For me, The Unbearable Lightness of Being-Milan Kundera; On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous-Ocean Vuong; Love in the Time of Cholera-Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The most tragic, painful, human suffering can be presented and these writers present it in the most excruciatingly beautiful prose.
On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous-“A woman stands on the shoulder of a dirt road begging, in a tongue made obsolete by gunfire, to enter the village where her house sits, has sat for decades. It is a human story. Anyone can tell it. Can you tell? Can you tell the rain has grown heavy, its keystrokes peppering the blue shawl black?”
What is the beauty for you?
Rilke. Rilke every time. “Letters to a Young Poet” is truly fantastic, and should be required reading for any person who loves another person, but I keep arriving back at the beginning of his “Fragment of an Elegy”
“Now shall I praise the cities, those long-surviving (I watched them in awe) great constellations of earth. For only in praising is my heart still mine, so violently do I know the world. And even my most bitter lament turns into a paean before my disconsolate heart.”
Yesss Rilke is on my list too.