What writer has the best prose you've ever read?

Prose is really not his strongest point.

I did forget Melville. He us undeniably great.

>meme writers
>writers held in very high regard by literary scholars and critics
Don't act like this is the only place that reveres those writers. They're loved and revered for a reason, and it's not because a bunch of frogs on an amazonian archery imageboard meme them. I also love plenty of writers that rarely ever get mentioned on Veeky Forums, like Sherwood Anderson.

...

Good prose, yes. Novelist...?

Frank Herbert

“You can't live on nothing." "I can live on sunlight falling across little bridges. I can live on the Botticelli-blue cornflower pattern on the out-billowing garments of the attendant to Aphrodite and the pattern of strawberry blossoms and the little daisies in the robe of Primavera. I can live on the doves flying (he says) in cohorts from the underside of the faded gilt of the balcony of Saint Mark's cathedral and the long corridors of the Pitti Palace. I can gorge myself on Rome and the naked Bacchus and the face like a blasted lightning-blasted white birch that is some sort of Fury.”

Easily Mervyn Peake. Nobody else comes close.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine.

Julien Gracq, an authentic goldsmith of the French language.

Joyce, but I love Joyce quite a bit so I might be biased. Faulkner and Virginia Woolf are both other good choices. All of these are incredibly obvious, but they are well known for a reason. Recommendations for any lesser known writers would be greatly appreciated, I doubt I'll find anyone who I enjoy to read the prose of like Joyce but knowing others than just the top 10 academically acclaimed writers would be cool.
Also, not proofreading this post so enjoy my raw thoughts in all their retarded glory.
This is possible, but I can't read Argentino man land languagino.

I love Joyce's prose too, and Beckett's - especially read aloud - has such an odd hypnotic quality to it.

also Thomas Ligotti.

Just finished Journey to the End of the Night and I already missed that cynical funny bastard.

Poems of Tolkien.
Anyone who says anything else is pseud and a poser.
>look at me I'm not a pure pleb right
>do I fit in yet

Ask Dan Schneider to review these poems. He'll tear em to shreds.

he ripped off the Chinese:

"Before me, unseen are the ancients,
Behind me, unseen, those to come.
Thinking of this infinite universe,
Alone, in my sorrow, I shed tears."

-Chen Zi'ang, 'Upon Ascending the Parapet at Youzhou'

>Anyone who says anything else is pseud and a poser.
>>look at me I'm not a pure pleb right
>>do I fit in yet

lol at how paranoid you're being in preempting any critique

DFW warned of his type. He is of a group called "Irony bros".

Lord Macaulay

I love tolkien but...
>Poetry
op said prose boi

Faulkner has beautiful, lyrical prose, i don't know why idiots keep calling it purple prose.

These days, my favorite prose probably comes from Ligotti, it's hypnotising and genuinely creepy, and massively depressing. It's immediately recognizable too.

The Great Gatsby. The first big party scene will always be the best prose ever written.

millwall

Updike, you dumbasses. Everyone should read a good book of his at least once, Veeky Forums's hatred of his superficiality aside.

Even Cortázar is far better (if we're talking about prose), so no.

what's updike?

it's when you bone a lesbian

Ripped off? They're both talking about a fairly universal theme. There's no sign of theft.

The Pinecone

or Nabokov

poor poe, so underloved. a genius though.

not much

le raven :^) so deep

>thinks Poe only has one good poem and maybe one decent tale or essay.
fucking pleb

Well... alright.
I don't know why people diss so much on poor ole' Tolkien, probably never actually read it.
>Then the Black Captain rose in his stirrups and cried aloud in a dreadful voice, speaking in some forgotten tongue words of power and terror to rend both heart and stone.
>Thrice he cried. Thrice the great ram boomed. And suddenly upon the last stroke the Gate of Gondor broke. >As if stricken by some blasting spell it burst asunder: there was a flash of searing lightning, and the doors tumbled in riven fragments to the ground.
>In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.
>All save one. There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: >Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dínen.
>'You cannot enter here', said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. 'Go back to the abyss prepared for you! >Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!'
>The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.
>'Old fool!' he said. 'Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!' And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade.
>Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.
>And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.

Only complaint is, why didn't he make ole Gandy and Witchy Witch fight, but just a little, guess that's the modern action way.

Probably Thomas Mann. But then again I've had the privilege of reading his works in German.

ok so you guys are gonna think i'm crazy but honestly thomas pynchon

if you pay close attention there is the most perfect prosody to each of his sentences

gonna be honest, I had a bit of prejudice against moby dick exactly because "MURRICA FUCK YEAH". I really thought melville wasn't that great but was only shilled by burgers, but now participating on the moby dick reading group, shit..he is indeed marvelous

Moby Melville

reading Journey right now. He has some great lines... but he also has some really shitty ones too

Probably Gibbon by sheer fact that I've never read another style that I would tolerate for ~3000 pages

Only answer

DeLillo. I know this man is controversial here, fucking plebs but those sentences get me every time. He's my favorite at least, maybe not the best. But he speaks my language American Bitch so I'm naturally biased.

i got a copy of white noise at the thrift store for about 50 cents day before yesterday. should i be excited?

