Novelists No One Reads Anymore

Bonus points for being completely out of print. Such as:

Wilfrid Sheed.

Although some stuff of his like his Great American Songbook survey and maybe some memoirs and baseball books can still be found.

And it looks like Real James Morrison read Max Jamison in recent years.

Checked for any earlier such thread but couldn’t find one.

George Gissing

Gilbert Frankau.

Harold Frederic

xpost Extraordinarily popular at the time, and i found to my astonishment at the weekend, also wrote poetry. The only novel i attempted to read was almost unbearably boring.

Peter de Polnay

*forty novels in 45 years*

again, v popular. again, very hard to find any worth these days, though i think he was favourably mentioned by Julian McLaren-Ross somewhere.

Another Peter de...

Does anyone read Peter de Vries any more?

Edward Jenkins

There's a book on this topic, The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler. Here's an article about it, hilariously the hyperlink to the book on his publisher's website is now a 404.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20171010-the-great-writers-forgotten-by-history

J.G. Holland
William Black
J.W. DeForest
Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

I like these btw

Arnold Bennett

Another Peter de...

Does anyone read Peter de Vries any more?

George Meredith
Sinclair Lewis

Arnold Bennett

― lord of the rongs (anagram)

In a college course on the British modernists, my professor said in ref to Woolf's attacks on Bennett, "Ha, ha, actually, Arnold Bennett's a pretty good novelist!"

Ever heard of Alexander Baron or Mary Elizabeth Braddon?

I'd say Braddon is no longer "forgotten." Lady Audley's Secret has 22, 573 ratings on Goodreads, for example.

Sinclair Lewis

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, September 26, 2022 3:40 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

It Can't Happen Here got a bump after the 2016 election. It along with Arrowsmith, Babbitt, and Main Street appear to be print as "The Essential Sinclair Lewis."

if i’ve read them they don’t belong in this thread, so sinclair lewis def doesn’t

Sir Walter Scott was once the towering novelist in English, roughly equal in stature with Dickens. Now, he's a dim blip on a fast receding horizon. And who reads John Galsworthy nowadays?

_Another Peter de...

Does anyone read Peter de Vries any more?_

Good one! A friend once decided to lend me his copy of _Slouching Towards Kalamazoo_ which I eventually returned years later unread except for the first page or two.

Mrs. Alexander (Annie Hector)
Margaret Oliphant

Have read some Mrs. Oliphant, as she was credited in the anthologies where I found her---don't remember other particulars, but thought she was very good.

Mervyn Peake

oliphant still has several regular readers at my library (granted it's a strange one); have seen bennett, braddon, and gissing all go out too.

Some of the long-book high modernists -- Robert Musil, Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos -- feel this way to me. Still famous, I think, but read?

has anyone not writing a disraeli biography read a beaconsfield novel?

Mervyn Peake

― the floor is guava (Ye Mad Puffin), Monday, September 26, 2022 10:07 PM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

No way, I read Titus Groan just this year.

I still want to read Peake, also Gissing's New Grub Street, sounds v. relatable. Did read a lot of Dos Passos a few years ago, but seemed like would have been best read in high school (later confirmed by ILB founder Scott Seward). Enjoyed the Ford memoir I read, haven't gotten to the novels. Will read my copy of The Man Without Qualities when I can dig it up.

eephus' list are all authors I've thought I should read at some point or another and never did, so you might be onto something there (xp)

For some reason I read a couple of Sinclair Lewis books in high school (on my own, not for class). I was assigned Galsworthy in college, but it was his plays for a course on modern drama. A friend gave me a copy of Titus Groan not too long ago, so definitely not Peake.

Booth Tarkington, maybe?

Booth Tarkington is a GREAT one. Probably looking at old Pulitzer winners is a good way of finding likely candidates.

Sir Walter Scott was once the towering novelist in English, roughly equal in stature with Dickens.

Probably greater in stature actually.

I don't like Gissing, afraid he's often like "what if Dickens or Zola was a tory who hated poor people and thought they deserved all they got?"

Wanna read BT's The Magnificent Ambersons. (Just now finally got irony of family name btw.)

I did read Lewis's Kingsblood Royal: rising young pillar of a Minnesota community is urged by his daddy to investigate family tree, which may be like title says. Turns out key ancestor, whom they knew to be Canadian immigrant, was originally Haitian---Creole at least. Youngblood conceals findings from father, and self for a while, but eventually is told by out Black people of Minnesota race crimes, one of which (been so long, can't recall) may well be the Duluth lynching which some Minnesotans think is referenced in first verse of Duluth native's "Desolation Row." Novel, even by Nobel Prize winner, seems to be pushing envelope of late 40s, when civil rights was said by proto-McCarthyites and some others to be subject to Commie plots.

Robert Musil, Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos

Musil recently had a minor revival with new translations coming out and I read Man Without Qualities several years back. I've read Ford's most famous novels, and thought his Parade's End trilogy much better than The Good Soldier. Every time I try to read anything of Dos Passos I bog down before I get to page 20.

I figure very religious novelists are less read today, like E.P. Roe who was hugely popular and is probably now just read by Christians.

I figure very religious novelists are less read today, like E.P. Roe who was hugely popular and is probably now just read by Christians.

― SincereLee 'Scratch' Perry (President Keyes)

oooh, how about lew wallace?

first one to come to mind was james branch cabell

do people read, like, james clavell? james a. michener? how about clive cussler, author of the extremely popular "dirk pitt" series of novels? how about don pendleton, whose character mack bolan, the executioner, was the inspiration for marvel comics' "punisher", and is really the guy cops _should_ be celebrating?

J.F. Powers?

Thought Powers got revived by NYRB.

I bet Executioner books are still read by gun show types

99% sure my dad still reads clive cussler

I'll see your James Michener and raise you Herman Fucking Wouk

"Historians, novelists, publishers, and critics who gathered at the Library of Congress in 1995 to mark Wouk's 80th birthday described him as an American Tolstoy.[2]"

Feel like the most canonical answers so far are

Arnold Bennett
George Meredith
James Branch Cabell

I even seem to remember something the subject of the original post said about Meredith, have to go look for it.

Of course all the other answers are welcome as well, although some authors that have been named seem to have had recent enough revivals to be disqualified, such as Mervyn Peake, as someone has already brought up.

Meredith mentioned here:

Bonfires In The Sky: What Are You Reading, Winter 2021-22?

Doesn’t work on zing though

Bernard DeVoto
A.B. Guthrie Jr.

^these two were on the reading list of The Other (Honors?) English Class one summer in high school so I checked them out at the time but don’t think I have heard much mention of them since.

I read a George Meredith book last week!

Which?

btw, James, I didn't know this thread was for obscurities we hadn't read.

It was Beauchamp’s Career. I liked it.

those sound like worthy lost authors, but I haven't heard of any of them

I've been thinking about more pedestrian works

Years ago I loved Len Deighton's espionage trilogies - Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match, and also Spy Hook, Spy Line, Spy Sinker and Faith, Hope, Charity. Looking him up today I'm surprised to read that he is still alive

I just looked to see when the Mack Bolan the Executioner series ended. 2020!

Yeah, a lot of popular spy novelists from the 50s/60s not named Ian Fleming or John Le Carre are pretty obscure these days.

Oliver Optic

ok I guess, not sure what you're mad about

Leon Uris maybe too obvious but also maybe I missed the Uris revival. James Clavell already noted. I kind of think those types of novelists who wrote those astronomically long works which inevitably were turned into eight hour mini series are perfect for this thread. John Jakes!

Which?

btw, James, I didn't know this thread was for obscurities we hadn't read.

Although now that I look, some of the names mentioned (even by me) are still in print. But still in print is one thing. Being in print plus the cachet of a new edition with foreword by Michael Moorcock like a recent edition of Titus Alone I just got is another thing.

But the cover says the intro is by another guy, David Louis Edelman.

Booth Tarkington is a GREAT one. Probably looking at old Pulitzer winners is a good way of finding likely candidates.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Monday, September 26, 2022 5:00 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

There was a good New Yorker article a couple of years ago about Tarkington's changing reputation. Here's how it begins:

A trick question: Can you name the only three writers who have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice? Faulkner, yes; Updike. And? Hats off if you came up with Booth Tarkington. And yet his two prize-winners—“The Magnificent Ambersons” and “Alice Adams,” just reissued in one volume by the Library of America—are not even the most commercially successful novels of his extraordinarily successful career. Nine of his books were ranked among the top ten sellers of their year (up there, pre-Stephen King, with Zane Grey and Mary Roberts Rinehart), and the outlandishly dissimilar “The Turmoil” and “Seventeen” were the No. 1 sellers in consecutive years. And then there’s “Penrod,” probably the most beloved boys’ book since Tom and Huck, though I can’t recommend a stroll down that particular memory lane.

There are thirty or so novels, countless short stories and serials, a string of hit plays. And there were countless honors: Tarkington was not only commercial but literary—not just the Pulitzers but in 1933 the gold medal for fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells had won previously. As early as 1922, the Times had placed him twelfth (and the only writer) on a list of the twelve greatest contemporary American men. “Yes, I got in as last on the Times list,” Tarkington commented. “What darn silliness! You can demonstrate who are the 10 fattest people in a country and who are the 27 tallest . . . but you can’t say who are the 10 greatest with any more authority than you can say who are the 13 damndest fools.”

As for booksellers, in 1921 they voted him the most significant contemporary American writer. (Wharton came in second. Robert Frost? Thirteenth. Theodore Dreiser? Fourteenth. Eugene O’Neill? Twenty-sixth.) Nothing ever changes. Some forty years earlier, a comparable poll ranked E. P. Roe and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth at Nos. 1 and 2, with scores of votes each. At the bottom of the list—with two votes—came Herman Melville.

How to explain this remarkable career—the meteoric ascent to fame, the impregnable reputation over several decades, and then the pronounced plunge into obscurity? If you read all his fiction (which I strongly advise not attempting), you find a steady if uninspired hand at the helm. Slowly, painstakingly, Tarkington had taught himself to write reliable prose and construct appealing fictions; he was unpretentious—always literate but never showy. You could count on him to catch your interest even if he failed to grip your imagination or your heart. And he was always a gentleman.

The article finds that Tarkington turned into a hack as he got older and concludes that "ultimately what stands between him and any large achievement is his deeply rooted, unappeasable need to look longingly backward, an impulse that goes beyond nostalgia."

Good find! As a kid I forced myself through some giant new volume of Penrod since the elementary school librarian said it was only for True Readers or something like that. The only thing I can remember about it was some gag about all the kids bumping into each other and saying "Pardon my bum."

Not to pick on Alfred but those NYRB J.F. Powers volumes have intros by the likes of Elizabeth Hardwick and Denis Donoghue.

David Ely
WIlliam Kotzwinkle
Richard Brautigan

Now wondering how the LoA edition of Tarkington fits in with my reissue rule, does it not really count because they kind of do it because of historical importance? Maybe my rule is BS? Don't really want to discourage people from submitting as many authors as possible that sort of fit, or disqualifying any author since somebody read them last week. Really thread should be interpreted as something like Out of Print or Out of Fashion.

Hmm. Kotzwinkle still going strong.

it's kind of true about brautigan, which is a fucking shame. he's one of my favorites and a big influence on my own writing style. he really got pigeonholed unfairly as a "hippie writer" i think.

do people still read william gaddis?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n24/august-kleinzahler/no-light-on-in-the-house

do people still read william gaddis?

i plan on reading the recognitions this year

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n24/august-kleinzahler/no-light-on-in-the-house

― Ride On Proserpina (James Redd and the Blecchs)

"Often described a “pugnacious” and a “pugilist poet,” August Kleinzahler’s reputation rests on his jazzy, formally inventive and energetic poetry, though he has also garnered notice as something of a bad-boy literary outsider prone to picking fights with the establishment."

oh look a "fight me bro" poet decided to fight the corpse of richard brautigan

how _unexpected_

so many science fiction and fantasy writers who have fallen into obscurity. spider robinson. harry harrison. both pretty beloved writers when i was in my teens. does anybody remember either of them?

Yes, but mostly in the way that they are good candidates for this thread.

Spider Robinson really forgotten. Can’t remember much about him except that I once thought he had a cool name but then didn’t really like his writing, being especially disappointed by The Sliced Crosswise Timewise Cafe or whatever it was. Seem to later recall some entry about some book in the sf encyclopedia where John Clute said “avoid reading the unfortunate childish introduction by Spider Robinson” or words to that effect.

Harry Harrison remembered mostly as the author of the book the film Soylent Green was based on, Make Room, Make Room! although the book didn’t have the famous punchline. He also came up recently as begin married to one of the sf wives, who had also been married to… Damon Knight? Lester del Rey?

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon.

Evelyn Harrison became Lester del Rey’s third wife and died when they were in a car crash which he survived.

Harold Brodkey and John O’Hara both were more visible and important when alive than after. Not sure how much self-promotion, when alive, played a role in that.

John Clute said “avoid reading the unfortunate childish introduction by Spider Robinson” or words to that effect.

― Ride On Proserpina (James Redd and the Blecchs)

can't possibly be as unfortunate or childish as harlan ellison's introduction to the american doctor who target novelizations. that thing was a masterpiece of cringe.

i got one! when i was young people kept attributing "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it" to someone named santayana. i looked him up once. he wrote some novels. i can only surmise that at some point somebody must have _read_ him, that his name must have _meant_ something to someone.

oh, people _loved_ "jonathan livingston seagull" by richard bach when i was young. haven't heard of that one in a while. do people still read paul gallico's "the snow goose"? i only know it through the prog-rock concept album based on it.

oh, and jean m. auel! she wrote the "clan of the cave bear" books. one was published as recently as 2011! also, she's a portlander - i didn't have any idea!

Kleinzahler kind of a tough guy but with a sense of humor and not overly macho, more like a San Francisco James Salter in a leather jacket than Mailer or Hemingway. Or maybe like a distant cousin of M. John Harrison.

Was waiting for Jonathan Livingston Seagull to show up! Couldn’t quite remember the author’s name anymore. In fact have been considering this thread as somehow related to In every 70s US home ever

Auel another good one. Seems to show up crosswords occasionally although I haven’t been paying attention recently.

Thought Santayana was more of a philosopher, didn’t know about novels.

michael arlen
w somerset maugham
e phillips oppenheim
mark rutherford

wsm prob the only one of these with even general name recognition nowadays?

xps to Dan S
got 3 len deighton titles on the 'classics table' in our shop right now 'ipcress file' 'ssgb' and 'berlin game'. sold okay in the wake of TV production of 'ipcress file'

also clive cussler still sells well

Auel literally has whole shelves to herself in every bookshop ime, fair to say people read her books still

i've been a third of the way thru gissing's new grub street for several years, not sure if this counters the thread project or affirms it

it's fine, what it isn't is grabby

James Hanley? I read one of his 70s books a few years back.

