top 5 writers (bar buk) (1 Viewer)

Why Camus is the @#$%

#1 Albert Camus
#2 Fyodor Dostoyevski
#3 Franz Kafka
#4 John Fante
#5 Jack Kerouac

Camus rocks, fuckin' rocks.

Such a gentle way of telling us how things will turn out. The rest is obvious...By that I mean the world shall get it, or not; not a Camus thing, just a...thing.
 
mmm... ok,
in random order. but 7 since it's a nicer number to me.

1. Anna Akhmatova
2. Attila Jozsef
3. Sandor Kanyadi
4. E.M. Cioran
5. Anton Chekhov "Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress" ... I understand that. :cool:

6. Ayn Rand (only for Fountainhead)
7. CP (I'll leave that one up to interpretation)


eh...now THAT was personal. :p
 
#1 Albert Camus
#2 Fyodor Dostoyevski
#3 Franz Kafka
#4 John Fante
#5 Jack Kerouac

Camus rocks, fuckin' rocks.

Such a gentle way of telling us how things will turn out. The rest is obvious...By that I mean the world shall get it, or not; not a Camus thing, just a...thing.

I was thinking strongly about mentioning Camus, but I didn't want to sound too pretentious. There's something very empathetic about his writing. He could easily take the place of Huxley on my list.
 
The Cannon

mmm... ok,
in random order. but 7 since it's a nicer number to me.

1. Anna Akhmatova
2. Attila Jozsef
3. Sandor Kanyadi
4. E.M. Cioran
5. Anton Chekhov "Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress" ... I understand that. :cool:

6. Ayn Rand (only for Fountainhead)
7. CP (I'll leave that one up to interpretation)


eh...now THAT was personal. :p

2 Hungarians. Interesting.
 
Glad to see Jim Thompson on a couple of lists. The Killer Inside Me was incredible, as was The Grifters. The hardest of hard-boiled.
 
Isn't Victor Valoff Buk's old Nazi pal, the guy with the gun who forced a crying Baldy to blurt out "I'm a man, I'm a man" and then shot a hole in the bottom of the boat they were rowing, causing it to sink?

Somewhere in HAM ON RYE.
 
Igor squared himself in front of Baldy.
"You're not a man!"
"I AM A MAN, IGOR! I AM A MAN!"
"YOU LIE!"
Igor backhanded him across the face and as Baldy's head jumped to one side, he straightened him up with a slap to the other side of his face. Baldy stood at attention with his hands rigidly at his sides.
"I'm . . . a man . . ,"
Igor continued to stand in front of him.
"I'll make a man out of you!"
"O.K.," I said to Igor, "leave him alone."
Igor left the kitchen. I poured myself another rum. It was dreadful stuff but it was all there was.
Igor walked back in. He was holding a gun, a real one, an old six- shooter.
"We will now play Russian roulette," he announced.
"Your mother's ass," I said.
"I'll play, Igor," said Baldy, "I'll play! I'm a man!"
"All right," said Igor, "there is one bullet in the gun. I will spin the chamber and hand the gun to you."
Igor spun the chamber and handed the gun to Baldy. Baldy took it and pointed it at his head. "I'm a man . . . I'm a man . . . I'll do it!"
He began crying again. "I'll do it . . . I'm a man . . ."
Baldy let the muzzle of the gun slip away from his temple. He pointed it away from his skull and pulled the trigger. There was a click.
Igor took the gun, spun the chamber and handed it to me. I handed it back.
"You go first."
Igor spun the chamber, held the gun up to the light and looked through the chamber. Then he put the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. There was a click.
"Big deal," I said. "You checked the chamber to see where the bullet was."
Igor spun the chamber and handed the gun to me. "Your turn..."
I handed the gun back. "Stuff it," I told him. I walked over to pour myself another rum. As I did there was a shot. I looked down. Near my foot, in the kitchen floor, there was a bullet hole. I turned around.
"You ever point that thing at me again and I'll kill you, Igor."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
He stood there smiling. He slowly began to raise the gun. I waited. Then he lowered the gun. That was about it for the night. We went out to the car and Igor drove us home. But we stopped first at Westlake Park and rented a boat and went out on the lake to finish off the rum. With the last drink, Igor loaded up the gun and shot holes in the bottom of the boat. We were forty yards from shore and had to swim in . . .
It was late when I got home. I crawled over the old berry bush and through the bedroom window. I undressed and went to bed while in the next room my father snored.
- from HAM ON RYE by Charles Bukowski
 
Fucking fantastic! I am laughing out loud, as I did when I first read this. I guess I confused "Valoff" with "Igor".
 
I'll have to check them out as well...justin.barrett's poems brought me into the smal press world and I eventually was lucky enough to experience William Taylor's work, which made the whole journey worth while.
 
- Kurt Vonnegut
- Vladimir Nabokov
- James Joyce
- Samuel Beckett
- Edgar Allan Poe

(hard to narrow it down to 5...it's more 10 favourites and who makes
my top 5 has more to do with my mood of the day:
Jean Rhys, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Tennessee Williams are faves as well)

I'm Norwegian, glad to see Hamsun made someone's list :)
 
1.John Fante
2. Hunter S. Thompson
3. Kurt Vonnegut
4. Jack Kerouac
5. Dan Fante

I'm actually trying to think where I'd put Bukowski in my top 5... Probably 3... Definitely a level above Kerouac... Maybe above Vonnegut... Hm... Yeah I guess he'd be 3.
 
I didn't think this would be so tough. I suspect a top 20 list would be more representative, while still forcing limitation (e.g., where are the women?!) Maybe a future thread.

1) David Mamet
2) Albert Camus
3) Raymond Carver
4) Kurt Vonnegut
5) Jean-Paul Sartre
 
i don't really have a top five list of writers, but i'd like to throw some names out which have grabbed me.

leopardi (a particular translation published by princeton uni. press.)
samuel butler (one novel "the way of all flesh.")
c.p. cavafy (particularly the short, personal poem.)
jose ortega y gasset (some of his works are transcripts of lectures and thus, are conversational in tone.)
chamfort (like lichtenberg, was beloved by schopenhaeur and nietzsche.)
 
Jim Harrison
Céline [writings, not ideas]
Allen Ginsberg
Rick Bass
William S. Burroughs
 
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