I prefer his more serious work, but White Noise is a good satire. Be prepared for the highest degree of sarcasm in American literature

i also found omensetter's luck, love in the time of cholera, all the pretty horses, and the house of the seven gables. it was a nice haul for five bucks.

i like satire quite a lot, so that's good.

definitely a nice haul. I would be really excited about all of them if I were you

me (in my diary, desu)

N A B O K O V
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P, is that you?

Ligotti.

Ray Bradbury

Laurence Sterne
Robert Burton
Thomas Browne
John Ruskin
Thomas Carlyle

If I really dig the other four, will I enjoy Ruskin? I've never taken the time to read his stuff, but I know Proust loved his writings so much he made an amateur translation of one of his books.

>anyone but Nabokov when it comes to english prose

>anyone but Asturias when it comes to spanish prose

>stream of consciousness
>good prose
I mean, if they tied together sections of stream of consciousness with sections of perfectly straight to the point, but flowery, but not too flowery prose, I'd have no issue. Asturias does that in Men of Maize and Mulata. Garcia Marquez does it too, in The General in his Labyrinth. And they're fantastic, although what they managed to do with on point but flowery spanish prose is nowhere near as impressive as what Nabokov did to english prose.

But Joyce and Faulkner, while having very nice experiments, are not exactly the best at prose. Hell even if The Sound and the Fury is outstanding, most of everything else Faulkner wrote was, while not mediocre, not exactly outstanding either.

As for Woolf, she's at best a poor copycat. I'd take Plath any day of the week, and that says more about Woolf than it says about Plath, who is insufferable.

Agatha Christie had nice prose. Jane Austen had really nice prose from time to time (ie Mansfield Park). I guess Anne Bronte too. But seriously, fuck Woolf.

>if they tied together sections of stream of consciousness with sections of perfectly straight to the point, but flowery, but not too flowery prose, I'd have no issue.

They all do that, though.

>most of everything else Faulkner wrote was, while not mediocre, not exactly outstanding either
Now that's a huge literary sin if I ever saw one. There are plenty of people that don't even see TSatF as Faulkner's best work. As I lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom! are both outstanding, and masterpieces in their own right.

>Joyce[...]while having very nice experiments, is not exactly the best at prose
It's like you forgot that Portrait and Dubliners exist. Both of which have some of the best prose (the former better than the latter)in the English language, and are not exactly experimental. Ulysses also has plenty of straightforward prose. He's not always writing in stream of consciousness, just as Faulkner and Woolf do not always.

You also can't really call Woolf a copycat when her masterpiece, The Waves, is so different from anything that Faulkner or Joyce wrote.

>What writer has the best prose you've ever read?
That would be me!
My editor is awesome.

the one and only

>They all do that, though.
They all fail to do that. By which I mean, their non stream of consciousness prose is not the perfectly straight to the point, but flowery, but not too flowery prose you find in Nabokov.

For some reason, I can only think of Nabokov and russian-english translators (Mirra Ginsburg and Lisa C. Hayden) when trying to come up with writers who actually did it right in english. And Nabokov himself was a russian-english translator too...

Anyway.

>Now that's a huge literary sin if I ever saw one. There are plenty of people that don't even see TSatF as Faulkner's best work. As I lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom! are both outstanding, and masterpieces in their own right.
As tales, not as works of amazing prose.

>It's like you forgot that Portrait and Dubliners exist. Both of which have some of the best prose (the former better than the latter)in the English language, and are not exactly experimental
Portrait tries to be Wilde, but doesn't reach him. Dubliners is... again, I have to use Asturias as a comparison, but it's closer to The President or Viernes de Dolores (colorful, but nowhere near as sweet-spot on the prose) as Mulata or, say, his Banana trilogy.

>You also can't really call Woolf a copycat when her masterpiece, The Waves, is so different from anything that Faulkner or Joyce wrote
Except everyone and their mom called her a copycat when it came out, and they were right.

She wasn't trying to tell some stories. She was trying to be one of the boys.

>Shakespeare
>prose

Yes, you would enjoy Ruskin if you like the other four. However, Ruskin is arguably the most difficult writer to get into of the five because his writings, as a whole, are amorphous: they aren't novels or histories; they are philosophical wanderings on architecture and art from an imaginative mind. It's also hard to just procure a decent, well-made, unabridged copy of one of his books.