I think 'Boy' by Hanley still has some currency as a 'banned' etc book.

Angus Wilson
Nevil Shute
Harold Robbins
Desmond Bagley
Tom Sharpe

I've read an Angus Wilson or two, no idea what his current standing is but definitely doesn't deserve to be forgotten.

He is now more known as the father of scholar, and Homer translator, Emily.

Also had a lunch or two with the Queen, which he recounted, and came up during her becoming.

anybody still reading Wilbur Smith?

"There was a good New Yorker article a couple of years ago about Tarkington's changing reputation. Here's how it begins"

I remember how Tarkington came up as a contrast to William Gaddis in a (poor) review in the LRB of the reissues of his novels.

Wonder if a good way to come up with lists of writers no one reads would be to dig up old sales figures from past decades (something that's equivalent to the pop charts).

Not to pick on Alfred but those NYRB J.F. Powers volumes have intros by the likes of Elizabeth Hardwick and Denis Donoghue.

― Ride On Proserpina (James Redd and the Blecchs),

I'm aware -- I own one of them, bought about 15 years ago -- but you're being unusually insistent considering the top of this thread has no rules.

Denton Welch enjoyed some popularity when Exact Change of Galaxie 500 fame published his books. I think he's a great writer, but I haven't reread his writings in a while.

Welch probably picks up readers from William S Burroughs being a big fan - but I wonder how widely READ (as opposed to name checked) Burroughs himself is these days.

I think there's another category of writers who are definitely not forgotten and certainly still read but are just way less important than they were 30 years ago. People like Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, even Salinger.

What about the novelist Winston Churchill?—who is not the same guy

i checked out denton welch when i read a john waters book where he cited him as a favourite a few years back...i imagine quite a few ppl have done the same

ok I guess, not sure what you're mad about

― Dan S, Monday, September 26, 2022 10:06 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Ha I wasn’t mad about anything. Just saying that would be a good place to look for thread candidates.

joking around with comrade alph on another thread it struck me -- by wayward train of thought -- that no one reads carlyle any more

isn't he an "essayist"? does he even count as a novelist? yes! sartor resartus is a novel -- a comic novel abt hegelianism! *ilxors hurry off to get a copy*

i have a weird tattered ancient large-size versions somewhere, like an 1890s A3 graphic novel lol, i'm not even sure where from (i mean my family but i don't know which side of which side). i've never got beyond the first page, its humour really REALLY doesn't carry

Re: Alexander Baron, I think he's highly rated in the admitidely niche world of East London literature geeks.

When I did those books by year polls there were a lot of names that kept popping up again and again that I don't think have much exposure nowadays. Georgette Heyer I remember standing out.

Wonder if a good way to come up with lists of writers no one reads would be to dig up old sales figures from past decades (something that's equivalent to the pop charts).

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, September 27, 2022 5:08 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Bestselling fiction titles (Publisher’s Weekly)

1895
Ian MacLaren- Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush

1896
F. Hopkinson Smith- Tom Grogan

1897
Henryk Sienkiewicz- Quo Vadis

1898
F. Hopkinson Smith- Caleb West

1899
Edward Noyes Westcott- David Harum

Hammond Innes

now and then some of the more literary-minded american periodicals take it on themselves to get one of their um wittier stylists to do a kind of singles column of the best-selling books of 50 years gone, many of which are entirely forgotten

(the new yorker had anthony lane do one in the 90s and james wolcott did one did one for someone, maybe vanity fair, more recently)

anyway even if there's no chance of me soon deciding which of lane or wolcott is the worse writer and the crappier critical mind this concept is good!

ages ago i started trying to read CP Snow but didn't get into it, dunno how much he's read anymore

A shelf at my uni library groans with the weight of 50-year-old CP Snow paperbacks.

anybody borrowing them?

i have a handful also, nice late 50s penguins which i'm guessing my dad (a very arty scientist) dutifully read. i think i did try one as a teen and thought it was awful lol (not exactly a good judge then but happy to carry on believing i was correct)

in the same orange-backed reach of my bookshelves: some angus wilson and some anthony powell, v alluring cover illustrations, i believe i also attempted "the old men of the zoo" and metaphorically threw it against the wall

I think there is a distinction between truly obscure names, where no-one could readily eg: name a single book by the author or say who they were; and names that are well-known, where you could probably reel off titles and mention that author's place in history, but you haven't really read them.

For me, Wilfrid Sheed and Peter de Polnay are in the former category, and Bennett or Gissing are in the latter.

It seems to me that this thread started off mainly aiming to enumerate true obscurities, and quickly started including well-known names.

I agree that these names are now much less read than they were, but they're still quite famous.

I suspect that Maugham, Angus Wilson, Brautigan, not to mention Walter Scott and especially Mervyn Peake, are still read - especially given how many readers there are in the world, plugging away.

anybody still reading Wilbur Smith?

― Mizue loves company (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, September 27, 2022 10:03 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

had to direct a customer to his shelf just yesterday

This is the kind of reportage I like. Agree with pinefox's point tho

A Far Side cartoon of Wilbur Smith's Shelf, hewn from jungle vines with a machete, with animal skulls used as bookends.

I feel like the kind of people who read Wilbur Smith still insist on calling Zimbabwe "Rhodesia"

Yes, the pinefox otm. Thread would have been pretty short if we had only stuck to Type I Obscurity though, so mentally opened the gates to those other barbarians pretty quickly.

eBooks of works in the public domain are probably having an impact. I was pleased to discover that the Project Gutenberg website maintains lists of most frequently viewed/downloaded works (https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top) and books sorted by popularity (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?sort_order=downloads).

Starting to come around on J. F. Powers after seeing this:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-saint-with-a-bad-temper-j-f-powers-company/

Born in 1917, James Farl Powers in mid-life won the 1963 National Book Award for his first novel, Morte d’Urban, which Gore Vidal and his fellow judges found worthier than either of that year’s other leading contenders, Pale Fire or Ship of Fools. Nabokov’s masterpiece was “over-elaborate academic funning” compared to Lolita, as Vidal saw it, while Katherine Anne Porter’s best-seller had already been quite grandly, if not excessively, celebrated. Even Porter agreed with the verdict

We should start a thread on great short story writers whose novels suck, for Ship of Fools would land in the top five.

Go ahead!

That bbc article CaAL linked to is quite good and contains this interesting pull quote:

Unlike musicians or filmmakers, authors can vanish completely – Christopher Fowler

people keep recommending that i read mervyn peake. as well as peter curren brown, whose sole novel "smallcreep's day" was the inspiration for mike rutherford's solo concept album...

I own Smallcreep's Day but never finished it, it's pretty heavy-handed allegory imo

At some point I am actually going to back and talk about Wilfrid Sheed if I can manage

wilbur smith sold his name to his publisher around 10 years ago so I expect he was still selling well then.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/vdnwzb/wilbur-smith-gavin-haynes-sleepless-nights

legit "wow"

I read a lot of Jack Higgins, Alastair McLean, Frederick Forsyth etc as a kid and even then I thought Wilbur Smith was terrible

Wonder if a good way to come up with lists of writers no one reads would be to dig up old sales figures from past decades (something that's equivalent to the pop charts).

Bernard DeVoto's granddaughter is a friend of mine. His wife was also an interesting person - Julia Child's best friend.

Approximately a century ago I went to Virginia Commonwealth University, where the library (and several other things) are named after James Branch Cabell. I tried to read him but fell asleep on or about page 4.

Fun fact: apparently his name is supposed to rhyme with "rabble," not "cab bell" or "cable."

My favorite fact from Mervyn Peake's Wikipedia entry:

Peake designed the logo for Pan Books. The publishers offered him either a flat fee of £10 or a royalty of one farthing per book. On the advice of Graham Greene, who told him that paperback books were a passing fad that would not last, Peake opted for the £10.

Trying to calculate what his eventual income would have been had he chosen the farthing.

Thread delivers, thanks YMP!

Winston Churchill (not that one) definitely belongs in this thread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill_(novelist)

Heh, just noticed that Wallace Stegner wrote a biography of Bernard DeVoto.

Any relation to Howard Devoto?

hi there

https://i.imgur.com/95GTVBZ.jpg

bernard is where howard d got the name from -- a book he read as a student i think

(his birth surname is trafford)

I can confidently report that Bernard DeVoto is NOT related to Howard DeVoto of the Buzzcocks (which is, alas, a pseudonym).

lol xp

Any relation to Howard Devoto?

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Tuesday, September 27, 2022 1:01 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

"I definitely don't remember this happening."

I can't find an confimation of mark's explanation, much as I want to believe.

a or any

I wonder if Harry Styles has given Brautigan a slight bump in popularity.

Have read, and enjoyed, Snow's Strangers and Brothers series (under the influence of Burgess' 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939). Not great literature, but I intend to return and re-read a couple volumes at some point.

Ronald Firbank probably belongs here? (The Flower Beneath the Foot: Being a Record of the Early Life of St. Laura de Nazianzi was a good read for me last year)

Disappointed by the new thread title*

*Please don't change it.

Wrong thread!

https://wikimili.com/en/Buzzcocks#cite_note-14:
↑ Some sources claim that the surname came from a "bus driver in Cambridge" mentioned by a philosophy tutor at Bolton (e.g. Dave Wilson, 2004, Rock Formations: Categorical Answers to how Band Names Were Formed, San Jose:, Cidermill Books, pp. 38–9). Other accounts link it to US novelist Bernard DeVoto. (See, for example, Adrian Room, 2010, Dictionary of Pseudonyms: 13,000 Assumed Names and Their Origins, 5th ed., Jefferson, North Carolina/London, McFarland & Company, pp. 38, 144.

i mean it's possible it's the "bus driver in cambridge" mentioned by the "philosophy tutor at bolton" (maybe it was a trolley not a bus)

that's not where i read it btw (but my music books are all in boxes and anyway probably i remember it from being a clean teen slate reading the inkies in 1977)

i will tentatively add Jocelyn Brooke here, even though i bang on about him a lot, and he didn’t sell *that* much even when he was around. now in the Faber Finds graveyard. But extremely good, especially The Image of a Drawn Sword, and well respected by his peers.

And I think Ronald Firbank, while a reasonably well known *name* is v little read these days despite being moderately significant in his connection between fin de siecle aestheticism and subsequent 20th C comic novels.

Ronald Firbank may go unread these days, but his offspring Butch Firbanks still looms large in his legend.

Hi bulb after bulb that was the series I embarked on the first book of and tbf I could have continued, it just didn't hold me at the time. I'm definitely interested in Snow for historical reasons if nothing else

Does anyone read Ben-Hur or Shepherd of the Hills anymore? Huge in turn of the century US.

How about The Robe for that matter.

Lloyd C. Douglas.

What was the name of the guy who wrote Seven Who Fled again? He was in the comeback kid mode around here for a hot minute.

The Flower Beneath the Foot
bulb after bulb
The Flower Beneath the Foot
bulb after bulb
*please don't change it
The Flower Beneath the Foot
bulb after bulb

Zane Grey? Louis L'amour?

(not answering James's question; just wondering if anyone still reads 'em)

What Are You Reading
The Flower Beneath The Foot
bulb after bulb

Grey L'Amour
Fall '22
bulb after bulb

James Gould Cozzens.

wow Winston Churchill really was a giant at the time

His first novel to appear in book form was The Celebrity (1898). However, Mr. Keegan's Elopement had been published in 1896 as a magazine serial and was republished as an illustrated hardback book in 1903. Churchill's next novel—Richard Carvel (1899) — was a phenomenal success. The novel was the third best-selling work of American fiction in 1899 and eighth-best in 1900, according to Alice Hackett's 70 Years of Best Sellers. It sold some two million copies in a nation of only 76 million people, and made Churchill rich. His other commercially successful novels included The Crisis (1901), The Crossing (1904), Coniston (1906), Mr. Crewe's Career (1908) and The Inside of the Cup (1913), all of which ranked first on the best-selling American novel list in the years indicated.[2]

That quote about novelists vanishing, when compared to musicians or filmmakers, rings pretty true. I wonder if a lot of it has to do with stylistically a lot of writing simply becoming unfashionable or dull compared to other eras, which might lean more into poetry or a sort of hardboiled realism, or working in a genre which has fallen into complete disfavor. For example I've got to believe there were so many writers of western novels which will never see the light of day again, whereas western films and music influenced by the west will always have a huge audience. L'Amour and Grey are obv largely unfashionable (maybe the latter has been since he was obliquely zinged in The Third Man) but they'll always be known.

Peter Benchley probably sticks around in the public consciousness exclusively due to Jaws. I'd be curious to see if Mario Puzo would have suffered a fate of being forgotten, too, if The Godfather was never filmed.

Michael Swanwick wrote a pamphlet-length essay on why Cabell's reputation fell. Swanwick's theory was that the uniform edition did it. Cabell collected all of his very uneven books into a series, and tried to force all the stories into a common legendarium. (Heinlein was influenced a lot by Cabell, and tried doing the same.) The simpler explanation is that the world after 1929 got too serious for Cabell's brand of ironic comedy, and he starved his imagination by temperament and circumstance. The same happened to Flann O'Brien, who was also influenced by Cabell.

I read Cabell as a boy, which is the only time for that. The oldest member of my family saw me doing so and said, "Well, well, well. So Cabell is still read."

Cabell disappoints but in real life he was brilliant. He was a prodigy in classical languages and was asked give lectures in college while still in his teens. (Unfortunately his emotional development stopped there.) A few years later the Teddy Roosevelt administration tapped him for a career in the diplomatic service. He would have been ideal for that (he had the languages, the intellect, and the polite obnoxiousness) but in those days diplomats had to be independently wealthy and Cabell wasn't.

I remember Spider Robinson from the same period, but found him unreadable even then. Cabell was extremely limited, but within his narrow bounds he had wit. Robinson didn't even come up to Douglas Adams standards. Robinson was the guy you must have met once, who makes a play on words for no reason and laughs uproariously at his own joke. Or takes a familiar song, changes one thing in the lyrics to something different, and then sings the entire song to you. Later he had a sort of fan culture in the days of Usenet. ("alt.callahans." I never spent any time there, but a woman I loved did, which was awkward.)

Cabell's close friend was the writer Joseph Hergesheimer, who was also acclaimed in the 1910s and 20s. Hergesheimer was famous for his stories of emotional drama among the very rich. He wasn't very rich himself, but he made money and bought a large country house. The Depression killed his career too. (In a letter in old age, Cabell answered his correspondent's question. "Hergesheimer? I seem faintly to recall the name.")

