A clean well-lighted place

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1. mikhailfrancoAug 2023
   The short stories and journalism of Ernest Hemingway.

   Of course, The Old Man and the Sea is not underrated, because it is explicitly mentioned in the Nobel citation.

   Anything longer (all the novels) were overrated and now out of favour. Anything shorter will reward your time.

   For example...

   Fiction: A Clean Well-Lighted Place and The Capital of the World.

   Non-fiction: coverage of the Greco-Turkish war (1919-22), especially Refugees From Thrace and On the Quai at Smyrna.

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2. oblomovshchinaFeb 2019
   Hemingway's A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

   Pynchon's Entropy

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3. SinafJul 2016
   Philosophy has many different shades and colors (Philosophy of language, science, mathematics), and there is also a "branch" asking questions related to the meaning of life.

   I can't tell you where you could/should start, because I feel like I would already influence you too much by taking some sort of choice away from you.

   I will link a few essays I could find that are available for free and are not too long. I'm already influencing you a little bit by making this selection, but I urge you to do your own research: If you like one of the stories, try to find out who was influenced by whom (e.g. Kafka doesn't directly address meaning but influenced Camus; Nietzsche was influenced by Schopenhauer), and consider reading things challenging the author.

   [1] The Last Question - Isaac Asimov (http://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf)

   [2] Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5200)

   [3] A Clean, Well-Lighted Place - Ernest Hemingway (http://www.url-der.org/a_clean_well_lighted_place.pdf)

   [4] On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense - Friedrich Nietzsche (http://www.jpcatholic.com/NCUpdf/Nietzsche.pdf)

   I've often see people link the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, so I'm gonna do it as well: http://plato.stanford.edu/index.html

   While I'm writing this gutenberg.org seems to have some problems, but just search for "Metamorphosis Kafka", and you should find plenty of other sources.

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4. dnetesnSep 2015
   The great cafe short story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" by Hemingway. http://www.mrbauld.com/hemclean.html
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5. telemachosApr 2010
   What the hell. Here's my list of literature everyone should at least try (in no particular order):

   Homer: both the Iliad and Odyssey

   Sophocles: Oedipus the King (read it - far better than you might think)

   Plato: The Apology of Socrates

   Sappho's fragmentary poems (the translation by Anne Carson titled If not, winter is especially good)

   Dante: Inferno

   Shakespeare: at least one tragedy, one history, one comedy and one of the final "problem plays"

   John Donne: a bunch but if none else Elegy XIX To His Mistress Going to Bed

   Philip Larkin: he didn't write much; read the complete poems (if nothing else, look at "Born yesterday")

   T.S. Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Return of the Magi", "Hollow men"

   Ernest Hemmingway: A Clean Well-Lighted Place

   Herman Melville: Bartleby, the Scrivener

   Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent

   Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary

   George Orwell: Any and all of the essays, but especially "Shooting an elephant" and "A hanging"

   Stendahl: Red and Black

   James Joyce: A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man

   Andre Dumas: The Three Musketeers

   Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

   Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

   I'll shut up, except to say that although I agree with some of the people on the thread that reading "great books" just because they're considered great is stupid, these books were all a joy. I remember them each pretty happily and return to a few of them now and again and just browse through for awhile. Some "great" books really are great, and if you're reading for yourself (not as a forced assignment), they're often well worth the effort (because, yes, none of them reads like a magazine article).

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6. GCA10Nov 2020
   Couldn't resist the temptation. I grabbed the opening paragraph of Hemingway's own short story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" -- and put it to the test.

   Danger alert! Danger alert!

   The master himself opens with a 110-word, two-sentence paragraph. The first sentence is flagged yellow. The second one is flagged red. By the software's system, Hemingway's own writing is in trouble.

   Truth is, this app is a nifty diagnostic tool that will help you avoid some writing goofs, if you use it judiciously. But if you let it dictate every change, you'll lose the full rhythms of good writing.

   Even a master of lean writing (Hemingway himself) knew when to bulk up, even for just a moment, to create a cadence that could surprise and intrigue us.

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