Do you know if he owns/has read Vonnegut's Wompeters, Foma, and Granfalloons? Even among his fans, it's a lesser known/read work, consisting of a collection of essays, speeches, and interviews. He would undoubtedly enjoy that. For Heller, if he hasn't read both Picture This and Something Happened, I would highly recommend those, but I would guess he has if he is as well-read as you suggest.

For something similar to some of his tastes that you mention that he may not have read, I would also suggest Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. It is very similar to Heller's Something Happened, a satire on the middle/upper middle class American bourgeoisie.

One last recommendation would be Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. Fantastic novel comprised of a series of short stories centered on the various people of a small town. Wonderful look into what makes different people tick, their desires, their flaws, etc. Regarded as one of the most highly influential works for modern American authors including Faulkner.

>>7452050
Thanks anon. Winesburg especially sounds like something he might like. I'll look into all those

>>7452050
>Regarded as one of the most highly influential works for modern American authors including Faulkner.

I probably could have worded that more precisely. It's regarded as one of the more influential works for those authors in terms of setting the foundation for the styles, themes, etc. that you find to be common amongst the modern American authors like Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Hemmingway.

And one more random rec that someone like him would get a kick out of: The Professor and the Madman (or The Surgeon of Crowthorne if in UK). Very intriguing history of one of the most significant contributors to the original Oxford English Dictionary. He was highly intelligent but also highly insane, to the point he thought people were kidnapping him in his sleep and forcing him to have sex with children, and he spent the majority of his adult life in an institute for the criminally insane after killing a guy he thought was after him but was really just on his way to work. Oh yeah, and he also hacked off his own dick while institutionalized.

>>7452081

Not to shit on that anon's recommendation but there is a very good chance he's read 'Winesburg, Ohio' already. It's a short read and an entry one. If he's well-read he's probably hit it already.

Maybe something like 'Petersburg' by Andrei Bely would be a safe bet? Not as popular as it should be.

>>7451997

I would assume that he's already read Solzhenisyn, but if not, the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago would be perfect.

>>7452120
Sadly he has. That's also one of the only authors I haven't borrowed from him actually.

>>7452114
Yknow come to think of it I don't think I've seen Bely's name on his shelf. Next time I go by his apartment I'll snoop around a bit and check.

Thanks guys

Looking into it more Bely sounds like a really good option. What's the best edition/translation? He speaks pretty good russian conversationally but can't (or at least doesn't) read it at a novel level.

>>7452114
No offense taken. I actually had the same thought, that he may have read it already. But for a work that truly is "entry" and something you could knock out in a day or two, I never hear anyone talk about it. It seems to be one that flies under the radar.

>>7452201
Oh, and OP, another Russian work he may not have read: Ivan Turgenev's The Torrents of Spring. I'm not too knowledgeable when it comes to Russian literature, really only vaguely familiar with the more well-know works/authors, so my apologies if that is something that it should be obvious he would have read. I just have literally never seen it mentioned on here so I figured maybe it's not such a popular novel.

>>7452194

Grabbed this quickly from a Goodreads user review. He's pretty well-read and reliable. He covered translation specifically here and it might be helpful to you:

A quick note on the four available translations:

The first point is that there are two versions of this novel – the original of 1916 and a later version from 1922. The 1922 version was heavily edited by the author, with significant portions of the text removed, mainly to make it easier to read. He removed many of the more experimental sections, and added clearer structure at the expense of some of his flights of fancy. The shorter version is about 380 pages in the Maguire, the longer is 570 in the Pushkin and 600 in the Penguin, and both have similar size type. For that reason alone I would not recommend reading the 1922 version.

Here is what someone else has said: “"Peterburg was first published serially in 1913-14 and in book form in 1916. Bely revised it--largely by making more or less random drastic cuts--for its republication in Berlin in 1922. The novel was reprinted in Soviet Russia with further changes in 1928 and 1935. Several reprintings of different versions have since appeared outside Russia. While the cuts of the 1916 version may have improved the novel structurally, they resulted in dangling loose ends and unpursued hints. This in turn, incidentally, has had a negative effect on translations, giving rise to passages which make little sense."

The Elsworth and McDuff translations are from the 1916 edition, and should therefore be preferred. Of the two translations it should be noted that the Elsworth is the most recent, he is a respected scholar of Bely’s work (and has written books in English on him) and it won the Rossica Translation prize in 2012.

Comparison of translations:

The first line in Russian is: "Aпoллoн Aпoллoнoвич Aблeyхoв был вecьмa пoчтeннoгo poдa: oн имeл cвoим пpeдкoм Aдaмa."