I thought about Zane Grey earlier but would guess there's cowboy afficionados out there

Thought about Jacqueline Susann too but same rules apply I guess, still historically noteworthy

Ben Hur vs. Quo Vadis FITE

But Flann O'Brien is still very popular! In ILx circles anyways

Flann O'Brien will never not be read.

What was the name of the guy who wrote _Seven Who Fled_ again? He was in the comeback kid mode around here for a hot minute.

(not answering James's question; just wondering if anyone still reads 'em)

― Les hommes de bonbons (cryptosicko)

sort of a related question that one, _genres_ that have fallen out of favor probably they have at least niche followings. i was at powell's i think before the pandemic and they had a whole section, for instance, of nautical adventures. i think my brother read some of the horatio hornblower books. he's kind of big on old niche fiction, he's really into doc savage. i didn't know nautical fiction was an entire genre, though i guess it stands to reason.

i'm actually half-heartedly reading a harlequin romance now! _for the love of april french_ by a lady named penny aimes. my mom read harlequin romances by the bushel when i was young - i never touched them myself, they were For Girls, so i don't know how _for the love of april french_ stacks up, but i can _definitely_ see the appeal. only reason i haven't finished it is because all of my leisure reading tends to be dour nonfiction books about genocide and for some reason i've stopped enjoying reading for leisure as much as i used to. april french is pure fantasy - it's about a trans woman (of course, because i am a cliche) who meets a cis guy who isn't a chaser, an egg, or otherwise a fucking asshole but who is nevertheless into her. aside from that it was actually super relatable to my own life, which i can't imagine would be true about '80s harlequin romances. the titular april french is sort of a den mom at a local bdsm club, who by day works a job that's _very_ similar to my own, even considering that there are like three or four careers that have historically been open to trans women.

anyway. my feeling - and again i haven't read any '80s harlequin romances so i can't confirm - is that the idea of a "harlequin romance novel" has changed to adapt with the times, and that while the romance novel is probably even more of a niche concern than it was previously - nowadays i suspect that ao3 fills a lot of the niche that harlequin used to fill - there's certainly good quality writing still being put out by harlequin.

Flann O'Brien will never not be read.

I wasn't proposing Flann O'Brien as a subject for this thread. O'Brien and Cabell were both stuck and couldn't renew their imaginations.

What about Henri Barbusse? Feel like he would be difficult and lack the cache of say Celine.

My best friend at high school was an obsessive reader of Alexander Kent novels, was he ever a big deal? Certainly wrote a lot of books, and he only died five years ago.

What about Henri Barbusse? Feel like he would be difficult and lack the cache of say Celine.

i didn't know nautical fiction was an entire genre

OCEANS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS

Poster Boy Arnold Bennett is a Penguin Classics kind of guy, so while this definitely disqualifies for Type I Unread, not sure about Type II Unread. Maybe Type II should have subdivisions of the clade: Type IIa- famous for being unread, but still read and in print, Type IIb - unread and unknown by most but still in print but a publisher you know etc.

definitely need some empsonian classifications of that sort.

have read two Arnold Bennett's in the last couple of years - the card and Anna of the five towns. was figuring him for stoke's version of gaskell based on descriptions of the latter but the card was a bit of a knockabout. tptv shows the film from time to time.

gissing also, New Grub Street, slightly depressing

Most recent Arnold Bennett reference prior to this thread

i was right to say it

Lol

I think the important thing about Bennett is that Stoke is now widely understood as a racist shithole

So George Meredith doesn't seem to be in print with any publisher of note in the US but it seems maybe Penguin UK does have The Egoist.

So his Penguin Score is very low but non-zero.

**ahem** a more recent Arnold Bennett reference:

Bright Remarks and Throwing Shade: What Are You Reading, Summer 2022?

sort of a related question that one, _genres_ that have fallen out of favor probably they have at least niche followings.

Good point. In identifying Grey and L'amour, I was kind of thinking of them in these terms, and my suspicion, at least, is that the pop Western as a genre was basically replaced by the likes of Clancy, Grisham, Patterson, etc. There are undoubtedly some large gaps in that history; Stephen King might belong there, but I always think of him belonging to slightly different, if related, literary traditions. Basically, I'm arguing for Grey and L'amour as the "airport reads" of their day, if that makes sense.

Oh wait, sorry, maybe I was sorting by relevance instead of date.

lol

EIther that or I just can't read or something.

Stephen king has a new book in the top ten just this week

he's the new winston churchill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSzJNQSkbi8

probably nobody still reading j.b. priestley? pretty big in 50s & 60s, lots of his books still in op shops (uk -"charity shops") - i read one once, was a sort of heavy handed satire of an arts festival

op shops is probably where you'd get a pile of answers for this thread but i seldom go into those places any more

Good one, Priestley. I always get him confused with J.R. Ackerley tbh who had a recent revival via NYRB, not sure how high he got on the Type-O-Hype-O-Meter.

At the risk of dragging out the big gun for dinosaur and aiming it at Stonehenge (DO U SEE?), there is a kind of hauntology associated with these kinds of authors.

lot of '90s "chick lit" & "lad lit" dudes in the op shops last i looked but i don't remember any of those authors' names & anyway maybe ppl still do read em idk

^^ those feel like a different category, as far as an omnipresent best-seller (Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain) that never entered a canon vs. one that endured for a while and has now petered out.

That said, not sure Millennials or Gen Z are getting into High Fidelity or Bridget Jones's Diary unless it's picked up from a Little Free Library.

yeah those are ubiquitous in the ol' LFL & i don't know if that means nobody reads em any more or if it means lots of ppl still read em

actually i realise that i don't have very much idea what other people are reading at all

probably nobody much still reading susan hill or andrea newman (also ubiquitous 2nd hand & both actually good imo)

this thread is a delight & i'm awed and charmed by many posts

I read a few J. B. Priestley plays in that same modern drama course I mentioned earlier. Maybe the instructor was some kind of freak?

SF/fantasy seems like a slightly different thing, but I hope no children are reading Piers Anthony like I did.

I'm curious if kids these days are into Baum or (older kids) Vonnegut? Is Kerouac too toxic masculine now? Bukowski? I feel like the category of "genuinely popular in my lifetime but now not read" is harder to fill. I remember my parents reading The Jewel in the Crown when the miniseries was on Masterpiece Theater—I assume that's a tough sell these days

I meant to include Heinlein in my childhood wonderings

SF/fantasy seems like a slightly different thing, but I hope no children are reading Piers Anthony like I did.

― rob

god, even when i was young piers anthony had a well-known reputation as a creep.

Daphne du Maurier. (Surprising that she died as late as 1989.)

Andre Norton btw? idk

People surely still read Du Maurier (and Brautigan), a lot.

Daphne du Maurier. (Surprising that she died as late as 1989.)

she was still in her 20s when she wrote her big hits, hitchcock was on it!

Is kind of mad that she wrote Rebecca and Jamaica Inn and The Birds and Don't Look Now, if we judge an author by their film adaptations she's a world-beater.

I just downloaded a du Maurier novel onto my Kindle! And I recently read a collection of her stories that included Don't Look Now. It was patchy, but very readable.

i think of those four as the birds expanded universe tetralogy

I've read two of her short stories and tried to read Rebecca (not bad but life is too short)

First encountered Rebecca as part of my stepmother's set of "classic novels" audiobooks, think it was the only thing from the 20th century in the set, still odd to me that it was written so late

There’s a sub-group of novelists who were sort of big deals because they were related to famous authors:

Julian Hawthorne
Constance Fenimore Woolson
Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie

They're the literary equivalent of James Taylor's siblings.

Someone who knows more of the English Canadian literary canon could probably come up with a bunch of names that were considered important in their times. Brian Fawcett was a writer (and quasi-novelist) who died earlier this year; celebrated in the 80s as Canada's foremost post-modernist, but there's only one, non-circulating copy of Cambodia : a book for people who find television too slow now in the Toronto library system.

So I said later for this thread and went striding the stacks of my local library this afternoon, and for the first time spied a novel by xpost Margaret Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks, another xpost Penguin Classic. The back of it referred to Q.D. Leavis (this phrase is the only direction quotation): heroine is a "missing link" between Austen's Emma and Eliot's Dorothea, and Leavis likes her better. Well I glanced through long tunneling sentences in tiny type: Miss M is not the heroine (whom she tells to drop by tomorrow only if she can "pick up someone amusing"), seems to be queen bee or enforcer of high-ish society types I got sick of in Proust, but maybe I'll read it some more, having liked the few anthologized stories I've come across (though she may be one of those great or good short story writers who suck at novels, as mentioned by Alfred).

direct quotation

Does anyone read Norman Mailer any more?

oh that brian fawcett book is great. i never read or even saw any other books by him or talked to anyone else who'd read it (far as i can remember) so i guess he might be a writer nobody reads any more

or maybe never did, i dunno

Mailer's Armies of the Night still speaks to ongoing frustrations: levitate the Pentagon? Sure, why the fuck not, let's go, Fugs. "Out Demons Out."

(Come to think of it, the Fugs took their name from the published compromise for a term v. frequently used in Mailer's '40s war novel, The Naked and the Dead.)

Kurt Vonnegut, Hermann Hesse, Robert Heinlein and Richard Brautigan were really popular with high school and college students in the 70s

Does anyone read Norman Mailer any more?

Thought of him earlier and assume that people still read him, but a time-traveler from the 70s might be surprised that he isn’t taught.

He showed occasional flashes of brilliance, but most of his books seemed to be attempts to follow and one-up other (better) writers (Hemingway, Capote, Hunter Thompson).

Mailer's Harlot's Ghost is great fun, especially if you think Oliver Stone's JFK is fun.

i hope to god no one reads edward abbey anymore

xp To be fair, I never read Harlot's Ghost. I kind of gave up after Tough Guys Don't Dance.

Armies of the Night, dammit! Also, his play, The Deer Park, had some of the best lines and some of the worst lines ever, for good characters---I still daydream about going back to college time and directing it---

oh that brian fawcett book is great. i never read or even saw any other books by him or talked to anyone else who'd read it (far as i can remember) so i guess he might be a writer nobody reads any more

or maybe never did, i dunno

Cambodia was publicized enough that I read it in high school, as a teenager who wasn't really tied into the literary scene.

He's having two books published posthumously, though, so presumably somebody is (or will be) reading.

xpost But if I did go back then and put it on, he might show up unannounced, as other playwrights did, and not like that I cut lines---I mean, he was pretty small, but so was Polanski in Chinatown (ouuuch)

xp Yeah, I read Armies of the Night in, I think it was grad school, although it may have been undergrad. In any event, it was good, but as a piece of political gonzo journalism it didn't hold a candle to something like Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

He also wrote a good one about that campaign, St. George and the Godfather. It was just whatever happened, don't think he was trying to beat Thompson at his own game.
Lines cut/me cut cont.:
And he did land in Bellevue after stabbing his wife, so might still be carrying a knife like Polanski's character: "Hey kitty-kat."

People seem to like Mailer’s Apollo book, Of a Fire on the Moon, in which he refers to himself appropriately as Aquarius. Not a novel though.

I remember reading somewhere that John Barth is an author who was once in many syllabi but is rarely taught any more. I read "Lost in the Funhouse" in a textbook released in the mid 90s (and I dug it).

Wouldn't it actually be rational to assume that most novelists are no longer read, and the ones who are extensively read are exceptional?

I agree that Mailer, Vonnegut, Brautigan are less read than they were, when they were cult heroes of a generation or two. But are the other novelists of their era still read, by this thread's standards? Maybe it's really only a small sample who stay afloat. Say: Pynchon, Barthelme, Didion, Updike, Bellow ... And then dozens of names now more obscure than Mailer, Brautigan et al.

Vonnegut was still a huge name for teens getting into literature when I was one in the early 00's, at a point where Mailer already felt like a bit of a relic.

probably nobody still reading j.b. priestley? 

Saw a National Theatre production of An Inspector Calls a few years ago, I think he's also taught a lot?

Is Kerouac too toxic masculine now? Bukowski?

These live on as avatars of toxic masculinity for ppl to make angry TikToks about. They probably read them enough to find some cringey passages to include.

(maybe the latter has been since he was obliquely zinged in The Third Man)

I wouldn't call it a diss! Our cowboy novelist is surely sympathetic and the highbrow assembly portrayed as pseuds.

Was thinking about Louis Auchincloss, but a glance through archives seems to indicate he has yet to by the wayside.

Barth, Barthelme, Gaddis, and Gass were pretty big in the 90s. I still read that sort of thing from time to time.

That said, I find it refreshing to have whole years go by without even having to think about John Updike.

Some quality Updike hating here

Worst sex writing ever.

Yeah, that's the stuff, JR+tB. Feel the hatred rising within you. Let it flow.

I fully admit I admired JHU's prose style (and even light verse) when I was a teenager. Dude was silver-tongued at his best. But taking even a cursory look at the politics, the sexism, the crude self-absorption, the waspy angst... cured me really fast.

There are some really lovely sentences in Updike. But I can't wait for him to be as justifiably forgotten as, I dunno, Hesiod.

E.R. Eddison, Tolkien-contemporary, author of The Worm Oroboros (which was apparently the main point of comparison for LOTR when it came out) and the really peculiar Zimiamvian Trilogy. I've picked up a few of these as second-hand paperbacks over the years and it's hard to imagine them finding a contemporary audience, that and the fact Eddison had a relatively small body of work I think means he's unlikely to experience a revival anytime soon

I agree that Mailer, Vonnegut, Brautigan are less read than they were, when they were cult heroes of a generation or two. But are the other novelists of their era still read, by this thread's standards? Maybe it's really only a small sample who stay afloat. Say: Pynchon, Barthelme, Didion, Updike, Bellow ... And then dozens of names now more obscure than Mailer, Brautigan et al.

― the pinefox

i'll always remember vonnegut for what he said about semicolons. what the fuck, kurt? the only way you can think of to express your exaggerated and irrational grammatical prejudices is to fucking dump on trans people too?

huh? wha'd he say?

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. The first rule: do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”

I do think that if he were still alive (and ancient) he would be embarrassed about that and apologise, he wasn't ever a Norman Mailer type about these things

Let's not be too hard on Mailer. Who among us hasn't stabbed his wife?

i use semicolons all the time

so it goes

who among us hasn't killed their wives with their semicolon use?

fine as long as you don't stab your wife in the semicolon with a pen knife

William S. Burroughs to thread

More of a full stop in his case.

Let's not be too hard on Mailer. Who among us hasn't stabbed his wife?

