Is there anyone else here who reads standing up? I feel I'm more actively engaging with the text when I'm standing than when I'm just passively sitting down.

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER IS A HUGE FAGGOT!

Help me write a monologue for my devised Drama piece?
>My character is a pedophile realizing what he's done
>He wants to seek help from others to cure himself
>He ends up being killed by three of his victims (Eye gouge King Lear style)
>It's set in purgatory
>Actually turns out that the three victims are already in hell and my character is a symbol of that
>As the play finishes it comes back to the opening shot
>Showing that they are forever trapped in this cycle of hell

What is it about this place (and I suppose the internet at large) that breeds the hyperbolic hyper cynical amateur critic? For example, say someone thinks they found something of demerit in cervantes and from then on out they aggressively spatter every mention of don quixote with their hip cynical opinion. And when they aren't subjecting the greats to contrarianism they find some middlebrow author to grill knowing there isn't anyone to bother challenging them on it.

Malcolm Lowry is to the Divine Comedy what Joyce is to the Odyssey.

Just finished reading Under the Volcano and Lunar Caustic, and they are both perfect parallels to inferno and purgatorio.

Apparently he had another book(In ballast to the white sea) that was meant to be paradise, but the manuscript was lost when his house burned down.

I would argue his re-write of the divine comedy is even better than jimmy j's parallel of the odyssey

So, I want to improve my writing. I wrote a few short stories and halfway done with a novel, but its rather amateur-ish. I used to read a lot of hard sci-fi when I was younger, and now I just feel everything that I have read showing up in my writing. No style of my own.

Best course of action - take creative writing classes? Something else? Obviously, "keep writing", but I'm already doing that.

Are these "On writing" books even worth looking into? |

Stanislav Lem was so dreamy.

Why do we derive so much pleasure from reading well crafted prose? What is it about rhythmically perfect sentences and ingenious syntax and diction that excites us? Is there any scientific research that sheds light on this topic?

I want to know why the likes of Hawthorne and Melville stimulate my brain while authors such as Dan
Brown and James Patterson do not.

Hey /lit/, I'm going to travel for a couple of months to the other side of the globe this christmas and I'm looking for books to read on flight and while there, care to help me?

I'm looking for small books, few pages, light and easy to carry. E-readers are a no-go for me. Also, I've read pretty much everything that is usually recomended on charts, so there's no need to come up with the usual suggestions. I mostly read History, if that's any help.

What does /lit/ think of Fitzgerald?