I must say that
I happen
to
find
E
E
C
u
m
m
i
n
g
s
quite
annoying.

I'll read anything that describes itself as a "toilet book".

He wasn't the first to use non traditional line structure and punctuation its really something he picked up from the Dada Movement and some futurist poets from Europe. Only the way he uses punctuation and line structure seems to be more meaningful than that of many other poets.

Nah. It's annoying. Not as annoying as Edwin Morgan, mind you, who tried to do the same thing with even less skill.

My favourite novel is "Darkness at Noon" by Arthur Koestler. A psychological and political masterpiece.

Only a fraction of his poems were in that form

Wow. Nice to see a brand new user get straight in to the action on the forum :)

This is a cool website a friend recommended it and i've been playing diplomacy for a while so its not all completely foreign.

Sounds great. Glad to have you on board.

I dont know playwrights that well, but as far as novels go I love reading Dostoevsky and Camus, and Vonnegut and Bukowski for some lighter reading

Hahaha.

The recently departed Ray Bradbury was always one of my favorites.

Novelist: Michael Chabon, Best Work: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I tried to pick someone mainstream, rather than a writer specific to my preferred genre of scifi/fantasy like China Mieville (Perdido Street Station, The Scar), Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash), or George RR Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire).

Short Story Writer: Ray Bradbury, Best Work: The Veldt

Poet: Gerard de Nerval, Best Work: El Desdichado

Dramatist: William Shakespeare, Best Work: Boy, that's a toughie. I'd say right now my favorite is Coriolanus.

Shakespeare seems like too easy an answer. I could say Jonathan Larson for RENT (my favorite). I also like Lynn Nottage (Intimate Apparel, Ruined).

well as far as Shakespeare I like King Lear most at the moment

*AHEM* :)

Dramatist: SHAKESPEARE! (And Wilde, Shaw, Beckett, and Sophocles for a Top 5.)

Poet: T.S. ELIOT! (And Milton, Byron, Keats, and Poe to round out that category.)

Novelist: ...Oh. Good question.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, D.H. Lawrence, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Dostoyevsyk, but no real order...and plenty of others in there...Twain...Hardy...

Short Stories: ...Already said Poe, so Kafka can take this relatively uncontested (Chevkhov would be the other one here, I suppose.)

*Dostoyevsky

And as for Shakespeare's best..since someone brought THAT up:

Tragedies, as I'd rank them:

1. Hamlet
2. King Lear/Macbeth (tie, if I had a gun to my head and had to choose, Macbeth)
3. Othello
4. Antony and Cleopatra (I think it's his best Roman play and a better love story than...)
5. Romeo and Juliet (A&C are a more realistic pair, and Cleopatra > Juliet)
6. Titus Andronicus (First and roughest tragedy, VERY crude, but there's some fun in that)
7. Julius Caesar (Still like it, it's just not nearly as fun or original as the others above it)
8. Coriolanus (Only because I can't think of what can make it stand apart.)

Comedies:
1. Twelfth Night
2. Much Ado About Nothing
3. Taming of the Shrew
4. A Midsummer Night's Dream

And then it blurs after that.

Histories:
1. Richard III
2. Henry V
3. The Rest of the Henriad
4. Everything Else, in no particular order

The Merchant of Venice I count as a Problem Play and not a Comedy, but I love that...

And

The Tempest to round out his career and round it out.

^ That is obi, Svidrigailov. He appears in any literature thread around so you'll be good friends.

haha i was going to ask does he keep these tables and lists on call to be copy pastedon a moments notice ;)

It must be a macro or hotkey.

Na, I have it all stored in that cavernous area known as my brain...

I'm just THAT much much a literature nerd. ;)

I like TS Eliot alot too, he doesn't seem to have written that many poems though, or am i mistaken

No, he himself said and knew that he made his reputation on comparatively-few poems...

It's just that so many of them are masterpieces--

The Waste Land, Prufrock, Gerontion, The Hollow Men, and then smaller poems as well...

He still had plenty of poems, but not nearly as many as a lot of the great poets do--quality over quantity.

Patrick O'Brian's Aubery Maturin novels have to be up there for me, superb writing, historical research and character development, by the time I finished reading the series I felt like I had come to know Jack and Stephen as well as some of my real life friends.

My favorite, by far, is Kurt Vonnegut. My favorite book by Vonnegut is probably Slapstick. I am a huge P.K. Dick fan and he has too many great short stories to list. Although, my favorite short story is Harrison Bergeron by KV. My favorite poet is Langston Hughes, and again I like so much of his work it is hard to pick a favorite. I will try to find my favorite, the name escapes me right now. I am also a big fan of Charles Bukowski. I do love The Dark Tower as well.

For what it's worth, I am reading the Magus by John Fowles right now and I just finished The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant, highly recommended.

With a name like Svidrigailov, you have to be a Dostoyevsky nut.

I'm also a huge fan of e.e. cummings. And of course Shakespeare goes without saying. My rankings would be close to Obi's, though I'd rate Henry IV, Part One first among the Histories, simply for Falstaff and Hotspur.

I'd add Joyce and Dreiser as novelists.

By uncanny coincidence, T.S. Eliot in the Waste Land (line 429) references Gerard De Nerval's El Desdichado. Eliot also was a fan of Coriolanus. I guess we had similar tastes.

Samuel Beckett stands alone.

^That's because he's forever Waiting for Godot. ;)

Haha, that makes me think of Endgame. Beckett stands alone, but Hamm is unable to stand and Clov is unable to sit.