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux)

i never stabbed norman mailer's wife

fun fact, this is the only grammatically correct way i can construe that particular sentence

one of the books i'm reading is a book called "semicolon" about how grammarians done the semicolon dirty

i think what shocks me most about vonnegut's comment is how utterly _out of character_ for him it is. he was a humanist, not a cruel man. very strongly empathetic. it says a _lot_ about how fucked up the world was for trans people that someone like kurt vonnegut would consider _saying_ something like that, let alone believe it to be clever enough to publish. not only is it not clever, it doesn't even make any sense! the idea of a "transvestite" is sort of rooted in binary ideas of gender. to label someone or something an intersex transvestite is nothing short of incoherent.

Not to defend it but thats literally the joke?

Like he’s using an apparently self-contradicting term (person of both sexes who dresses as the opposite sex) to convey the (to him) meaninglessness of the semicolon

fun fact, this is the only grammatically correct way i can construe that particular sentence

Who among us has not stabbed his, her or their spouse, registered domestic partner, significant other, life partner, boyfriend or girlfriend (as applicable)?

Who among us has been at a wedding with Norman Mailer's son at which he made a toast in which he told the newlyweds "I have two words for you: couple's therapy"?

*Raises hand*

E.R. Eddison, Tolkien-contemporary, author of The Worm Oroboros (which was apparently the main point of comparison for LOTR when it came out) and the really peculiar Zimiamvian Trilogy. I've picked up a few of these as second-hand paperbacks over the years and it's hard to imagine them finding a contemporary audience, that and the fact Eddison had a relatively small body of work I think means he's unlikely to experience a revival anytime soon

Worm is such a wonderful and weird book -- I've been hunting down the Zimiamvian Trilogy in paperback and I think I have all 3 volumes around here somewhere now, I keep meaning to get to it. There's something so pre-modern about Worm in the way the plot just wanders here and there.

Umberto Eco seems like one who had bestseller novels that were intellectual and thoroughly researched but didn't make it into the classroom to endure.

worm is available on project Gutenberg fwiw (but only that by him)

Is Gore Vidal much read? He enjoyed a renaissnce during the Iraq War. But since his death -- nope.

Isn't Zachary Quinto playing him on stage right now?

uh yeah

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/sep/05/zachary-quinto-star-west-end-production-best-of-enemies

Had no clue.

Umberto Eco

I read The Prague Cemetery a few years ago. I thought it was quite good.

Many xps

I teach Priestley (An Inspector Calls) and have tried a few bits of late. English Journey is a decent, angry trawl around England of the 1930s (Owen Hatherley cited it as the main inspiration for A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, FWIW). Margin Released is a decent writing memoir, where he spends a good deal of time NOT writing about his WWI experiences (while writing really well about his WWI experiences). And Bright Day, which, the further I get away from, I'm convinced is a damn fine novel.

I'll be interested to see what happens to Ballard over the next 20 years or so.

Anyone still reading Lewis Grassic Gibbon?

Does anyone read Joaquin Miller anymore? Mostly a poet, but wrote some novels too.

Miller was championed, although not enthusiastically, by Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce. In his time, Miller was known for his dishonesty and womanizing. Bierce, his friend and contemporary, said of him, "In impugning Mr. Miller's veracity, or rather, in plainly declaring that he has none, I should be sorry to be understood as attributing a graver moral delinquency than he really has. He cannot, or will not, tell the truth, but he never tells a malicious or thrifty falsehood." Miller's response was, "I always wondered why God made Bierce."

Joaquin Miller's literary works seem to have been locked into a cabinet of Victorian era curios around 1920 and largely forgotten since. He wasn't a very good poet or novelist, but he was one hell of a character with a talent for self-promotion.

I'm mentally going back through my college-era faves and realizing I haven't heard much about Margaret Drabble lately.

I hope she's still being read in the UK at least.

I enjoyed reading the beginning of some Margaret Drabble book recently but couldn't keep up the momentum, but that is more my problem than hers, haven't been able to read a novel in quite a while. Being an empty nester might change that though. *fingers crossed*

heh, I read The Ice Age after Lester Bangs mentioned it somewhere (do people still read him?)

Greil Marcus mentioned it, I think.

Is Gore Vidal much read? He enjoyed a renaissnce during the Iraq War. But since his death -- nope.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, September 29, 2022

Our book club just read Julian

I think hardest novel I ever actually made it all of the way through was Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. It was assigned to our book club on my recommendation and I was the only one who finished it

Yup, I'd say Gore Vidal's lease on literary life hasn't expired, yet.

Drabble > Byatt

I've got a modern translation of The Magic Mountain, looks like all the French is translated too, and it's promising to skim. I should dig it up and dig in, considering that even H.T. Porter-Lowe's old Britishy roast beef version was intriguing enough.
Ice Age and the other two Drabble novels I read in the 70s and 80s had some good bits but ran out of steam. The first was, "Yes, we are in the 70s, and the 70s are fucked, ah yes, ah yes," which was what Bangs and Marcus seemed to like about it.

Lawrence Durrell is a good answer. Robertson Davies too?

Some favourite Gissings:

New Grub Street
The Odd Women
Born in Exile
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories
By The Ionian Sea (poor George having a miserable time in southern Italy but good fun anyway)

Some favourite Bennetts:

Anna of the Five Towns
Riceyman Steps
Old Wives Tale
Buried Alive (a Borges recommendation)
The Card
Clayhanger

(why late in the week in the uk does mark s get all pynchoned out: Thomas Pynchon )

Dunno if this Magic Mountain stuff is just a tangent but I can't imagine Thomas Mann not being widely read in German speaking countries still at least.

martin amis lol.

Heh. But Money might still be good, or is that challops at this point?

well i was discussing this with an intermittent ilxor the other day and the answer was a tentative yes. but more the point was just how much he isn’t part of *anything* these days. “he hasn’t even been cancelled” was an observation.

Hah!

He wasn't even the best curmudgeon in the Amises.

yeah does anyone still read kingsley amis?

or john braine, alan sillitoe, john braine etc

all those dudes were still in the school library when i was at high school (end of the 70s) but i get the feeling i was in the last generation to read them

might be wrong

Much easier to watch the films iirc.

Because I’m out for a good time. All the rest…

no one reads either of the john braines any more

The Man with Two Braines

lol oops

the other john braine is john wain i guess

Figured that’s what you meant but didn’t want to call you on it as it was kind of funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJf7_5vH1WE

you read one angry young man you've read em all

motherfuck him and John Braine

Lol!

(xp)
Never noticed until now that that song has a sub-Police faux reggae groove.

Insane in the Membraine

yeah does anyone still read kingsley amis?

― lambert simnel (doo rag)

hell does anyone read _martin_ amis lol

i read his book about pac-man i think

Julian Barnes?

Anybody seen
My old friend Kingsley
Can you tell me
Where he’s gone

Thought I saw him out walking
Out over the hill
With John Osborne
John Braine
And John

DO U SEE?

Jilted John to #onethread!

Jeez, you're busy, man

Sorry. Do you have a thread of your own you’d like to attend to?

(Thought I might have to help with homework tonight but kid is taking a break)

Again in truth I think this thread has undergone a, maybe inevitable, maybe somewhat productive, mission creep -- from genuinely listing people who are now very obscure (but maybe once weren't), to listing people who were once central and are now, necessarily, past, and recognised as important in an earlier generation but not current.

Anyone studying, say, England in the 1950s is likely to read Sillitoe (I've read SN&SM maybe 3 times, others here may have too - not to mention the LONELINESS book), and also the early Braine and Wain. (Wain btw was quite an interesting critic - a good essay on Orwell for one, as I recall.) I have actually been lining up HURRY ON DOWN and ROOM AT THE TOP to read for months myself.

These authors are not now extensively read as current authors (which they're not), but they are still read and part of the catalogue of cultural and literary history. In sum I don't think they are really good candidates for the thread.

I believe that people do still read Kingsley Amis, though clearly his stock has fallen since say 1995.

Martin Amis is I think a more specific and interesting case - he ought still to be, or could be, central and current in some way, but has faded away from that - as is correctly noted. I think that he made a number of particularly bad calls - the wayward statements on feminism and matrimony around PREGNANT WIDOW an example - in an attempt to maintain public profile. In that, indeed, it is hard to resist the obvious parallel with Morrissey - people vaguely know the controversial opinions, better than they know any of the later work.

MONEY I would say is (naturally?) as good and bad as it ever was. It was outrageous, extreme, nasty, brilliant, central. I still think it's his most impressive feat by far.

Sorry. Do you have a thread of your own you’d like to attend to?

― If The Damned Are United (James Redd and the Blecchs)

That was a compliment.

yeah does anyone still read kingsley amis?

― lambert simnel (doo rag)

*raises hand*

The NYRB rereleased his only good books.

So The Alteration then.

And The Old Devils too, I think.

Sorry Alfred, I was a bit irritable last night for some reason.

pinefox speaks wisdom - honestly for me the mission creep is cool.

I mean, it might well be true that there aren't a lot of people reading (say) Elinor Glyn or John Galsworthy or James Branch Cabell. Fades like those are going to happen.

To me it's WAY more interesting to speculate when people will stop reading more recent authors, even (perhaps especially) ones who are still alive. Because a relatively modern writer going out of style quickly is a more dramatic development than the natural process of forgetting the distant past.

There's a line in my second-favorite novel (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight) about how hyper-modern art sometimes gets dated really fast, and I think it is accurate.

Has anybody here thought much about Douglas Coupland in this century? (pause for show of hands)

There will be a day when Bret Easton Ellis or Kathy Acker become a footnote, interesting only to specialists in a particular zeitgeist. Not sure when that will be, but I'm interested in finding out.

literally 5 minutes ago i was looking at a half-obscured book on my shelf and wondering what it was. it was Generation X.

You forgot #onethread!

Good post from Ye Mad Puffin. It's these specific developments that are intriguing, rather the general fade-out of everything.

In 2005 Coupland was hired (by the Observer Music Monthly as I recall) to interview Morrissey in Rome. He produced a strange text that showed that he hadn't bothered to interview Morrissey, had written up almost nothing Morrissey had said - I'm not certain he'd even met him. People were unimpressed. That's the last distinctive thing I can remember from Coupland.

Ellis and Acker, though, I feel still have kinds of cachet. I believe that people value Acker as some kind of avant-gardist - she had a big LRB retrospective only a few years ago. Ellis seems to have followed a different path - becoming some kind of ... maybe gay libertarian shock jock?

Of the 80s lit brat pack, Tama Janowitz is the one who faded without a revival. (Ellis has a tome coming out January, and even if McInerney is more bon vivant now, I feel like I see/hear Bright Lights, Big City referred to often.

Wasn't there a novel recently told in first person in the voice of Kathy Acker? Crudo, by Olivia Laing iirc.

The shiftcreep was inevitable. The only way the thread could have survived in its original form is if somebody else had actually read, say, Wilfrid Sheed. Either him or some other obscurity was posited who at least turned out to be a folie à deux.

lol, koogs and Eazy. Plate of shrimp, I guess. I think of how prominent Coupland and Janowitz were on my friends' DIY bookshelves circa 1993 and shudder. A few years later the same people were all knee-deep in Infinite Jest.

Maybe the thread needs a "future edition" spinoff. I dunno.

My sideswipe at Elinor Glyn reminds me that I only ever heard of her because of Dorothy Parker's deliciously snarky reviews. Her collected book and theater reviews are a very good source of fodder for this thread.

I know have a couple collections of Woolf's criticism, as well as Eliot's (somewhere, probably in the attic). Negative book reviews from 100-ish years ago will reveal people you've justifiably never heard of. Is that cheating? I dunno.

There was a recent New Yorker piece about Elizabeth Hardwick that was chock-full of extremely precise evaluations of people I had never read, and it made me a bit melancholy.

Feeling this last bit.

I would think twice about a Future Edition thread. The one I started seem to only sow confusion.

I think I said before that it might be more rational to posit that EVERYTHING becomes unread, except a handful of things, lights in a vast darkness, islands on a dark sea.

What are those islands? Things that do remain in print, prominent, or read?

I posit:

1: old canonical stuff, often in translation, like the Odyssey or DON QUIXOTE - things that are presumably cheap to publish and that readers still keep attempting because of an admirable desire to educate themselves.

2: English canonical material within eg: the C19 novel - so the Brontes, Dickens, G Eliot, not to mention Austen, remain always above water whatever else drowns. In modern times this is true of Woolf, Joyce, then Orwell. Meanwhile lots of things around them have wayward, up and down fortunes. Lewis went up as Lawrence fell away - but this surely still didn't mean that Lewis ever became as widely read as Lawrence had been (or even still is).

3: within genre fiction, some things that become canonical and hold their place: Christie, Chandler, Simenon; Asimov, Dick?

4: then you have a world of Current Literary Fiction which is prominent and read. Zadie Smith and J Franzen would be good cases from UK and US. Slightly longer established names hang on: Jonathan Coe, Jeanette Winterson, and yes, McEwan. And this contemporary corpus gets added to - probably especially now by writers of colour.

4a): you could add a sub-category for independent publishers and more experimental writers - ILB favourites like C-L Bennett, who are read by, maybe, passionate subcultures.

5: then add the tendency of publishers, sometimes critics, to go back and reclaim, republish, champion. Penguin making pretty new editions of something, multiple titles by an author, is a good sign. Feminism has broadly been a factor here - so Jean Rhys is more prominently in print than ever before? - perhaps so are Elizabeth Bowen, Djuna Barnes. Yet there must still be people who were contemporaries of theirs who do not get salvaged (yet).

The logic of the premise, justifying that perhaps increasingly predictable perambulation, would be that anything NOT in those categories is no longer read - and in any given case you would be positing a happy exception or surprise.

pinefox

In 2005 Coupland was hired (by the Observer Music Monthly as I recall) to interview Morrissey in Rome. He produced a strange text that showed that he hadn't bothered to interview Morrissey, had written up almost nothing Morrissey had said - I'm not certain he'd even met him

That is so David Foster Wallacesque it almost physically hurts. In retrospect there was a whole genre based around 90s white dudes who - consciously or unconsciously - sought to invent a very specific neo-gonzo aesthetic. "I'm not a real interviewer, I'm just going to submit 5,000 words about how nervous you are about peeing, and how we needed to find a very specific snack." I'm looking at you, Chuck Klosterman, David Sedaris, Joe Queenan.

There is another, demographically related, subgroup of probably genuinely sensitive souls who had a BIT more to say, but who are not without their own flaws. David Shields, Allan Gurganus, Lionel Shriver.

