Tfw Herman Melville is literally the only American fiction author worth reading

OP has not read the amazing exchange between Lekhi Starlizt and Mehemet Ozbey in Bruce Sterling's novel "Zeitgeist".

“You’ve got to drop this and step back, Mehmetcik. You’re spreading yourself way too thin here. You’re all over the map. The master narrative can’t take that cheap, gratuitous shit. You can be the Ascended Guru Master, or the Dapper Don with the showgirls, or the Secret Spymaster with the smack, but you can’t be all of those at once and stay sustainable.”
“That is your version of the narrative, not mine.”
“We are in my narrative, man.”
“No, we’re not. You are in my homeland and my culture, and this is my narrative.”
Starlitz groaned. “I hate this kind of shit, okay?” He snatched up the knife and drove its curved blade deep into the desktop. “Maybe I can’t stab you. But not because you say so. You can’t say squat to me. You can’t dominate my fucking narrative, because we are speaking fucking English. Listen to yourself. You’ve got nothing more to say. I’m telling you that none of this actually happened. You can’t argue with me, because my language defines the terms. You can’t discuss it any further, because it never took place.”
Ozbey stared at Starlitz in dazed astonishment, then in a growing rage. His face flushed and grew congested. He opened his mouth, and struggled for his confounded words with a distant, muted squeak.
Ozbey turned and spat on the carpet. He clenched his fists, beet-red with rage, trying to rush forward.

Something snapped in the realm of the unspeakable. Ozbey bent double in silent pain. His knees buckled in their tailored naval whites. He began to heave.
With a vomiting rasp a fifty-caliber bullet fell wetly to the carpet. Then came another. They were huge things, with thumb-sized slugs and big brass mil-spec cartridges. This was bad, but the big wet bags of heroin were worse. These weren’t the standard balloon or condom courier bags that human mules would eat and shit out. These were serious, tape-and-poly, kilo smack bags, big fat bricks with the dense, slightly yellow look of window putty. Ozbey was heaving and wheezing them up from his visceral core, with the hair plastered to his forehead and the uncanny look of a starved ghost.

“Okay, I’m with the story here,” said Starlitz alertly..

Lovecraft

David Foster Wallace.

pffffahahahahahhahhaa

What about George RR Martin?

g9b9m9

>He's never read Faulkner

...

>he hasn't read tao lin

...

You are a retarded shitposter.

Henry James
William Faulkner
Thomas Pynchon

Steinbeck and Hemmingway

this so much

>Tfw you're actually stupid enough to believe this meme

Literally only retarded frogposters dislike Steinbeck

Henry James is the greatest novelist and short story writer who ever lived. But it's questionable how American he is.

Im a lib but desu Ive found Ayn rand to be more enjoyable/generally a better writer than Steinbeck. It's not that I think he's bad I just think he writes for like a noble cause and this makes people see past some of his flaws. Like the first half of the grapes of wrath and the ideology he was pushing for was cringe worthy.

He is a bit pushy with that but he was talking about real injustice. And it was tough for workers around that time in the US. Regardless I think East of Eden is definitely his most significant work

>I'm a lib
>I'm rightwing

anyone who prefaces their comment with any variation of the aforementioned is a big red flag of "DO NOT READ" for me

I read the fountainhead and then went straight to grapes of wrath bc it left a bad taste in my mouth, but just the lack of objectivity in his "the land is ours bc we work it" thing I found to be unsettling. Have yet to read east of Eden, but will probably turn to it after I finish atlas shrugged and hopefully that'll settle my Steinbeck v. Rand conflict. As for the first claim about Herman Melville, I have yet to read him but I know he was friends with Hawthorne, and if he is stylistically similar to Hawthorne but can actually develop an interesting plot and compelling characters then he is probably on a whole other level above Steinbeck and most American writers.

I just wanted to get any bias out of the way. It would make since for someone with my political beliefs to favor Steinbeck but I found Rand to be more compelling based on what I've read of both of them, even tho it's limited. I could have dropped the preface but then I could have easily been called out for being a libertarian or right wing as the reason I favor rand over Steinbeck, even tho it was not. I was trying to dispell a potentential and very likely misinterpretation of my reasoning.

Gene Wolfe and DFW

A FUCKING WHITE WHALE

le reddit XD

Replying to my own post here: I haven't read a lot of Cormac McCarthy but from what I've seen he seems to be a better stylist than Melville was
Melville is great though

YeCarthy's style is seeing how much corn-laced shit he can shove in a tortilla and call it a book.

Damn.. you got three McCarthy-related memes into one post. Good job.

he's the best american fiction but to deny yourself Hemingway, Faulkner, and Twain really is self harm.

Tobias Wolff

Gaddis. Duh.

WS Burroughs is quintessential Americana

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

Philip K Dick

Based Flan

Is Mark Twain hated on here or something? He's my #2 American author after Melville.

>based tommy p
you went there and frankly im glad you did

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