisionally enjoy engaging in minor fluff - haha.

How does one go about searching on Amazon or in the bookstore for 'serious' literature by more recent authors.
The only thing I can think of is looking for award winners. Nobel prize, booker prize etc?

I'm painfully ignorant of authors beyond the 1900s, and especially am interested in post 1940s stuff.

Help an ignorant fool.

[Rores28]

Off the top of my head here are some authors who according to critics have literary merit....

Thomas Pynchon (not my favorite)
David Foster Wallace (prolly one of my favorites)
David Mitchell
Toni Morrison
Jonathan Franzen
John Barth
Cormac McCarthy (I'm sure you've hear of him)
Donald Bartheme

[Kyriakos]

I do not know any English post 1940 stuff, although i might have read a couple for english class in highschool.

But i have read a number of turn of the century/early 20th century works by people who wrote in English.
These tend to be horror though. Lovecraft and Machen are the ones i would suggest, you can find most of their works online so you could see for yourself if they interest you :)

[TheFifthElement]

Hi spotty :D

I just started a thread for 'good' contemporary literature, which you might want to take a look at: http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=55770

For recommendations, well, it'd be useful to have an idea of what kind of books you like to read, and then it might be easier to pinpoint something that you'd like.

I find the Guardian Books (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books) site to be quite helpful in tracking down contemporary authors, as well as recommendations via Lit-net. I also used the Nobel Prize for Literature winners list as a basis for tracking down some good quality fiction, but I suspect that isn't a list for everyone and I don't think it's an absolute guarantee of quality either.

My personal recommendations for post 1940s (ish) writers would be: J M Coetzee, Jose Saramago, Jean Paul Sartre (specifically Nausea), Simone de Beauvoir, Halldor Laxness, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Tom McCarthy, David Mitchell, Iris Murdoch, Angela Carter, J G Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut, Haruki Murakami, Cees Nooteboom, oh and Grendel by John Gardner is probably one of the best books ever written. There are probably loads of great writers I've missed there, no doubt some fellow Lit-netter will come and put that straight.

Just a few there :D

[Rores28]

I'd definitely second Kurt Vonnegut

[the facade]

Vonnegut definitely. Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest is a must. Albert Camus' The Stranger is one of my (if not the) favourite book of all time.

[Patrick_Bateman]

I'm starting to burn myself out for a while on 19th century literature.
The thing is I wan't to read intelligent books with depth, not fluffy 'popular' fiction. Though I occaisionally enjoy engaging in minor fluff - haha.

How does one go about searching on Amazon or in the bookstore for 'serious' literature by more recent authors.
The only thing I can think of is looking for award winners. Nobel prize, booker prize etc?

I'm painfully ignorant of authors beyond the 1900s, and especially am interested in post 1940s stuff.

Help an ignorant fool.


Have you ever checked out the recommendations Amazon give you based on your purchases? That could help you.


I think with regards to post-40's literature you have to begin with

1984
Animal Farm
The Naked and The Dead
Darkness At Noon
Lord Of The Flies
Doctor Zhivago
Fahrenheit 451
The Stranger
For Whom The Bell Tolls
American Psycho
Catch 22
Slaughterhouse 5


And that should start you off :)

[Patrick_Bateman]

Albert Camus' The Stranger is one of my (if not the) favourite book of all time.

This (wo)man is good. Listen to him.

[spotty]

You guys rock.
I've got a bunch of authors to explore now. Suprisingly though (for me) I've read quite a few of the book suggestions.

Keep 'em coming.
Gonna get an e-reader soon and hope to be reading even more (with larger text) :)

[David Lurie]

Winter's tale by Mark Helprin (magic realism in NYC? much more than that!)
London Fields by Martin Amis (a murder story with darts and amazing writing)
All the books by Marilynne Robinson
The known world by Edward P. Jones
Midnight children by Salman Rushdie

[stlukesguild]

PROSE:

Saul Bellow- The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day
Philip Roth- Portnoy's Complaint, Zuckerman Bound (The Ghost Writer,
Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, The Prague Orgy), Sabbath's Theater
Cormac McCarthy- Child of God, Blood Meridian, The Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain), No Country for Old Men
Don DeLillo- White Noise, Underworld
Thomas Pynchon- V, The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason and Dixon
Flannery O'Connor- Collected Stories
Gore Vidal- Julian, Myra Breckinridge, Burr, Lincoln, Selected Essays
Nathaniel West- Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust
John Barth- The Sot-weed Factor, Giles, Goat Boy
Donald Barthleme- The Dead Father, Sixty Stories, Forty Stories
Norman Mailer- The Naked and the Dead, Advertisements for Myself, Ancient Evenings
Joseph Heller- Catch-22
Kurt Vonnegut- Slaughterhouse-Five
John Updike- Witches of Eastwick
Ralph Ellison- Invisible Man
Toni Morrison- The Song of Solomon
Aldous Huxley- Brave New World, Chrome Yellow, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
George Orwell- 1984, Animal Farm
C.S. Lewis- The Screwtape Letters
Graham Greene- The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair
William Golding- Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, Pibcher Martin
Anthony Burgess- A Clockwork Orange, Nothing Like the Sun, A Dead Man in Depthford
Salman Rushdie- Midnight's Children, Satanic Verses
V. S. Naipaul- A Bend in the River
Walter Abish- How German is It?
Samuel Beckett- Murphy, Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

THEATER:

Samuel Beckett- Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, Waiting for Godot
John Osborn- Look Back in Anger
Eugene O'Niel- Desire under the Elms, Mourning becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh
Arthur Miller- Death of a Salesman, The Crucible
Tennessee Williams- The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly, Last Summer