And there is another more elite tier of writers with some pretty solid literary merit who I don't think will vanish quite as easily: Chabon, Franzen, Lethem, Michael Cunningham. But

...but I dunno

The pinefox otm. Part of me wants to attempt to make a case why people should read those Wilfrid Sheed novels and novellas I enjoyed so much as a nipper, in particular The Hack and The Blacking Factory. Seems to me there was some kind of, not to say existential dread or malaise but just some kind of sense of discomfort in his work that spoke to me, but maybe I have misremembered that, you really can’t go home again, maybe there was something offensive or clumsy or wooden I forgot about or overlooked, or maybe the stuff was actually really good but people won’t care, they will say “Why do we need him? We have Walker Percy, we have J.F. Powers” and so ultimately it wouldn’t be worth the tilting at windmills effort.

Your loyalty to your past is laudable, Mr. Redd. But I generally feel there is just way too much culture for any one brain to comprehend. So any particular lacunae (Enid Blyton, or Wilfrid Sheed, or Banana Yoshimoto, or R.F. Delderfield) are forgivable.

I feel the same way about music, FWIW. No, I don't know as much about Wu-Tang Clan as the person sitting next to me at the bar. But she doesn't know as much about Nanci Griffith or Elvis Costello. The person two stools over knows way more about Ultravox than I do, and that's okay.

It's all a vast tapestry.

Crap I think I meant to put George Saunders in the last post but I forget which category.

Carry on, y'all

Here in Canada, Coupland has become the kind of cultural presence who is called upon to make government-sponsored installation art.

Lethem has an essay, 'Rushmore vs Abundance' I think it's called, which well articulates a point that poster Ye Mad Puffin is making.

Roughly he is saying that we should accept the idea that there is a ton of culture, beyond our ken, and be happy with this abundance and diversity, rather than bothering trying to delimit the canon (which would be the 'Mount Rushmore' of literature).

A good moment is where he says that we have an anxiety that we're missing something, which we shouldn't bother having - '(trust me, we're missing something)'.

re Ye Mad Puffin's comments again, and re the thread, it would actually be good if we could plot Wallace on it -- ie: that there was a peak of his fandom, which is now declining for various reasons, as we are supposing it has done for M Amis.

Unsure about this, though, especially as academic work on him seems almost as thick as ever.

I have had some nice moments with Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair has some undeniable gems, for example.

But I think it would be fine for our cultural health if he eventually went the way of Updike, Mailer, Cheever, etc.

Cheever, I think, has survived, partly because he's waaaayyy weirder than Updike; he's in the same league as the Latin American fablelists.

Well I recently re-read "The Enormous Radio" and right away he's sneering at his characters---this thirtysomething couple hasn't made it to Westchester yet, but if and when they do, Cheever will be waiting (as in "The Swimmer" etc. etc.) Yes, he's got an imagination, but the critique of plastic suburban New Yorker readers, literary default of his era has an edge of personal hostility (he was one of the downwardly mobile Cheevers, not like the ones who started contacting him only when he had a lot of New Yorker stories to show for himself), which can add electricity to the distinctive imaginative momentum, but also can be off-putting and/or encourage me to squint a little harder at the dazzle or just get plain predictable: you get to know when he's going to stick pins in a character or get boozy-sentimental.
Having said that, now I want to dig up my copy of The Stories of, first published in late 70s (I have the doorstop paperback with bright red cover), which was a trip then, pulling in a lot of stuff us youngsters had never seen, seemed startling to some older reviewers and profs also)---and his novels!!

That's an early story, though. Tonally they change after The Housebreaker of Shady Hill.

Even in that collection with "The Enormous Radio" there's "O City of Broken Dreams," this lyrical account of a family of naifs in Manhattan agog in the Automat.

True, and I was about to admit that, although this was among shallowest among the (New Yorker anthologized) ones I just read---though in part because "these are shallow people dammit," young JC would be likely to remind me---it's got more grabby momentum than any of the others.

(others were by: Elizabeth Taylor, Jessamyn West, VS Pritchett, Nabokov, Shirley Jackson---from The 40s--The Story of a Decade--New Yorker nonfiction, poetry, fiction---which I'll prob say something about on WAYR?; it's v. worth checking out, for the most part.)

Naifs in Manhattan is my next band name; our debut album will be called Agog in the Automat

(xpost Well, Irwin Shaw's story, about PTSD x antisemitism in WWII, was also a grabber, but was longer and took hold more slowly, not like Cheever's)

Agog and Magog In The Automat

Yes I'm going to get back to reading him---these things come around, as I noticed working in a bookstore and a CD store in the 90s---oh good call imagewise on Amis and Morrisey, pinefox---I have the impression from a couple of overviews that Amis is better the further back you go---any truth to that?

George Saunders

I'm betting he will be regarded thirty years from now the way Donald Barthelme is today.

The only M. Amis book I can stand is his memoir.

Experience?

Yep. The latest one, another memoir, has decent bits about writing around yet more tedious valentines to Hitch.

Here's one for the thread: The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas. It was very present on the literary landscape in the '80s, always saw it at bookstores and on friends' parents' bookshelves. I eventually read it, I liked it, but that was 30 years ago so who knows what I'd think now. Anyway, it was his only popular book and I feel like it's just totally disappeared.

John Barth is well on his way to this thread, smiling self-contentedly all the way. Early this year I read Lost in the Funhouse and Where Three Roads Meet, but that won't stop it.

B-b-but what about the upcoming Dalkey Arcjive Essentials edition of The Sot-Weed Factor?

Dalkey Archive of course, although now I kind of want to reuse Arcjive.

I read The White Hotel in the 80s: don't remember specifics, but it seemed refreshing.

George Saunders

I'm betting he will be regarded thirty years from now the way Donald Barthelme is today.

jane smiley

will anyone read murakami in 10 years?

John Irving

Anne Tyler, although ledge was reading something recently.

will anyone read murakami in 10 years?

― ꙮ (map), Saturday, October 1, 2022

I think so. Two of the most loved and acclaimed films of the last few years - Drive My Car and Burning - are based on his short stories, and they are destined to be remembered

Dow: yes I broadly think that earlier Amis has more energy and interest than later. MONEY is 11 years after his debut, and is now 38 years old - in that sense it's 'early'. I can't praise any of his 3 longer novels that I've read after it.

Great call on THE WHITE HOTEL - a book that was big and taken seriously and now isn't.

moving away from academia - how about VC Andrews? didn't read it myself but the vibe i got of it was that it was a particular manifestation of child abuse lit, something that fit alongside "satanic ritual abuse" really well. maybe people weren't _quite_ ready to face up to the truth that in america it was _christianity_ that was the main driver of child abuse in those days...

Bruce Chatwin. Huge in the 80s, never hear anything about him these days.

Anne Tyler has books out all the time. i tend to reread old things of hers rather than new ones but it's quite regular.

my mum is currently reading Garp

in a similar vc Andrews vein, what about Dennis Wheatley?

David Foster Wallace... is a writer I have Complicated feelings about. In one sense he's an avatar of Clever White Man literature, people who write about whatever the hell they feel like writing about. it's only white guys who ever get praised enough to start doing that sort of thing.

Well. White _AMABs_. One of the transfem tropes out there is "gifted boy -> burnout trans girl with a praise kink". My past self had a certain... lack of insight about things. The kind of person who would _notice_ that all of their favorite writers were deeply miserable white men who had killed themselves and concluded "Well, that's that, I definitely shouldn't become a writer, I have enough problems with my mental health."

What I see in the writers I loved in my younger days - writers whose writing style is the most like my own - is not just that they tended to be deeply miserable, fucked up people - yes, I do know I'm talking about _writers_ here - but men who were deeply fucked up by _masculinity_ in particular. Often in ways that perpetuate the problem. DFW is widely known and acknowledged as an abuser whose self-loathing only really seemed to perpetuate his abusive behavior patterns. All of his self-hatred about being a tennis child prodigy and wow he brings a tennis player who's a trans woman into the story and it's _the_ stereotype of the trans female athlete, just like 20 years before damn near anyone else (me included) had any idea what "gender dysphoria" actually was.

With DFW I guess what you get back to is something like "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men". The sense I get is that he thought of himself as a "hideous man", like I did, and couldn't figure out how _not_ to be a hideous man. I guess I eventually figured it out but my particular solution probably wouldn't work for most people - and none of the writers I grew up reading lived long enough to be able to have the option I wound up taking.

I don't really think that DFW is a writer who should be Read, but I think the problems he exemplified have become more, rather than less, acute since his untimely passing.

Back in the early '90s my sophomore high school English teacher, who was a Clever White Man who had a second job selling luggage at Sears and spent his spare time trying to sell spec scripts to second-rate three-camera sitcoms, assigned _A Prayer for Owen Meany_ as the summer reading assignment for the honors English class he taught. I never really read Garp, in large part I think because it had a transsexual in it and it was important to me to know as little about transsexuals as possible. (In retrospect I probably would have been fine, since the character in Garp, like most trans characters in fiction of the era, bears no noticeable resemblance to any actual trans person.)

One problem with speculating on who will be unread in the future is there's a temptation to name authors you don't think are very good - yet the literary world is full of rediscoveries of unjustly forgotten authors, so clearly it's not some platonic notion of quality that prevents authors from falling into oblivion in the first place. I guess a good exercise then is "what current authors you admire do you think will be forgotten?".

Roughly he is saying that we should accept the idea that there is a ton of culture, beyond our ken, and be happy with this abundance and diversity, rather than bothering trying to delimit the canon (which would be the 'Mount Rushmore' of literature).

I am considerably more skeptical of this argument now than I would have been when that essay was published (2007, if I'm correct?). It's immensely freeing on an individual level no doubt, and the fact that canons, no matter how well tuned to preoccupations of race, gender, etc. are always going to be oppressive on some level, makes it tempting to want to ignore them entirely. But We Live In A Society, there is a social dimension to art and the death of the monoculture seems to have resulted not so much in a world where every person has their own highly curated individual tastes but rather a situation where what is left of the "mainstream" feels impoverished. There's never been a greater time to be a specialist, you can get into dadaist poetry or 60's wuxia films or 30's swing and have more information available to you than ever before, but meanwhile those who haven't got those geeky impulses to research and look beyond are now I think much less likely to be exposed to anything that might take them out of their comfort zone. It's kind of like the nostalgia expressed on the Godard thread for TV channels showing foreign arthouse fare, probably the vast majority of ppl who came across these must have found them pointless but for a few people it may have been an entry point to explore these new worlds. So I guess that is where I see the usefulness of a shared canon, of having these works that most people get exposed to in school or whatever. This might also be viewed as a defense of the middlebrow, I guess.

"it's not some platonic notion of quality that prevents authors from falling into oblivion in the first place"

Think I agree with this. It's contingency, happenstance, politics - unsure how much quality has to do with it. Maybe it does, but then, most of us don't agree about questions of quality in the first place. If it was up to me, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW would be forgotten. Other ilxors would have the diametrically opposite view.

>>> I guess a good exercise then is "what current authors you admire do you think will be forgotten?".

Yes - agree - this kind of angle on the question is interesting.

Off the top of my head, Lorrie Moore (whom many of us love) might be a relatively good candidate for this because of her lightness.

David Mitchell - if thinking harshly I can see his work coming to be seen as youthful and brittle, more than dazzling.

I was just thinking of taking another crack at GRAVITY’S RAINBOW – after all, it can’t be as bad as V- but maybe not.

Bruce Chatwin. Huge in the 80s, never hear anything about him these days.

― Zelda Zonk, Sunday, 2 October 2022 bookmarkflaglink

A test for this thread is to get hold of the names, go to a bookshop and see whether they stock a copy.

I would say this is the case for the vast majority of the authors in here, such as Chatwin.

What is this bookshop you speak of?

In a secondhand bookshop yesterday (South London readers: the tiny cheap and chaotic BOOKS on Oglander Rd in SE15) I was inspired by this thread to take a look at a Len Deighton book, “Horse Under Water”.

On the back it had a quote, no context, apparently from LIFE Magazine:

“Next, big soft girls will read Len Deighton aloud in jazz workshops”.

I don’t know what that was supposed to mean or what readers it was meant to attract but it sure as hell worked on me, I bought it for £2.

I like this story and quotation a lot.

I also quite like that shop. We may have discussed it before.

We may well have.

Truth told, the appealing front cover of the book also had a part to play in my decision to purchase:

https://astrofella.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/fab6d-deighton20horse20under20water.jpg

LIFE magazine: “Next, big soft girls will read Len Deighton aloud in jazz workshops”.
narrator's voice:

Deighton After Dark.

I love the context-free "Next"

It's an amazing blurb.

Friend informs me that particular Deighton is set in Portugal, and at one point the main character mentions the German's uncanny ability to emulate the local language accent-free. This, I regret to say, is not true.

http://clothesinbooks.blogspot.com/2017/11/big-soft-girls-and-jazz-workshops.html?m=1

The thriller is borrowing the props of the conventional “literary” novel…
No wonder a newspaper reviewer breathlessly declared that “the vitality of the modern thriller flows directly from the bloody realities of our embattled day”. Next, big soft girls will read Len Deighton aloud in jazz workshops. The real question is not whether the new thrillers are literature (the answer is no) but whether they really do tell anything about the latest symptom of fiction’s increasing inability to get to the terrifying matters of our time.

context of the context: conrad knickerbocker (for it is he) is supplying his own implied narrator's voice (viz that this is not in fact going to happen, bcz newspaper reviewers are making too much of "the modern thriller", which knockerbocker boldly offsets against "fiction" (despites its current, viz 1964, failures)

He liked In Cold Blood though.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/28/home/capote-blood2.html

He was working on a Malcolm Lowry bio but committed suicide, some say as the result of a Lowry curse.

comically enough given the context of this thread what the full blurry knickerbocker review is pleading for is the arrival of the pynchonesque spy thriller (viz a form that also reflects desk-bound faceless bureaucracies at scale)

adding: george plimpton klaxon

Great cover too: Len halfway under what over here (US) signifies "watered down" to some and "Lifesaver!" to others---not the candy but the striped Cliff's Notes you read just before the big test. There are or were (when I worked in a mid-90s bookstore) even Notes for short stories, and I sold some; God forbid you risk getting lost in the five-page original when you can (well probably) cruise right through Cliff's ten. But I'd still like to look at the Notes for Finnegan's Wake before I finally try to read the whole original (which will happen, if at all, with Campbell's A Skeleton Key To).
Meant to say that Daniel's misgivings about lack of canon feel right re further fragmentation (of secular, pluralistic, in my take) social-and-even-individual cohesion.

My mother taught English, American and World Lit (in a university geared toward STEM and other non-Liberal Arts majors), and I maybe spent too much time in school, so I tend to think of canons as academic: What should be taught now, to all students, to those with certain majors, on what grade levels, secondary and college?

