Your six of the best classics!!!

[Theunderground]

Ok peeps,simples.
Pick one of your favourite ever from each category to make a sweet 6.
1) Novel 2) novella 3) play (prose.) 4) non fiction

5) short story 6) poem. (epic,narrative,play,lyric or other.)

I will go first,
1) The life and opinions of tristram shandy,gentleman. L.Sterne.
2) Notes from underground. F.Dostoevsky.
3) The importance of being earnest. O.Wilde.
4) The genalogy of morality. F.W.Nietzsche.
5) The pit and the pendulum. E.A.Poe.
6) Le tartuffe. Moliere.

[keilj]

since no one has responded to your thread yet, I wanted to point you to this thread from a couple months ago. Some interesting choices related to the categories that you specified

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=56801

[fb0252]

My "best" list:

Shakespeare--any of them. Hamlet, Henry V, all the history plays.
Middlemarch
Canterbury Tales/old English
Montaigne
Goethe's Faust--Walter Arndt translation only.
Brothers Karamazov
Don Quixote
War and Peace
Anna K
The Trial
Misanthrope/Moilere

the lines really blur for me rating the above. Honorable mentions: Master and Margarita, Ulysses. favorite generally unknowns--William Meister's Apprenticeship and On the Edge of Reason by Miroslav Krleza

[stlukesguild]

1.Novel- Cervantes-Don Quixote (Tristam Shandy would be a close second)
2.Novella- Goethe- The Sorrows of Young Werther
3.Play- Shakespeare- Hamlet
4.Non-fiction- Gibbon- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Montaigne's Essays, Emerson's Essays, and Walter Pater's The Renaissance being runners-up.
5.Short Story- Theophile Gautier- La Morte Amoureuse (AKA Clarimonde) with Gautier's Omphale and J.L. Borges' Library of Babel (or any number of other tales) as close runners-up.
6.Poem- Dante- The Divine Comedy

[mortalterror]

1.Novel- Heller- Catch-22, Salinger- Catcher in the Rye
2.Novella- Conrad- Heart of Darkness, Hemingway- The Old Man and the Sea
3.Play- Shakespeare- Hamlet
4.Non-Fiction- Gibbon- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Montaigne's Essays, Plato's Republic
5.Short Story- Hemingway- The Snows of Kilimanjaro, London- To Build a Fire, Poe- The Cask of Amontillado, Connell- The Most Dangerous Game, De Maupassant- Ball of Fat, Marquez- A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, O'Connor- Everything That Rises Must Converge
6.Poem-Dante- Divine Comedy, Homer- The Iliad

[stlukesguild]

I almost went with The Heart of Darkness for the novella myself. The single short story is surely the most difficult choice.

Catcher in the Rye??!!:yikes: You really like it that much?!!

[Jozanny]

Novel: Invisible Man
Novella: Memoirs of A Survivor (this is a close call)
Play: mmm, The Master Builder
Non fiction: Montaigne essays
short story: The Lottery
Poem, The Ring and The Book

[mortalterror]

Catcher in the Rye??!!:yikes: You really like it that much?!!

Yes, I do. Between the ages of 16 and 20 I read it about 16 times. I kept the copy by my bed, and I used to carry it around in my coat pocket, in case I had a spare minute to read. It's a very well written book about a neurotic outsider grappling with his society. Essentially, it's the American answer to Notes From Underground. For some reason, anxiety, ambivalence, and alienation are acceptable, visionary characteristics for a middle-aged Russian, but the same emotions exhibited by an American teen are dismissed out of hand. Nausea and The Stranger are somehow deeper because they are about European adults? I don't buy that at all.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

This list is based on what I've enjoyed, not what I think is the "best" thing ever written for each respective category (just justifying my novel pick).

Novel - A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (or, any of the Song of Ice and Fire books, aside from the lame fourth).

Novella - Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

Play - The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde.

Non-fiction - Don't have a favorite.

Poem - "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats.

[JCamilo]

Novel: Moby Dick (Melville)
Novella: Pedro Paramo (Juan Rulfo)
Play: Medea (Euripides)
Non Fiction: Flaubert Correspondence
Short story: Hunger Artist (Kafka)
Poem: Divine Comedy (Dante)

Tomorrow

Novel: Brothers Karamazov (Dostoievisky)
Novella: Benito Cereno (Melville)
Play: Oedipus King
Non Fiction: Coleridge (Biographia Literaria)
Short Story: Immortal Story (Karen Blixen)
Poem: Metamorphosis (Ovid)

After Tomorrow when nationalistic guilty will make me think of brazilian writters.