Google translate gives me: "Apollo Apollonovich Ableukhov was very respectable kind : he had his ancestor Adam."

1. Elsworth - "Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov was of exceedingly venerable stock: he had Adam for his ancestor."

2. Maguire - "Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov came of most respected stock: he had Adam as his ancestor."

3. McDuff - "Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov came of most respected stock: he had Adam as his ancestor."

4. Cournos - "Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov came of very good stock: Adam was his ancestor."

I think the Elsworth is much better, certainly “exceedingly venerable” is much funnier.

****************

This is a dialectic novel.

East/West
Father/Son (interesting similarity to Ulysses in that respect, though this came first)
Chaos/Order
Apollo/Dionysus
the City/the islands
geometric forms/mist and fog
creation/destruction

etc etc etc

>>7452220

An excerpt (if this does not make you want to read this novel, please make an appointment with your doctor...)

Beards, moustaches, chins: that abundance comprised the upper extremities of human torsos.

Shoulders flowed by, shoulders and shoulders; all together, the shoulders formed a pitch-black porridge; all the shoulders formed a slow-flowing porridge of extreme viscosity; and Alexandr Ivanovich’s shoulder immediately became attached to that porridge; stuck to it, you might say; and Alexandr Ivanovich Dudkin followed that self-willed shoulder, in accordance with the law of the indivisible wholeness of bodies; thus he was disgorged on to Nevskii Prospect; and there he was compressed like a single grain into the porridge that flowed with blackness.

What is a grain? It is both a world and an object of consumption; as an object of consumption a grain—of caviar, say—does not represent in itself a satisfactory wholeness; that wholeness—is caviar: the aggregate of grains; the consumer is not aware of grains of caviar; but he is aware of caviar; that is, the porridge of grains of caviar. Spread on a proffered sandwich. In just the same way the bodies of individuals who emerge on to the pavement are transformed on Nevskii Prospect into the organs of a communal body, into the grains of the caviar: the Nevskii pavements are a field of sandwiches. Exactly the same happened to the body of Dudkin as he emerged here: exactly the same happened to his persistent thought—to the thought of a huge, many-legged creature that ran along the Nevskii.

>>7452224

They left the pavement; multitudinous legs were running there; and they stared speechlessly at the multitudinous legs of the dark porridge of people as it ran past: the porridge, incidentally, was not flowing, but creeping: creeping and shuffling—creeping and shuffling on a tide of legs; the porridge was composed of many thousands of tiny constituents; every tiny constituent was a torso: and the torsos ran on legs.

There were no people on Nevskii Prospect; what was there was a creeping, clamouring myriapod; a miscellany of voices—a miscellany of words—was pouring out into a single moisture-laden space; coherent sentences clashed against each other and broke; and words flew apart there senselessly and terribly like the shards of empty bottles, all broken in a single spot: all of them, mixed at random, were woven together again into a sentence that flew for all infinity, without beginning or end; this sentence seemed senseless and woven from fantasy: the unalleviated senselessness of the sentence thus composed hung like black soot over the Nevskii; the black smoke of fantastic tales enveloped all its space.

And the Neva, swelling now and then, roared at those fantastic tales and beat against the massive granite walls.

The creeping myriapod is terrible. Here, along the Nevskii, it has been running for centuries. But higher up, above the Nevskii—it’s the seasons that do the running: springs, autumns, winters. There the sequence is changeable; but here—the sequence is unchanging in its springs, summers and winters;; through springs, summers, winters the sequence is the same. And, as we know, a limit is set to periods of time; and—period follows upon period; after spring comes summer; autumn follows upon summer and passes over into winter; and in spring everything thaws. There is no such limit to the human myriapod; nothing takes its place; its segments may change, but it—is forever the same; somewhere over there, beyond the railway station, its head bends round; its tail protrudes into Morskaia; but along the Nevskii its segments, the legs that are its members, shuffle by—with no head, no tail, no consciousness, no thought; the myriapod creeps past as it has always crept; and as it has crept, so it will go on creeping.

(pages 342-344, Petersburg by Andrei Bely, Pushkin Press, 2009, translation by John Elsworth)

>>7452224
i've read the elsworth, and that shit is fucking fantastic, dem human myriapods really rock my socks

>>7452228
Holy shit you sold me, thanks so much /lit/. Gonna find a copy of elsworth asap

>>7452234

No problem. You sound like a good brother, m8.

Hope he likes it.