Just read Conrad Knickebocker's obit and feel a little unclean. Somebody posted his interview with William S. Burroughs here if you want to read: https://bluewatsons.tumblr.com/post/122329932364/conrad-knickerbocker-interview-william-s

@Daniel_Rf - Good thoughts. My feelings on monoculture are complicated, I guess I'd say. I grew up I guess with an adverserial relationship to monoculture - I guess what you could call "hipsterism", with the caveat that I was in no way anything resembling "hip". As I've gotten older, some of the stuff I liked _because_ it was opposed to the monoculture has been absorbed into the monoculture. Geeky shit, a lot of times. Comic books and so forth. There's a shared cultural context that gets lost when something gets mainstreamed.

With books I guess that doesn't matter so much - time to "canon" is longer than that. The original cultural context of Olaf Stapledon, say, doesn't play into it so much.

There's this rift, I think, between liberal and radical approaches to... life, really, just life. And I've been on both sides of that divide. The liberal approach is look, can't we just expand the divide? Let's read more Octavia Butler. (I really need to read some Octavia Butler.) The radical approach on the other hand is... the monoculture isn't just _impoverished_, it's fucking insane and is killing all of us. I like the idea of _a_ monoculture, one where we don't have this fundamentally adversarial relationship with the "other". At the same time to defend _this particular version_ of the monoculture is an exercise in defending the indefensible.

He was working on a Malcolm Lowry bio but committed suicide, some say as the result of a Lowry curse.

― Misirlou Sunset (James Redd and the Blecchs)

Always wondered what Lou Reed meant when he sang "Malcolm's curse haunts our family"

Kate otm (incl. that last scary quote)
(Despite well-earned news coverage about book bans as grassroots prairie fire in US, and this being the Deep-ass South, my sister reports that, meeting the cast of a "beautiful mumblecore" local high school production of The Glass Menagerie, she was told that they're now reading The Handmaid's Tale.)(Have also read that Banned Books lists can be good for sales.)

Now reading it as assignment, that is. Wonder if anybody's sticking to Cliff's Notes---I'm guessing some might go from those to the original, once given an indication of the details.

Those nice Vintage International early-90s paperbacks probably led to more readers of Rilke and Camus in the U.S., or at least more people getting them as birthday gifts.

and their covers made them ideal beach reading..

Anyway---first thought not nec best thought---I wanna say "The Waste Land" should be required, while pointing out that it's Ezra Pound's remix---tell 'em/maybe have 'em read some Pound, maybe have to tell what a remix is by now, show/play examples of process (demonstrating value of revision and editing), also Eliot as St. Louis->London remix, and how that affected his writing maybe (allowing them to speculate at all times). Also about shittier side of him personally, ditto Pound ("Now, class, how does this affect your reading?") Also is any of his other writing as good as "TWL," to the extent that you can appreciate why it is-was considered good, whether you enjoy it or not.

moving away from academia - how about VC Andrews?

Should I read Flowers in the Attic? I found an extremely tattered free paperback, which seems somehow appropriate.

Been meaning to type all morning that there is an implicit slipdrift in the thread title itself. Does No One mean
No one at all
No one I know
No one I care about
No one I respect

Your day breaks, your mind aches.

xpost Somebody who I think first read it in middle school presented a very readable reconsid in The New Yorker not too long ago.

xxpost Not saying it would *have* to be taught this way

some of the stuff I liked _because_ it was opposed to the monoculture has been absorbed into the monoculture

I was an English major circa 1989, and I recall that critiquing the monoculture was a pretty central part of the monoculture even then.

In White Noise there's a coterie of PhDs who only read comic books, gum wrappers, cereal boxes, etc. 1984.

In like 1968 or so Ishmael Reed writes "No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons."

Pictures from an Institution has a line about a soap bubble being equivalent to a pyramid.

Culture has a ways to go toward full inclusion, but it has almost always had inbuilt self-criticism, if only of a halfhearted sort.

Pictures from an Institution has a line about a soap bubble being equivalent to a pyramid.

― the floor is guava (Ye Mad Puffin)

randall jarrell!

maybe contrarian of me but i'd put soap bubbles over pyramids. this idea of the Enduring Edifice, the megalith. what can you say about Giza? Wow, that's big? Who builds skyscrapers? North Korea. Saudi Arabia. I should _admire_ them? Admire their _great work_?

Not huge on "banned books" lists. Oh, everybody makes a big deal about Huck Finn being a banned book and I mean. I read it in, I don't know, sixth grade. It's a 19th century novel by a racist white guy and this is the novel we use to teach children that racism is bad? I don't think I benefited from reading that book. I think there are better ways of teaching kids about racism. I don't think reading it made me less racist, though it did _eventually_ help me figure out that America is, and always was, a white supremacist ethnostate.

I've never seen a celebrity on an "I Read Banned Books" poster holding a copy of The Turner Diaries. I guess it's only a matter of time, though.

Like, how do I feel personally? Burn every copy of Myra Breckinridge. Bury it wherever they buried the Gore Vidal biopic starring Kevin Spacey. Heine saying "Where they burn books, they will one day burn people" - I don't think it's _true_. Where they burn books, they are _already_ burning people, and people care more about the books than the people. Those famous pictures of the Nazi book burnings - Magnus Hirschfeld's _Institut Fur Sexual Wissenschaft_. A great loss to history, to _science_? Sure. How about Dora Richter, though? Where's her fucking obituary? She was "presumed dead" when the Nazis destroyed it. Presumed. Nobody _bothered_ to make note of her murder. It's only by chance that we know she ever existed.

Happy Nobel Prize week to all who observe. This is your reminder that, in October 1922, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Rilke were all alive and publishing major work. The prize that year went to Jacinto Benavente.

— Ryan Ruby (@_ryanruby_) October 3, 2022

https://www.nobelprize.org/images/benavente-12925-portrait-medium.jpg

Not huge on "banned books" lists. Oh, everybody makes a big deal about Huck Finn being a banned book and I mean. I read it in, I don't know, sixth grade. It's a 19th century novel by a racist white guy and this is the novel we use to teach children that racism is bad? I don't think I benefited from reading that book. I think there are better ways of teaching kids about racism. I don't think reading it made me less racist, though it did _eventually_ help me figure out that America is, and always was, a white supremacist ethnostate.

I think this is part of why I liked Huck Finn (apart from being a good to excellent yarn): besides showing the origins of the white ethnostate, it shows an America full of grifters and (nyuk nyuk) huckers.

There's this rift, I think, between liberal and radical approaches to... life, really, just life. And I've been on both sides of that divide. The liberal approach is look, can't we just expand the divide? Let's read more Octavia Butler. (I really need to read some Octavia Butler.) The radical approach on the other hand is... the monoculture isn't just _impoverished_, it's fucking insane and is killing all of us. I like the idea of _a_ monoculture, one where we don't have this fundamentally adversarial relationship with the "other". At the same time to defend _this particular version_ of the monoculture is an exercise in defending the indefensible.

I would certainly throw my lot in with the radicals when it comes to life - hierarchies are to be abolished, not tokenized, and sure canons qualify. The problem I guess with any kind of less horrible monoculture we could dream up is it's always going to be based on exclusion to some extent, because what's in it will always be less than what's not.

On the other hand, deciding then that monoculture is a lost cause and canons to be entirely abolished is that it cedes cultural ground to capitalist forces who do not share the hand wringing - so the shared culture becomes, at best, the front page of Netflix and, at worst, the youtube front page before you log in.

I'd say capitalism is killing us all, and, yeah, capitalism opposes monocultures of any kind, i.e. "You will no longer stream Von Sternberg on Netflix, suckers."

On the other hand, deciding then that monoculture is a lost cause and canons to be entirely abolished is that it cedes cultural ground to capitalist forces

Yes there's that. But for me the problem is that _I_ can curate my cultural intake just fine (for me). But so can everyone else, and "everyone else" will inevitably include horrible people.

So yeah, I'm curating for me. Kate is curating for Kate. And so on. There's a part of me that is glad that a few dudes on one specific island no longer decide who gets published and who doesn't.

But Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Eric Trump and Lauren Boebert are curating for Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Eric Trump and Lauren Boebert. I am not suggesting things were better when there was an alleged "consensus" about the world and reality - because I am old enough to remember that consensus sucked too.

This is your reminder that, in October 1922, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Rilke were all alive and publishing major work.

I'm not sure if this proves very much. Recherche was unfinished, Ulysses wasn't published until that year, Woolf's best-known novels are later. Rilke, sure.

That's well argued!

Yeats, winning in 1923 I think, is a more encouraging case.

the photo proves the nobel was correctly assigned in 1922

Yeah the Nobel is (by design) meant to be for your whole canon, and therefore tends to indicate that you're "done" (whatever that means). Which is why at least some writers have drily regarded the Nobel as a death sentence and sought to avoid it.

(At the same time, that's a pretty good problem to have, just sayin)

Woolf should've gotten the Nobel in 1882 imo.

Sick burn on toddler, damn

Her stuff up to age 6 was quite experimental. Lots of alternative spellings.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo....

I'd say capitalism is killing us all, and, yeah, capitalism opposes monocultures of any kind, i.e. "You will no longer stream Von Sternberg on Netflix, suckers."

Not sure I agree with this! Personalised choice is what streaming services claim to peddle, sure, but I'm not sure it actually pans out that way. You won't stream Von Sternberg, but you sure as hell will stream Squid Game! Which is not the greatest example of the evil of this model, being as it is a non-anglo show that from all I've heard is very well made and ideologically right on, but it's when I became aware of a certain disconnect - all these breathless articles going "wow a Korean show is the most watched thing on netflix, how could this be??". And, well, it can be because Netflix fucking put it on their main page for everyone. Which those of us accostumed to curating our culture might ignore, but there's still a huge amount of people who will click on that. And having that sort of mass audience will always be better for capital than tailoring a thousand different things to different niche audiences.

I'm not sure if this proves very much. Recherche was unfinished, Ulysses wasn't published until that year, Woolf's best-known novels are later. Rilke, sure.

― jmm, Monday, 3 October 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Ulysses was published in February. Fine. I doubt they could've give it to him the same year.

They could've easily given this to Proust. Even if it was for Swann's Way I'm sure by then many could see the ambition for the entire project.

"Yeah the Nobel is (by design) meant to be for your whole canon"

Beckett also had a whole period of work ahead of him!

Not sure I agree with this! Personalised choice is what streaming services claim to peddle, sure, but I'm not sure it actually pans out that way. You won't stream Von Sternberg, but you sure as hell will stream Squid Game! Which is not the greatest example of the evil of this model, being as it is a non-anglo show that from all I've heard is very well made and ideologically right on, but it's when I became aware of a certain disconnect - all these breathless articles going "wow a Korean show is the most watched thing on netflix, how could this be??". And, well, it can be because Netflix fucking put it on their main page for everyone

This is what I meant to say -- merely that "I can't watch what I want on Netflix because Netflix has decided for me; the rest goes into the memory hole."

I think this is part of why I liked Huck Finn (apart from being a good to excellent yarn): besides showing the origins of the white ethnostate, it shows an America full of grifters and (nyuk nyuk) huckers.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

Oh, I agree with you totally - Huck Finn is a well-written and entertaining book even for the contemporary reader and it's of invaluable historical importance. I'd put it on the reading list for a university course on 19th-century American history, along with _Democracy in America_ and that book by Anthony Trollope's mom. There was a lot of important stuff about 19th-century American history nobody taught me in school, not just thinks like that impeachment was first used successfully to reinforce white supremacy but things like the vice president who tried to fund an expedition to the center of the hollow earth, or that on the floor of Congress nearly everyone was drunk constantly.

I just don't think it's appropriate as summer reading for sixth-grade English. That's all.

Agreed. In elementary school we read an illustrated abridged Tom Sawyer, which, correct me if I'm wrong, is not as fraught as HF.

I'd put it on the reading list for a university course on 19th-century American history, along with _Democracy in America_ and that book by Anthony Trollope's mom.

Now this is a curriculum. Also: Dickens' American Notes.

the vice president who tried to fund an expedition to the center of the hollow earth

*perks up*

well, what do you expect with a middle name like Mentor

On the other hand, deciding then that monoculture is a lost cause and canons to be entirely abolished is that it cedes cultural ground to capitalist forces who do not share the hand wringing - so the shared culture becomes, at best, the front page of Netflix and, at worst, the youtube front page before you log in.

― Daniel_Rf

I'd argue that it cedes no ground at all - they already have the high ground! They control the media, they control what you see and don't see. Why has everybody heard "Plastic Love"? Because Youtube promoted it to anybody and everybody. They _are_ the monoculture. Marjorie Taylor Greene may curate for Marjorie Taylor Greene, but it's the capitalist media - Facebook, Youtube, Netflix - who decide what people see.

I open a new private tab and I search "transgender" and what do I get? Abigail Shrier. Matt Walsh. Blaire White. This is what the monoculture is teaching cis people about what it means to be trans today. Hatred. Bigotry. Lies.

Was it ever different? Has it _ever_ been different? Hahahahaha. No. Fuck no. Before that, the monoculture was the acclaimed, best-picture winning, virulently transphobic film _The Silence of the Lambs_, a film about which the major argument was whether Buffalo Bill was _a homosexual man_. This is the world I grew up in, the world I lived in my entire life. That I exist at all is the result of a collective struggle waged by trans people from before I was born, and were we given voices within the monoculture? No. The voice of trans people, according to Youtube, is fucking _Blaire White_, apparently, and that is NOTHING NEW. In the UK media monoculture, who is given voice to speak about trans people? The openly genocidal Lily Cade. Do we get to speak for ourselves in the UK media?

In fact the only way I can even _hear_ the voice of a British trans woman in the UK media is through... YouTube. Abi Thorn. This is how fucked up the monoculture is, YouTube spends all of its money and time preaching hate, promoting hate, and people like Abi fight for the _scraps_, because if she wasn't on YouTube, hardly anybody would hear her at all. When the only way we can get heard at all is through an openly transphobic platform, well, that's what we do.

If Sam Feder's amazing documentary _Disclosure_ is picked up for peanuts by Netflix, and Netflix then turns around and pays incredible amounts of money to Dave Chappelle to spew transphobic vitriol, then, well, that's what we have to do for anybody to hear us, anybody to know we exist, because silence = death, as always. Capitalist monoculture means that "the debate" means elevating the voice of Dave Chappelle, and silencing the voice of, say, trans sex workers who will gladly tell you about their professional interactions with Dave Chappelle. Like there's maybe some important fucking _context_ missing to this debate.

