I want to read some works by authors noted for very distinctive writing styles, preferably in English, but if the tone carries through translation that would also be fine. Does anyone have suggestions?
I want to read some works by authors noted for very distinctive writing styles, preferably in English, but if the tone carries through translation that would also be fine. Does anyone have suggestions?
Joyce. Woolf, Hemingway, for starters.
Thank you. Any specific titles?
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Lawrence Stern- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Edward Gibbon- The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire
Robert Burton- Anatomy of Melancholia
Jonathan Swift- Gulliver's Travels/A Modest Proposal
Oscar Wilde- The Picture of Dorian Gray
Walter Pater- The Renaissance
Herman Melville- Moby Dick
Ralph W. Emerson- Essays
Edgar Allen Poe- Short Stories
Henry James- Portrait of a Lady/Turn of the Screw
Virginia Woolf- Orlando
James Joyce- Ulysses
William Faulkner- As I Lay Dying
Joseph Conrad- Heart of Darkness/Lord Jim
Ernest Hemingway- Short Stories
Vladimir Nabokov- Lolita
F. Scott Fitzgerald- The Great Gatsby
Samuel Beckett- Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (trilogy)/Endgame
Lawrence Durrell- The Alexandrian Quartet (Justine, Balthasar, Mount Olive, Clea)
Thomas Pynchon- V
Gore Vidal- Myra Breckenridge/Justinian
Norman Mailer-Advertisements for Myself
John Boswell- The Life of Johnson
Samuel Johnson-Selected writings
Lewis Carroll- Alice in Wonderland/Through the Lookingglass
Just some examples of marvelous prose in English.
Poetry is a whole world in itself.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
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Kurt Vonnegut writing style seems deceptive at times as being too ordinary. He is gifted in his ability to tell an engaging story with humor and deep human emotion. He is in tune with the world and his writing style brings you into this world of fiction. He's highly engaging and a real humanist.
Oh, give HP Lovecraft a try. He puts words together like nothing I've ever seen. His is the only work that I've encountered which I would love just for the prose style even if the content wasn't brilliant (which it is, by the way). He writes short stories, so don't bother with particular titles, just pick up any collection of works.
I also suggest Hemmingway, his prose is nice and raw. The short story A clean, Well-Lighted Place is my personal favorite which you could likely find online, but if you're looking for something a bit longer you might try The Old Man and the Sea.
Fitzgerald writes beautifully. I hated The Great Gatsby though, I'd sooner suggest a collection of his short stories (I'm starting to see a theme here).
Last edited by JuniperWoolf; 09-18-2011 at 10:58 PM.
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"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
No one has mentioned Cormac Mccarthy?
I am surprised, but he is perhaps the best English language stylist alive.
If not the best, the most daring.
I second the Cormac McCarthy suggestion.
Perhaps W. Somerset Maughm could serve as your "control" author. Hah.
The author of the most stylistically perfect short stories in English is Edgar Allen Poe.
Yes... Cormac McCarthy is great... but his writing owes much to Melville... and even Shakespeare... and I would recommend getting some of the older works under one's belt before moving on to him.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
Says you, I hate Poe.Originally Posted by Des Essientes
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"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
What? A disagreement over who the better writer is?
Well, I've never...
~
"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
~
I agree, Poe's reputation is only so high as he occupies a spot hard to fill by other American authors and as such is the one Romantic era prose fiction writer that almost everyone in the US is forced to read. His style is not so innovative, though his particular synesthesia is a little intriguing. If I were to look for the best shot fiction writer in the States though, my first jumps would be at Hemmingway and then at Flannery O'Connor - almost by instinct. Then if I were to say English as a whole, I would jump to someone like Katherine Mansfield or Alice Munro.
Generally though short fiction is a continental European domain. It hardly factors into American traditions outside of a brief stint in the modernist era, I think primarily because printing when American presses took over was already cheap enough to get novels out - the brief stint of modernist writing, when people like Fitzgerald or Hemmingway could toss a story out for a periodical seems the last movements of a periodical-digesting time period. I mean, how many major serialized books can we think of in the American tradition even?
Thurber wrote wonderful short stories.The Night the Bed Fell is something I can scarcely read for laughing. Dorothy Parker too.
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