POETRY:

T.S. Eliot- The Wasteland and other Poems, The Four Quartets
Wallace Stevens- Collected Poetry and Prose, Opus Posthumous
Robert Frost- Collected Poetry
Allen Ginsberg- Howl
John Ashbery- Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, The Tennis Court Oath, Three Poems, Hotel Lautréamont
Richard Howard- Inner Voices
Richard Wilbur- Collected Poems, 1943–2004
A.R. Ammons- Collected Poems
John Berryman- Dreamsongs
Theodore Roethke- The Collected Poems
W.S. Merwin- The First Four Books of Poems, The Second Four Books of Poems, Migration, Present Company, The Book of Fables
Charles Wright- Littlefoot, Country Music, Chicamauga, Black Zodiac
James Merrill- The Changing Light at Sandover
W.H. Auden- Collected Poems
Louis MacNeice- Collected Poems
Seamus Heaney- Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996
Dylan Thomas- Collected Poems
P.K. Page- The Essential P.K. Page
Geoffrey Hill- New and Collected Poems, The Triumph of Love, Without Title, Speech! Speech!
Anne Carson- Autobiography of Red, Decreation, Plainwater

This just scratches the surface and focuses primarily on writers in Britain and the US post- 1940 writing in English. As you enter into the realm of World Literature the options expand exponentially. Among the absolute most essential works by writers writing originally in a language other than English I would include:

J.L. Borges- Labyrinths, Ficciones, Collected Fictions, Selected Non-Fictions, Selected Poems
Pablo Neruda- The Captain's Verses, Residence Earth, 20 Love poems and a Song of Despair, The Essential Neruda, World's End
Hermann Hesse- Steppenwolf, Glass Bead Game
Thomas Mann- Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, Death in Venice and other Stories
Octavio Paz- The Collected Poems
Paul Celan- Poems of Paul Celan (tr. Micheal Hamburger)
Gunter Grass- The Tin Drum
Camus- The Stranger, The Fall
Jean-Paul Sartre- Nauseau, No Exit and other Plays
Julio Cortazar- Blow-Up and other Stories, Hopscotch
Robbet-Grillet- The Erasers, The Voyeur
Italo Calvino- Invisible Cities, Complete Cosmicomics, The Baron in the Trees
Gabriel Garcia Marquez- Love in the Time of Cholera, A Hundred Years of Solitude
Eugenio Montale- Cuttlefish Bones, The Occasions, The Storm and Other Things
Czesław Miłosz- Collected Poems
Jose Saramago- Baltasar and Blimunda, Blindness
I.B. Singer- The Collected Stories
S.Y. Agnon- The Book that was Lost and other Stories

This does not even begin to scrape the surface but offers a few influential players.

[rafipunjabi]

PARADISE OF TEARS:
A Poem

Once upon a time

there was some one, when there was no one,

who rose his head look at the blue sky

Some one like a forgotten martyr

to lay his life for you

Some one with his chopped head,

swimming across the lake Dal ,(1)

to meet a wailing woman

Below the mount Zabarwan (2)

waiting in a despair

for her disappeared lover

Hoping against hope

'In forced disappearances

do people come again?'

In delirious reverie of delightful days

Feeling some day in near future

A ray of light from her dreams

peeps through her broken self

Shining the dark world around

Imagining in her colorful dream

He comes on a chariot of sun

with stretched arms and shining face

Prevailing over her broken self

Like the breeze of early spring

Gathering her in mighty arms

As he did with reaped harvest

Lights coming from dark alleys

Stars shine again

above the paradise of tears



______________________________

1. It is world famous sweet water lake in Kashmir

2. Mount Zabarwan is a mountain range in Kashmir surrounding the lake Dal

[Desolation]

Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable by Samuel Beckett
At Swim - Two - Birds by Flann O'Brien
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
V. by Thomas Pynchon
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

[PeterL]

A lot depends on what you like. There are and have been many excellent authors in the post WWII era, but they varied widely in the types of things that they wrote. Many of them wrote popular fiction the had great depth hidden under a popular plot. I would suggest that you go into a used book store and wander into the fiction section, close your eyes, and grab something. You might want to open it randomly and read a few lines to see if the author was literate, but you should be too critical before you read it. I have found some great books by that method.

[bIGwIRE]

I've recently devoured three Umberto Eco novels, and wouldn't hesitate to throw his name into the pot.

[mal4mac]

There is no consensus on the "best literature since 1940" amongst the critics and writers, as there is (just about!) for literature over a hundred years old. So how can you know what is the best serious literature? One man's serious is another man's whimsy (Vonnegut), one man's experimental greatness is another man's unreadable (Beckett)

Prediction - you will dislike many of the recommendations made here, and love a few. There will be no way of telling which you will like until you try them. I use the library a lot when reading new authors - then I don't waste money. Have you really exhausted the 19th century? Have you read all of Dickens? Balzac?

Of the authors Desolation mentions, I returned to the library after a few pages:

Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable by Samuel Beckett

But I liked:

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth

Wish I hadn't bothered finishing:

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

As you're a fellow fan of the 19th century you might have a similar split to me - I don't like modernism. Than again, you might like it, and hate more straightforward writers like Vonnegut and Roth. Everyone differs.

P.S. I liked Patrick Bateman's list, and facade's!

[E.A Rumfield]

Julio Cortazar- Blow-Up

I seen that movie by Michael Antonnini. Great movie I bet the story was better.