I'm ceding _nothing_ to them, because they started with everything, and I started with nothing. I, and the people I fight along side, are _taking back what is rightfully ours_. We are fighting to _exist_ in a world that has always, ALWAYS tried to erase us. Is capitalism killing us all? Yes, absolutely. And that's more... _evident_ to some of us than others. I don't have the luxury of pretending otherwise. Alfred doesn't have the luxury of pretending otherwise. And the monoculture, that _is_ capitalism. That is an _essential part_ of how capitalism gets its power, through _capitalist media_.

Hi! I have _opinions_!

well, what do you expect with a middle name like Mentor

― “uhh”—like, this is an insane oatmeal raisin cookie “uhh” (President Keyes)

but was it pronounced "menner" like the Ohio town

that book by Anthony Trollope's mom

DON'T SLEEP ON THIS ONE, people, it rules

Agreed. In elementary school we read an illustrated abridged Tom Sawyer, which, correct me if I'm wrong, is not as fraught as HF.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

Right, Tom Sawyer is a fun all-ages adventure story, and then people kept bugging Twain to do a sequel and he's like "OK, fuck it, you know what I'm gonna go Darker and Grittier".

(He did so some stuff like Tom Sawyer, Detective later on, maybe vs. one of his bad business adventures)
Continuing the threadcreep, re novelists we'd like to see more of:
Before I got off the Anne Tyler bus somewhere in The Accidental Tourist, gave her points for giving the Tourist an ideal longread travelling companion, which could even or especially be read satisfyingly at random: the massive novel Miss Mackintosh, My Darling, by Marguerite Young---wiki sez:

As she worked on The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler cured spells of writer's block by reading pages from Miss MacIntosh at random. "Whatever page I turned to, it seemed, a glorious wealth of words swooped out at me."[12] Tyler made Young's novel a traveling companion for her main character Macon Leary. A hardcover edition of the book was used as a prop in William Hurt's suitcase in the film adaptation.

In her zeal to demonstrate that nothing lives except in the imagination, Miss Young, with superb virtuosity, may have written a novel that in the profoundest sense does not exist.

— Melvin Maddocks, Christian Science Monitor, 9/16/1965

Isn’t Dalkey Archive republishing that?

According to Amazon the Dalkey Archive reissue "will be released on June 6, 2023."

Yes. But this fact was already mentioned on this borad at least once recently.

I saw your question mark and jumped to a conclusion.

Not sure why I put the question mark or worded it that way. Maybe because I wasn’t sure whether it had come out or not. Believe it’s one of those new Dalkey Archive Essentials.

As far Anne Tyler, I remember really liking Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant at the time and also reading a few others but then felt a sense of saturation or diminishing returns or paradigm shift in the Zeitgeist or what have you and so stopped reading.

Dinnerseemed like a creative peak, then Accidental got too cuet---but I loved A Slipping Down Life, which seemed to incl. a parody of early Michael Stipe lyrics (boondocks zen sequitur indie rock), but then I realized it was published in 1970---also enjoyed Searching For Caleb(1975). Some of the other early 70s novels looked good, maybe should get back to those.

I haven't rereading but remember Breathing Lessons being great, and Morgan's Passing pretty good

I really dug the family dynamics aspect way back when, but feel like there is an intentional artless to the writing that I don’t know if I could stand anymore at this remove.

Morgan's Passing is yet another relatively early novel I remember being favorably mentioned. But maybe she's just written too many for her approach, the reader's pattern recognition acceptance level, something:

If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
The Tin Can Tree (1965)
A Slipping-Down Life (1970)
The Clock Winder (1972)
Celestial Navigation (1974)
Searching for Caleb (1975)
Earthly Possessions (1977)
Morgan's Passing (1980)
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Breathing Lessons (1988)
Saint Maybe (1991)
Ladder of Years (1995)
A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Digging to America (2006)
Noah's Compass (2009)
The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)
Vinegar Girl (2016)[47]
Clock Dance (2018)
Redhead by the Side of the Road (2020)
French Braid (2022)

That seems like hella fan service.

Reviews of earlier work, as quoted on her wiki, are grrrreat! Although later:

Reviewing The Patchwork Planet, Kakutani states: "Ms. Tyler's earlier characters tended to be situated within a thick matrix of finely nuanced familial relationships that helped define both their dreams and their limitations; the people in this novel, in contrast, seem much more like lone wolves, pulled this way and that by the author's puppet strings ... Ms. Tyler's famous ability to limn the daily minutiae of life also feels weary and formulaic this time around ... As for the little details Ms. Tyler sprinkles over her story ... they, too, have a paint-by-numbers touch. They add up to a patchwork novel that feels hokey, mechanical ... and yes, too cute.[46]

Having recently watched both The Friends of Eddie Coyle and Killing Them Softly, I wonder if anyone is reading George V. Higgins (other than to mine him for dialogue-heavy screenplays)?

I tried Eddie Coyle once, based on a friend’s recommendation, but couldn’t really get into it.

But really came to post
Mordecai Richler

Also, I popped in a modern art museum today and one of the installments featured a plexiglass box full of James Michener paperbacks.

was going to give george v higgins a reread actually. my recollection of impostors, outlaws, and the kennedy novels is that they are exceptionally well written, not just the dialogue, which is about as good as dialogue gets (spare, witty, sharp, advances matters without being information delivery), but the depiction of material culture, legal and financial matters, and dense, psychologically astute plots.

he rated v highly for me when i read him in my late teens.

Co-sign on that, Fizzles. GVH's non-fiction book on writing also v good.

Even at the time, Higgins used to complain about being pigeonholed as a crime writer AND about his relative lack of commercial success compared to ppl like Grisham or Scott Turow. But some of his early novels, in particular, are as hardboiled as they come while approaching a level of abstraction that doesn't scream bestsellerdom to me.

Legal textbooks were always a horror to be avoided when I worked in a secondhand bookshop, because they date so rapidly. I wonder if the same is true for legal thrillers.

Maybe think of them as historicals? Thanks guys, will check him

I think the Marguerite Young books I might start with are Harp Song For A Radical and Inviting The Muses:

Young's next project was to be a biography of Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley,[4][5][7] the creator of Little Orphant Annie. Her experiences in joining the protests against the Vietnam War made her turn her focus to Riley's friendship with Eugene V. Debs.[3] The digression was to occupy the rest of her life, becoming an ambitious biography of Debs, the union organizer who evolved into the first Socialist candidate for President of the United States (1904, 1908, 1912, 1920). She projected a three-volume epic history of the people, through Debs's battles for workers rights and the development of the Locomotive Firemen's workers union.[1] Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs remained unfinished at the time of her death.[5]

Part I, “Prelude in a Golden Key,” portrays Swiss agnostic Wilhelm Weitling’s cross-country tour of the pioneer utopian communities built during the settlement of the western United States. He visits the Mormon communities in Nauvoo, Missouri and Salt Lake City, Utah; the Shakers; the Amish communities in Pennsylvania; the Oneida community; the Icarians; the Rappites, and many other settlements in the wilderness. Through this perspective Young establishes that this nation was founded and settled on the principles of communal ownership and mutual assistance. In Part II of Harp Song for a Radical, Young establishes that Eugene Debs was the catalyst through which these principles became the basic tenets of the labor movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

During Marguerite Young's final illness, her unfinished manuscript was compiled by Marilyn Hamilton and Suzanne Oboler and was then submitted to her publisher. After her death, the manuscript was edited by Charles Ruas to include Young's survey of utopian communities as well as her portraits of major historical figures encountered by Debs in his struggles as a labor organizer: the portraits of Mary Todd Lincoln, James Whitcomb Riley, Joe Hill, Sojourner Truth, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith and Susan B. Anthony. This edited version of Harp Song for a Radical was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1999.

Also in her last illness, Marguerite Young returned to writing poetry. Inviting the Muses, a collection of her stories, essays, and reviews, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1994.

Mickey Spillane used to be the king of crime fiction. According his wikipedia article "more than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally", but I don't see many of them on the shelves in bookshops. Are many of his titles still in print and do crime fiction readers still read him?

I'd imagine that even within the territory of vintage noir fiction Spillane's incessant bigotry and law & order fascism have made him somewhat difficult for modern audiences to take. He's also kind of a Michael Bay, OTT take on the genre that I think ppl can't really get with.

Spillane's popularity partly a result of him 'getting away' with more salacious material than was permitted in films or TV at the time. Once that was no longer the case, the actual quality of the writing wasn't good enough to last in the way that Chandler, Hammett, Cain etc have lasted.

I read Friends of Eddie Coyle because Elmore Leonard would often mention it in interviews as a perfect crime novel.

Think they've now run out of unfinished novels and outlines, but Max Allan Collins has been completing and releasing Mike Hammer books for years now, with Spillane's blessing.

So the ilx hivemind reports that Spillane may have a small remnant of his former readership, but it is fast disappearing and if he has a chance of being read twenty years from now it might be down to just Friends of Eddie Coyle.

Don't see the connection between Spillane and Friends of Eddie Coyle.

Was either a typo or a joke maybe

I see now that the Eddie Coyle remark was harking back to GV Higgins and I was confused by that because I've not read either Higgins or Spillane, as befits a thread about authors no one reads.

You seem to be taking the Non-Self thing pretty literally.

talk about spillane made me realise that no one has mentioned Sapper here. an extremely good example. i can’t imagine very many of any people choosing to pick up a Sapper book these days.

in general the railway thriller and its sequel the spy thriller would have to be v lucky to have any sort of lifespan beyond their immediate context. anthony price was another name i thought of this morning in that regard (though it’s still possible to buy his books, some of them formally quite surprising iirc). also thought about dick francis in this regard but he’s probably still fairly well read i imagine, and not just in the horsey set.

You seem to be taking the Non-Self thing pretty literally.

Could be a side effect of all the killfiles.

I read a Bulldog Drummond once. It was good fun though obviously politically indefensible - though I will say it was interesting as a person of German origin reading something that so explicitly sees Germans as Evil, gave me a "oh so this is how it must feel for marginalized people all the time reading fiction" moment.

John Buchan seems to be the one to have survived from that early spy thriller era, gets republished by Penguin a lot I feel.

Basically I think that if it's classic genre fiction, and doubly so if it's British, it'll be in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics and some saddos like myself will have tracked it down as a result.

"sapper" <-- call him by his name, he earned his quotemarks (gassed in ww1 and died young as a result)

based on wikipedia (the root of all sublte biography) he seems like a p terrible person lol

wasn’t “sapper” multiple people? but yes, misogyny, racism, and violent suppressed sadi-masochism.

bulldog drummond too, yes.

lol had forgotten bulldog drummond *was* a sapper hero fffs.

dunno why i thought sapper was multiple people. who am i thinking of?

Several people

omg haven’t done such a huge public eye roll in ages.

Sappho and her seven eight nine sisters, maybe?

O. Henry

Did he even write any novels?

Seems like the breeezy, easily anthologized short story writers will always have a life of some sort.

If I had to teach a literature class tomorrow (fortunately I do not have to), I betcha I would fall back on a lot of 20th century stuff like O. Henry, Vonnegut, LeGuin, Barthelme, Coover, Oates.

Ah I didn't think about the novelist designation

Grainy obit photo of Conrad Knicerbocker just popped up on my screen and I almost gasped. Previous CK mention here

Leading to a reminder of another novelist I still want to check out, thanks:

Charles Wright, Novelist, Dies at 76

By BRUCE WEBER
Published: October 8, 2008

Charles Wright, who wrote three autobiographical novels about black street life in New York City between 1963 and 1973 that seemed to herald the rise of an important literary talent but who vanished into alcoholism and despair and never published another book, died on Oct. 1 in Manhattan. He was 76 and lived in the East Village.

The cause was heart failure, said Jan Hodenfield, one of Mr. Wright’s former editors; earlier in the year, he said, Mr. Wright had learned that alcohol had eroded his liver. From the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, Mr. Wright lived in the spare room of the Brooklyn apartment of Mr. Hodenfield and his family.

Mr. Wright’s three books were “The Messenger” (1963), “The Wig” (1966) and “Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About” (1973), all published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Together they describe a loner’s life on the fringes of New York society, his protagonists stand-ins for himself, working at low-level jobs, living in low-rent apartments, hanging out with lowlife personalities.

“The Messenger” was the best received of the three, perhaps because it told a more universal tale about being an outsider.

“The Wig” is a far angrier effort. “Malevolent, bitter, glittering,” the critic Conrad Knickerbocker wrote in The New York Times, adding that Mr. Wright’s style was “as mean and vicious a weapon as a rusty hacksaw,” and that he wielded it against blacks as well as whites. The book is an occasionally surreal, comic portrait of a black man, Lester Jefferson, who feels he must hide his blackness to achieve the acceptance and material rewards he thinks he deserves.

“Absolutely Nothing,” most of which had been previously published in columns that Mr. Wright wrote for The Village Voice, is a chronicle of seedy adventures — as a dishwasher and porter, as a lover, as a drunk — that some critics questioned as self-hating, though others found it evocative and disturbing. The three books were republished in a single volume by HarperCollins in 1993.

Charles Stevenson Wright was born June 4, 1932, in New Franklin, Mo. His mother died when he was 4, and his father, a railroad porter, sent him to live with his maternal grandmother. When he was 14, they moved to another central Missouri town, Sedalia.

By that age, Charles was an avid reader and knew he wished to be a writer; he dropped out of high school and spent his days in the library, and according to one story he told the Hodenfield family, he would read magazines in their bound stacks at the railroad station because he knew that once they got to the local drugstore, he wouldn’t be allowed in to look at them.

At 17, having read about the Handy Writers’ Colony in Marshall, Ill., newly founded by the novelist James Jones and others, he went there.

Mr. Wright served in the Army during the Korean War and moved to New York in his 20s. An early novel was rejected by Farrar, Straus, but an editor there encouraged him to write his own story, which became “The Messenger.” Over the next decade, his profligate habits — he told one interviewer his hobbies were smoking and drinking — seized hold of him. Mr. Hodenfield, who in the late 1960s was working at GQ Scene, a magazine for teenage boys, assigned him to write an article about Motown.

“He was a very strange man, and after we met I thought, ‘Well, this is not going to work,’ ” Mr. Hodenfield said. “Then he turned in the most perfect manuscript I’d ever received.”

The two men became friends, and when Mr. Hodenfield saw Mr. Wright, then 44, spiraling into oblivion, he offered him a room in his home. Mr. Wright leaves no survivors.

“He came to stay for a few weeks in 1976,” Mr. Hodenfield said. “And he stayed until just before he turned 64. He was a second father to both my children.”