Novel: Finnegans Wake (Joyce)
Novella: Alienista (Machado de Assis)
Play: Othelo (Shakespeare)
Non Fiction: Othordoxy (Chesterton)
Short Story: Fita Verde no Cabelo (Guimarães Rosa)
Poem: I-Juca Pirama (Gonçalves Dias)

Then after I remember it does not matter...

Novel: 1001 Nights
Novella: Candide (Voltaire)
Play: Mandragora (Maquiavel)
Non Fiction: Il Convivio (Dante)
Short Story: The fox and the grape (Aesop)
Poem: La Belle Dame Sans Merci (Keats)

[mayneverhave]

1. Novel - Proust - In Search of Lost Time, Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
2. Novella - Voltaire - Candide
3. Play - Shakespeare - Henry IV
4. Non-Fiction - Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
5. Short Story - Borges - The Library of Babel
6. Poem - Dante - Divine Comedy, Neruda - Canto General

[Blasarius '33]

Novel: The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner
Novella: The Metamorphosis, Kafka. If that's too short then The Transmutation of Ling, Ernest Bramah
Play: King Lear, dur
Non Fiction: Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton
Short Story: The Open Boat, Stephen Crane
Poem: Paradise Lost, Milton

[kelby_lake]

3. Play - Shakespeare - Henry IV


Interesting choice. May I ask why?

[Alexander III]

Like Mutatis these are my favorites not those I deem the greatest.

Novel: A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway
Novella: The Cossacks - Tolstoy
Play: Prometheus Bound - Aeschylus
Non Fiction: Either/Or - Kierkegaard
Short Story: The Stationmaster - Pushkin
Poem: Don Juan - Byron

[mal4mac]

1) Bleak House - Dickens
2) The Cossacks - Tolstoy
3) A Streetcar Named Desire -Tennessee Williams
4) Essays - Montaigne
5) Ward 6 - Chekhov (and other stories!)
6) The Tempest - Shakespeare

[marcolfo]

Novel: 100 years of solitud - garcia marquez
Novella: notes from underground - dostoievsky
Play: othelo . shakespeare
Non Fiction: thus spoke zarathustra - nietszche
Short Story: the inmortal - j. l. borges
Poem: poem #20 - neruda

[JBI]

1) Ulysses
2) Ulysses
3) Ulysses
4) Ulysses
5) Ulysses
6) Ulysses

Wow, how easy, all modes in one text, I didn't even need to like the book to choose.

[The Comedian]

I'll give it a go:

1) Novel: This is hard for me because I have to think of a novel that I really like. I'll go with Willa Cather's My Antonia.
2) Novella: I'm going to put Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence into this category. And I love the hell out of that short book.
3) Play: Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neil
4) Non-fiction: Walden by Henry Thoreau. I return o this book every year. There are many imitators of Thoreau and Walden, but all fall far, far short of the original.
5) Short Story: "Young Goodman Brown" by Hawthorne -- the most under-rated short story writer that I've encountered. I always find his work vastly more frightening that Poe's work and the aura/mood that he creates is masterful.
6) Poem: "Tintern Abbey" by Wordsworth. Another text that I return to again and again.

[JCamilo]

The joke could have worked better with Wikipedia :D

[fb0252]

i am surprised Canterbury Tales fails to compete a little with Divine Comedy for best poem--or, is CTs considered a poem?

[mayneverhave]

Interesting choice. May I ask why?

A well structured plot, bringing together of the low and high (the prose of the tavern and the verse of the court), including some of Shakespeare's greatest characters.

Whether it be Hal's brilliant imitation of Hotspur, Falstaff and Hal's performance of Hal's future reconciliation with his father, or Falstaff's cynicism on the battlefield, the play is full of hilarious scenes in addition to the deeper pathos of Hal's planned repudiation of Falstaff and the rebel's loss on the battlefield.

Hamlet and King Lear may be better among Shakespeare's plays, but in the simple terms of endearment, I'd have to chose the first part of Henry IV.

[Mariamosis]

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Growth of the Soil - Knut Hamsun
Germinal - Emile Zola
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Martin Eden - Jack London