Hey /lit/, I'm looking for non-fic with god-tier prose, interested in any subject I guess. One example of this would be James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Not really interested in memoirs (it's mostly whiny middle-aged women), but if the prose is absolutely top-notch (as in Nabokov's Speak, Memory) then I'll accept it.
We could also turn this into a non-fic sharethread, if anyone's interested.
>>8086041
Anything Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Chesterton or Belloc desu
>>8086041
La Bible d'Amiens - Proust
Anything by Walter Isaacson
Essays - Montaigne
Illuminations - Benjamin
The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Rokeach
Theological-Political Treatise - Spinoza
Birth of Tragedy - Nietzsche
Laocoön - Lessing
Why Read the Classics? - Calvino
Im not sure Devil in the White City counts but I'll include it
>>8086539
Oh and The Goshawk - White
>>8086539
>La Bible d'Amiens - Proust
Do you mean the actual french version translated by Proust, or the original by Ruskin?
>>8086041
Anything from Fermor, of course.
what's the best biography on rimbaud, lads?
thor heyerdahl has nice prose if you're into stupid sexy adventurers
>>8086041
Addison
Steele
Johnson
Hume
Smith
Burke
Gibbon
Lamb
Hazlitt
De Quincy
Macaulay
Newman
Mill
Darwin
Ruskin
Huxley
Pater
>>8086639
Graham's is fantastic, I recommend it
>>8086722
Mill doesn't have god-tier prose man...
I respectfully disagree on that one
>>8086771
Well, tastes differ. But there is someone in that list for everyone. And Newman, for one, was definitely God-tier (and I say this as an atheist).
>>8086041
The Peregrine by J A. Baker
>>8087615
The only book I've ever read that is actually, solely, a meme.
E
M
Emerson
R
S
O
N
>>8086539
seconding Walter Benjamin. hit up his piece called "one way street". it's a series of somewhat mystical aphorisms, or prose poems perhaps. there's so much in it a person could live years in that text alone.
also check out "a fan's notes," a fictional-memoir by Frederick Exley.
>>8086639
i hear Starkie recommended often for Rimbaud biography.
>>8086041
Hume's History of Great Britain
The Black Jacobins
Napoleon the Great
Shelby Foote's narrative history of the Civil War
>>8086722
I'd say that Hume and Gibbon have truly the most beautiful and idyllic non-literary/lyrical prose in the English language