Usually his Seven Lamps of Architecture is the first book to read. If you like Ruskin and Carlyle, I recommend learning more about the Pre-Raphaelite movement for better context behind their writings. There are other great artists and writers associated with the movement: Dante and Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and Millais. Generally, I consider the Pre-Raphaelite movement, with its preference towards a Neo-Gothic aesthetic, to be a superior pre-cursor to the fantasy genre prominent in the twentieth-century and nowadays.

Fucking this, finally. Better than the Flow Bear but much less known. Say Lean is unexpectedly good at his game too.

faulker blows my mind it's so good

>implying he didn't write prose that is leagues beyond anything else

Ah yes, the prose. The prooooooose. the PROOOOOOOSE. There's a reason why the pseuds on this website are always so willing to talk about "the prose" of a book when discussing its merits or flaws. Why attempt to analyze the merits and effects of the literary devices used to add to the development of characters, why attempt to understand the interplay of the perspectives of different characters and the emphasis this places on different themes, the spectrum of ironies used throughout the novel, the historical significance of the novel and the influence it has spawned in literary tradition or the influences seen throughout the work, the specific structure and literary underpinnings of the novel and the way it influences the tone, the author's relationship to the characters and the theme, the presentation of the novel itself to the audience and thus the relationship between reader and text --- why do any of this, when you could talk about "the prose?" You know that you have such a deep understanding of the book, don't you, when you talk about "the prose," the "musicality of it," the "sparseness." What a great artistic touch you have, don't you! Such a highly refined poetic sense! And you feel like such a true reader of literature when you are able to compare these styles: "I am partial to the lyricism of Joyce's prose, as well as the clean and scientific prose of Borges," you might say. What a deep understanding you show! Because the "prose" of a work is such an accessible topic, something that is felt immediately in the body and senses, a nice little sensation and flutter of the heart. Art obviously has nothing else to it, nothing other than the little sensations that I experience, because why should i attempt to understand it on a deeper level than this, when I have such a "refined" sense of the "prose?" Why even attempt to analyze the prose and the poetic and rhythmical underpinnings of it, when I could use a pretty little metaphor for it? It matters little that virtually every reader of literature has access to the music of the words and so my understanding is not quite so advanced as I would think, that form is something that goes hand in hand with theme, that I missed all the deep relationships between characters and between text and reader that existed in the work and that comprise a large part of the literary merit of the text, for my understanding of "the prose" shows such a mastery of language, a fine-tuned sense of the magical flow of the words! Having understood this work, I may as well move onto the next, the next bundle of pretty sensations to experience, the next bagful of fun linguistic treats!

Pretentious douchebag is pretentious. Prose is to literature what cinematography is to film. Don't pretend it's not really fucking important. It's the lifeblood of writing.

Nice pasta

Your prose isn't very good.

What's with the bitterness, Piney Tomecone?

The great irony of that pasta is that his prose is awful. Anyone who doesn't understand why prose is the most important part of literature is a pseud.

KJV

Good job at killing the thread.

lolita

It's difficult and autistic to compare writers across languages, but yeah, Mann wins German

Carpentier>Asturias

>And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock
haha penis

me desu

He writes great sentences, and i regularly find myself rereading passages over and over again, slowly, but I just don't enjoy him in a Subjective sense as much as day Barth, Gaddis, McElroy, or Pynchon. I respect your opinion, though.

Fuckin lol this is some of the worst prose I've ever read. Great writers should be able to do everything well, and I'm not interested in whatever they're doing unless their sentences give me chills. Worst pasta

SALLUST
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>why didn't he make ole Gandy and Witchy Witch fight
das gay, can't just you appreciate the tension, that makes you compassionate for poor Gandalf and his brave, futile almost, Good fight? The odds are clearly against him, facing the very soul of evil and an endlessly brutish army. I haven't read it, but clearly the interruptive horns of Rohan were the decisive boost in morale, that feint spark of hope that drives this story, for what looks like an otherwise lost fight.

Not prose. But unironically, Tolkien is a very good poet. It's a tradesman's poetry but his trade was the study of words and the history of words. There's so little artifice. His verse is disproportionately meaningful and beautiful given its straightforwardness and self-containedness.
His prose is also good. He loves Anglo-Saxon words and this makes his prose forceful, beautiful, and simple.

such a teeny bopper thread, muh prose lol

Something about Mishima gets me. Even if its in translation.

Objectively MACHADO DE ASSIS followed closely by RADUAN NASSAR

Stream of consciousness is a joke. Nobody actually thinks like that.

Samuel Johnson
Jonathan Swift
Jane Austen
Charles Dickens
Henry James
Joseph Conrad

>he's trying to convince himself that nobody is more intelligent than him
Please go on about how other people think

Sallust isn't even the best Latin writer.

>two poems both deal with existentialist themes
>second one must be a rip-off.