Thread 3997109

/cm/ + /lit/
Discuss literature about/containing cute males!

What's your favorite /cm/-centered piece of literature? Including shota-related literature, literature pertaining to cute depictions of male homosexuality, etc.

I remember we had a thread like this a while ago, and it was very nice.

I'll start, I guess.

An underrated poet that I really enjoy reading is Sandro Penna. Penna wrote a lot about shotas, youth and the quiet tragedy that comes with the ephemeral nature of such. His poems are typically very short (only a few lines long), but also very evocative. Some of them genuinely leave you stunned in ways you wouldn't expect. Very depressing at times, but generally nice. You can pretty easily find translated versions of his loveliest work in the collection "A Boy Asleep Under the Sun" online.

>Midsummer at night.
>You close your windows and bar the door
>to satisfy your desire for a comfortable, familiar life.
>My silence hides,
>seething in the dark foliage below.

In a radically different vein, I'd like to bring up the novelist Hervé Guibert. He's another guy I really like.
His work is cute/male related insofar that it usually pertains to attractive young men and male homosexuality, but is notably more... Grotesque than that of the aforementioned poet. I mean, he's most famous for writing about dying of AIDS lmao. Which is to say - he wrote a lot about decay, decadence and rot. But I think his work, especially his later work (My Manservant and Me, The Compassion Protocol, The Man in the Red Hat, Paradise, etc), is really worthwhile.
His photography is also notably interesting, but I'm not going to post any of it here, as this is a 2D-only board.

I'll be basic and say The Song of Achilles

>>3997110
>>3997119
Oh this is crazy OP. I just read Sandro Penna recently. I found out about him some time early in October and borrowed a collection of his poems the next day. Funnily enough even though I picked him up for the homoerotic angle I ended up being much more affected by his descriptions of twilit piazzas, streetlamps, trains passing through an empty countryside at dusk, etc. Really beautiful and under-rated poet, at least in the Anglosphere.

Hervé Guibert has been recommended to me a few times (particularly by anons who want me to add him to a gay /lit/ chart I made - maybe you were one of them...?), but I always put it off because I have a bit of an aversion to books about contemporary gay life, clubbing, AIDS and so on... I guess I prefer stuff that is either bourgeois-sentimental or really off-the-wall Sadean. I tried reading Larry Kramer's 'Faggots' and just found it unbearable... (I enjoyed the 'The Normal Heart' movie though). Maybe I should give him a go. Speaking of French homosexuality, have you read 'The Screwball Asses'? That's also published by MIT Press. Initially they thought it was written by Guy Hocquenghem but it looks like they've changed the attribution recently. I usually dislike anything to do with 'queer theory' - I find that stuff so anaemic and ideological and overwrought - but this text is pretty short and evocative, super-charged with a real sense of indignation, the kind of rich steaming invective borne of dashed utopianism:
>Leftism has passed through, and Leftism dries up whatever it touches.

>>3997130
Also I enjoyed this as a guilty pleasure. I liked how often she mentioned Achilles' cute feet...

>>3997110
This geenuinely makes me want to cry. Why cant youth last forever, I should rope before i hit 25 so i dont hit twink death

The Silmarillion if filled to the brim with beautiful long haired men

>>3997181
>>3997181
>I just read Sandro Penna recently. ... Funnily enough even though I picked him up for the homoerotic angle I ended up being much more affected by his descriptions of twilit piazzas, streetlamps, trains passing through an empty countryside at dusk, etc. Really beautiful and under-rated poet, at least in the Anglosphere.
Wow, it's nice to see someone else who has read Penna - he is unfortunately very underrated. Call me Pasolini in how I'm constantly telling people to read him to no avail. I mentioned him in this thread primarily because of the homoerotic themes in his work, but yeah, a lot of his more landscape- descriptive work is beautiful as well.
Penna's poetry makes me really sad. It all feels incredibly nostalgic and mourning in an almost overwhelming way. My favorite poems of his are the ones where he connects his appreciation for youth with melancholic descriptions of his quiet hell - it's just so damn *tragic*. For example, I really like the one he wrote to Renzi Vepignani -
>The nights descended slowly upon the city
>and the world was blessed with peace.
>My youth was delicate
>like the gentle and unexpected joy of a soldier.
>
>Then came the war and in our life
>the nights were no longer patient and slow.
>The sunsets were dull because of all the dust and smoke.
>And the heavy malaise
>that overcame us when Spring returned, was without end.
Just... Holy shit. Stunning.

>>3997181
>>3997233

>Hervé Guibert has been recommended to me a few times (particularly by anons who want me to add him to a gay /lit/ chart I made - maybe you were one of them...?), but I always put it off because I have a bit of an aversion to books about contemporary gay life, clubbing, AIDS and so on...
Guibert's earlier work is definitely very tied to that sort of thing - but as his disease progressed, his writing definitely changed a lot. Don't get me wrong, it absolutely still follows themes of decadence and the such, but it all becomes far less directly autobiographical, and a lot more surreal - cynical - almost satirical at times. A lot of it is about the humiliation and isolation that comes from having a terminal illness.
If you want to read Guibert, I suggest you start with My Manservant and Me - it’s very short, but very interesting. In sum - it follows a dying elderly man (Guibert’s self insert) who gets cared for and abused by a cunning young man (also Guibert’s self insert). It’s all very brutal. Almost Sadean, in a way. (In a similar vein, Guibert also produced an equally-brutal movie called Modesty or Shame, but I’m not going to talk about it too much since this is a /lit/ thread).

>>3997181
>>3997233
>>3997234
>I guess I prefer stuff that is either bourgeois-sentimental or really off-the-wall Sadean.
I’m curious as to what you think of Henry de Montherlant (who was very /cm/core himself!)

>Speaking of French homosexuality, have you read 'The Screwball Asses'? That's also published by MIT Press. Initially they thought it was written by Guy Hocquenghem but it looks like they've changed the attribution recently. I usually dislike anything to do with 'queer theory' - I find that stuff so anaemic and ideological and overwrought - but this text is pretty short and evocative, super-charged with a real sense of indignation, the kind of rich steaming invective borne of dashed utopianism:
>>Leftism has passed through, and Leftism dries up whatever it touches.
I haven’t read it yet, but I downloaded a PDF of it a while ago and have been letting it sit in my drive for a few weeks now. I am going to read it later tonight, since you brought it up.

(had to make three separate posts since I kept hitting the character limit, sorry)

I must suggest More Than This, by Patrick Ness.

>>3997248
More Than This is great until it gets raped midway through by the stupid Matrix plot

>>3997268
Yeah. Gotta take the good with the bad.

>>3997130
I hated that book so fucking much. I don't understand how any of you can tolerate just how awful it is.

>>3997284
What didn't you like about it?

>>3997296
I don't know, but I personally discarded it entirely because it was written by a woman.

>>3997300
That put me off but I'm sticking with it and it's fine so far.

>>3997304
Upon reading further, there's a bit of feminist crap leaking it's way in, but it's more than outweighed by the rest.

>>3997233
>>3997234
>>3997235
Thank you for the recommendation anon! I downloaded 'My Manservant and Me' - it is indeed short lol. That's awesome. I'm trying to read a lot of shorter fiction at the moment due to how busy I am. I will let you know what I think of it soon. I also downloaded 'A Boy Asleep Under the Sun' as it seems to have a lot more of Sandro Penna's explicitly homoerotic poems than the collection I read. I quite liked this one:
>Good and evil coexist in the lure of your gaze.
I may also check out the Guibert movie you mentioned.

>Henry de Montherlant
He's been on my radar for a very long time but I keep putting off reading him. I've got a copy of 'Chaos and Night' and I downloaded a PDF of 'The Boys' - it's a shame that the latter seems to be out of print. I'd be very curious to read his correspondence with Roger Peyrefitte. I wonder if it will ever be translated into English. What have you read of his? Curious to hear your thoughts.

Let me know how you find 'The Screwball Asses'. I'm guessing you've read Andre Gide too?

Another book I would recommend is Forrest Reid's 'The Garden God'. It's very short but really beautiful. Highly idealistic portrait of a boyhood romance. Reminds me of my early crushes.

>>3997109 (OP)
yukio mishima wrote a cute short story called "cigarette" about his early adolescence feeling alienated from other kids, where he comes upon two boys who offer him a cigarette. it's like 10 pages long but it's very sweet, this is an excerpt from it
>Held in the custody of childhood is a locked chest; the adoles-
cent, by one means or another, tries to open it. The chest is
opened: inside, there is nothing. So he reaches a conclusion: the
treasure chest is always like this, empty. From this point on, he
gives priority to this assumption of his rather than to reality. In
other words, he is now a "grown-up." Yet was the chest really
empty? Wasn't there something vital, something invisible to the
eye, that got away at the very moment it was opened?
For me, at any rate, the process of becoming an adult refused
to feel like any kind of self-fulfillment, or graduation. Boyhood, I
believed, was something that should continue forever (and
doesn't it in fact continue?). Why, then, should one have to treat
it with contempt?...

>>3997506
Oh, great choice anon. That story is wonderful. Here's a copy of it for anyone interested.

'Martyrdom' from the same collection is also rather nice... I hope someone translates Kawabata's 'Shonen' sometime soon...

I thoroughly enjoyed Brideshead Revisited by Waugh. It's a novel detailing the relationship of an artist with an aristocrat, named Sebastian, and his family, beginning at their first term at Oxford. I have also been meaning to read a similar story titled Maurice by Forster. From what I understand the latter is more overtly homosexual, so much so that it took flak at the time of its publishing.

I've been obsessed with Elric of Melnibone by Micheal Moorcock. He's one of the earliest examples of a dark fantasy anti-hero, and an early inspiration for the bishonen aesthetic, in short he's the first gothic pretty boy. I love his writing style and moody prose it's all such a vibe.

>>3997731
he mentions elric's slim waist and hips a lot in the books, that was always the biggest thing that stuck out to me.

>>3997300
>I HATE Song of Achilles!

Why?

>I dunno...

>>3997109 (OP)
My own novel.
It's a sci-fi novel, and at the center of it is a friendship between the prince of a dying empire and his knight and sworn protector - the two being the last meaningful remnant of the empire as it falls to a revolution.
Part of the story follows them as they go into hiding together and try to blend in and live a normal, domestic life