― scott seward, Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Just heard a mention of Wilkie Collins

I don't think even I have ever read Wilkie Collins

others have

This I have observed as well.

the moonstone and the woman in white are still widely read. they are notable as early mystery novels.

Armadale is the best. It's got four characters named Allan Armadale and a really awesome female villain.

The worst Wilkie Collins I read was about a man who marries a blind girl who is deathly of people with brown skin even though she has never actually seen one. He gets some kind of fatal disease that can only be cured by medicine that darkens his skin. The doctor who saves him figures out how to restore the wife’s sight. Knowing that she will be repulsed by him, he has his still white twin brother switch places with him.

Should read Deathly afraid

Wasn’t that one made into a Douglas Sirk film?

Oh yeah I think my mom warned me about that one. But I thought his skin turned blue, not brown? or did I get it confused with another completely bonkers book?

I think it was bluish-black. The woman was particularly fearful of people from India.

Dunno if this is what happens in the story but there are real life cases of ppls skin turning blue from taking colloidal silver for supposed (but I think nonexistent) health benefits

Yes, that would be enough to freak out the Indiaphobe, if she knows about this, ondowntoearth.com

Religious interpretation of blue

Etymologically speaking, the Sanskrit word ‘Krishna’ means black or dark. At times, it is also translated as “all attractive”. According to Vedas, Lord Krishna is a dark-skinned Dravidian god. Even in traditional patta chitras (cloth art) in Odisha, Lord Krishna and Vishnu are always shown having black skin. Then why is Lord Krishna universally depicted as someone with blue skin?

Hindu religion believes in symbolisms and the blue color is a symbol of the infinite and the immeasurable. According to Swami Chinmayananda, the inspiration behind Chinmaya Mission, whatever is immeasurable can appear to the mortal eye only as blue, just like the cloudless summer sky appears blue to the physical eye. Since Lord Krishna is beyond our perception, it seemed apt to attribute this colour to him.

i think as long as people read dickens a small percentage of those will also read wilkie collins (was writing partner in his various magazines, along with gaskell and a few others. actually, those nameless others might be candidates for this thread)

R.D. Blackmore

Wilkie Collins is cool.

I greatly enjoyed Phoebe Judge's reading of The Moonstone. It did indulge in a bit of Orientalism, but no more than most works of the time.

Some of Dickens other peers were William Ainsworth, Thomas Love Peacock, Mrs. Henry Wood, Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Kingsley, George MacDonald, Charles Reade

Charles Reade is a lot of fun, esp. Foul Play

bulwer-lytton is reponsible for snoopy's "it was a dark and stormy night" and also the concept of VRIL

george macdonald's thing was GOBLINS

Trollope also contributed to All The Year Round. and Gaskell. and Le Fanu. but those were the only names i could name anything by.

https://www.amazon.com/Author-Who-Outsold-Dickens-Ainsworth/dp/1526720698

I hope people still read Trollope's The Way We Live Now: a vast banger and still timely.

I've never Trolloped, but it's so Dickens adjacent and lily has been talking it up so much that he's on my to-do list for next year.

Ainsworth sounds like it might be a romp, his highway-man stuff. also plague and fire stuff.

lots of Trollope still in print btw, by multiple publishers, so i figure it must sell.

Oh yeah, tons of tv adaptations of his books too

Yeah, just putting in gratuitous plug. Based on a real life Englisn scam fever (T.'s own father-in-law enthralled by the Railway King, for inst). In the book, a lot of the people who see the guy as Humpty Dumpty still want a piece of the action ASAP and fuck you if you get in the way, if not sooner. Some comedy and different notes in the serious, but Steadicam realness too dark for some of his fans.

just saw a Bernard Malamud book at the local little free library -- a paperback in a plastic bag, like it had been preserved for resale value -- and thought, wow, that book (The Fixer) was EVERYWHERE when I was a kid

I hope people still read Trollope's The Way We Live Now: a vast banger and still timely.

― dow,

This novel kicked off a Trollope phase. He's so much fun, and his interest in contemporary politics is refreshing.

I keep meaning to try him out again, I have some cool old eds. of his stuff

I've still only finished one Dickens book (Great Expectations).

One of those writers who always feels easy to put off - I'll get to Bleak House eventually /cope

just realised ainsworth is the author of ROOKWOOD, which refurbed the rep of dick turpin inc.inventing his wild overnight ride from london to york -- which his famous horse black bess did not survive :(

i mainly know it thru the medium of toy theatre

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Dickturpin.jpg

Does anyone read Andrew Greeley anymore? Catholic priest who wrote steamy potboilers in the 80s and 90s.

Trollope remains popular, widely in print, new TV adaptations still being made of his books, not even close to the "no one reads anymore" bin

Because, among other things, he actually rules and you guys should try HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT and CAN YOU FORGIVE HER?

I think he was just mentioned as a peer of Dickens, not an unread novelist

Isn't John Major the world's biggest Trollope stan?

that wd be my aunt tbf

oh sorry for my knee-jerk trollope defense

I know I've talked up Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset on ILB many times (and named myself after a character in it, which is a pretty obvious giveaway that I like it), but seriously, it's so good.

oh I see koogs mentioned me upthread! sorry for posting before reading.

Really dug Trollope's non-fiction North America, about, yes, traveling across North America and noting what he sees.

Almost as sharp as Dickens' own book.

More possibilities (have not checked if any of these have been reissued reassessed etc.):

Hans Koning or Konigsberger: Only know him through 2 relatively obscure film adaptations: The Revolutionary with Jon Voight, and John Huston's A Walk with Love and Death
with Anjelica Huston in her debut.

Evan Hunter: Excluding Ed McBain. I have only read Last Summer - OK, but the movie is more effective - and flipped through the sequel Come Winter, which is a straight retread, except minus the first book's most interesting character.

Pat Booth: In the Danielle Steel/Jackie Collins/Harold Robbins mode, but doesn't seem to be as remembered. Used to flip through these as a kid in the 90s looking for the naughty bits.

Also, to comment on a couple of suggestions made upthread:

I don't know if Spider Robinson *ever* had any rep among the cool SF kids, as least as far as critics and fellow authors goes. The last joke in the last issue of Bruce Sterling's Cheap Truth zine revolved around him.

Richard Brautigan's downward rep as a dated hippie novelist has been around for a while. When I was first digging into the counterculture (then-) canon in the early 90s (you know, Burroughs, Ballard, the usual crew), he was already considered terribly passe. The main thing I remember was that some guy at the time (90s) legally changed his name to "Trout Fishing in America". Which is kind of impressive.

Surprised that no-one mentioned Jerzy Kosinski, but I didn't think of him myself until tonight. He was well-known enough that I read Being There as a kid, though the decline in his reputation can't have helped his claims to posterity.

Has anyone mentioned Richard Bissell? I have a soft spot for Goodbye, Ava.

Prompted by a viewing of A Place in the Sun: Does anyone read Theodore Dreiser?

I reread Sister Carrie a dozen years ago and it grabbed me like The House of Mirth did.

I greatly enjoyed that in the Library of America omnibus (alleged naughty bits restored) with Jennie Gerhardt and Twelve Men (profiles). However, my sister tried to read An American Tragedy (basis of A Place in The Sun) and said some of the sentences were so long and winding that when she got to the end she was lost. But I spied it in the library last week, think I might take a shot.

I read the beginning of something by Brautigan where a girl came in crying about being knocked up and the narrator offered her a candy bar and I quit. Got a little further into something by Tom Robbins which had no especially low or any point, was just twaddle.

Jerzy Kosinski was eventually accused of fraud, but always had his defenders, and some say the books are good, no matter who wrote what (dunno, haven't checked):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Kosi%C5%84ski#:~:text=In%20June%201982%2C%20a%20Village,of%20Nicodemus%20Dyzma%20%E2%80%94%20a%201932

Kosinski seems to still be attracting readers, judging from all the Goodreads ratings of The Painted Bird from Oct 2022

https://slate.com/culture/2022/10/rod-mckuen-best-selling-poet-songs-what-happened.html

Poetry, but Related

Helen Hooven Santmyer (November 25, 1895 – February 21, 1986) was an American writer, educator, and librarian. She is primarily known for her best-selling epic "...And Ladies of the Club", published when she was in her 80s.[3][4]

The saga:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22...And_Ladies_of_the_Club%22

https://slate.com/culture/2022/10/rod-mckuen-best-selling-poet-songs-what-happened.html🕸

Poetry, but Related

I started a book of his last night, but James Purdy was a real critical favorite back in the day, and despite the fact that many of his books were recently reprinted, I know very few people who have read any of them. Almost none of those who have have read anything beyond Malcolm or Eustace Chisholm.

As I noted in the seasonal book thread a while ago, this is sort of understandable— gay sadomasochism with an air of southern gothic isn’t really a go-to genre. But jesus, they’re incredible books.

Does anyone read Theodore Dreiser?

I went through a Dreiser kick about ten years ago. Dude desperately in need of an editor but deeply otm re: America generally in the Cowperwood books. A Hoosier Holiday is honestly a hoot, he has a bad day in Ohio and actually rants a little

I read "...and Ladies of the Club" in one sitting when it came out. (I can't figure out how I did it, either.) I don't recall much to distinguish it from any other bestseller of the day.

I read Purdy in 2004 after Gore Vidal wrote one of his last coherent essays reappraising him. "Southern Gothic sadomasochist" is right on. The tonal control reminds me of Paul Bowles (another Veee-dal fave) but I found Purdy less compelling.

(The library copy of Malcolm hadn't been checked out since 1983 lol).

I suppose people still read Bowles, or at least The Sheltering Sky.

I suppose people still read Bowles, or at least The Sheltering Sky.

I prefer his short stories.

Re: Bowles, I refer to only one: Jane, because she wrote most of his books.

I had not heard that. Her writing under her own name is still admired.

I like Two Serious Ladies.

I hadn't heard that accusation, table! Funny how Judy Davis, who played Jane Bowles in Naked Lunch, played in Barton Fink a woman who wrote Faulkner's books.

Jane and Paul are different stylists too. She's arch, light; he's matter-of-fact to the point of creepiness.

This doesn't sound like the letter of someone who has written her husband's novel:

Five years later, when Jane was writing her story “Camp Cataract,” she revealed that their fiction not only stimulated them but also made her intensely competitive. She wrote Paul, with many doubts and insecurities, “I hope maybe to have done enough writing by then so as not to be completely ashamed and jealous when confronted with your novel. At the moment I can’t even think of it without feeling hot all over. And yet if you had not been able to do it I would have wrung my hands in grief. . . . However little I have done I am pleased with but shall probably throw it in the rubbish heap when I see yours.”[29] But her writing stopped soon after his began, and his far greater talent quietly eclipsed her own.

It sounds like they edited each other quite a bit:

In 1942 his stimulating role in the creation of her novel provided the impetus for his own career as a writer: “I went over Two Serious Ladies with her again and again, until each detail was as we both thought it should be. . . . We analyzed sentences and rhetoric. It was this being present at the making of a novel that excited me and made me want to write my own fiction. . . . Neither of us had ever had a literary confidant before. . . . We showed each other every page we wrote. I never thought of sending a story off without discussing it with her first.”

That reminds me of the scene in "Henry and June" when Miller is editing a page of Nin's work.

And that reminds me that Miller and Nin are probably two novelists (loosely defined) whom very few people, if anyone, reads any more.

hmm, that sounds wrong

Miller was hugely respected a couple of generations ago--I started reading him because Hunter Thompson praised him to the skies. I think he's fallen very far in the collective estimation, although I could be wrong.

He was certainly a writer capable of moments of genius, but overall a difficult person. I really became disenchanted when I read a biography. He seemed to spend the last decades of his life continually asking friends and associates for money.

I couldn't finish a Miller book if you paid me, but Nin at her best holds up fine. She reminds me of Maupassant. I wouldn't mind re-reading her now (though I suspect she's in storage).

Yeah, I probably shouldn't have lumped the two together. I've read Nin's erotica, but none of her other work. It's very well done.

Miller and Nin were part of a hipster canon and they will probably still be read alongside Burroughs and Bukowski even if they aren't influences on new writers anymore.

Burroughs' voice was his best asset. I love his spoken word stuff. His books are almost unreadable. Not sure how much hipster cachet any of those writers has any more, though--they're all about as relevant as Kerouac.

Goodreads:

Henry Miller- 149,408 ratings
Anais Nin- 86,584 ratings
William S. Burroughs- 239,549 ratings
Charles Bukowski- 678,629 ratings

Bukowski running away with the field.

Jane Bowles- 5,149 ratings
Paul Bowles- 43,056 ratings
Helen Hooven Santmyer- 12,976 ratings

I "rated" Tropic of Cancer when I joined Goodreads even though I read it in about 1990.

I thought Tropic of Cancer was good in its gamy (also gamey) way, and Orwell gave it a very favorable review, which I wouldn't have expected (two very diff favorites of mine converging). But one Miller was enough, somehow, like The Moviegoer was enough (very satisfying) Percy.
Burroughs has his moments on the page, but agree that its his voice, reading his own stuff, that really works; ditto, for the most part, Ginsberg and even Kerouac, in his quirky vocal way (backed by Steve Allen on piano, as some mentioned re Dylan's Nobel speech)
I find Jane Bowles' fiction compelling, with a sense that she's finding her own way through it, with only some sense of direction and goal. Didn't get very far in The Sheltering Sky, but may try again.

I had the Kerouac box on Rhino. His spoken word stuff was far more engaging than his written work.

Nice mention on The Moviegoer. A friend of mine back in the 80s recommended that book to me as portraying a character very much like him (my friend). I read it and was like, "Really, dude?"

That book is an all-time fave, I will never not love it

moviegoer is definitely not enough percy imo. i like all his weird books but i think the last gentleman and love in the ruins are better and more interesting than the moviegoer.

I think I read Lancelot, but now I am not sure. I guess it wasn't memorable.

All of these apps will be subsumed into X.

Oops, wrong thread.

as far as the hipster-friendly writers go, Bukowski is the most enjoyable to me by far and seems like the one who is most likely to retain his cachet.

Do people still read Ken Kesey or so they just watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?

I heard some guy in a grey ponytail recently humblebragging about running with The Merry Pranksters, does that count?

I don't remember how good I thought it was, but from the frequently fogged, medicated (he'd get upset and they'd slam him with Thorazine or the like) POV of the Chief, jolted into scenes, eventual continuity, but not conventionally realistic like the movie: Big Nurse was his built-up, cartoonized reaction to the actual nurse, for instance, not that she actually wasn't doing some evil shit (at least, he was pretty sure). The reader is challenged to sort it all out. Would be worth attempting another read, I think, if I happened to come across it.
His other best-known novel, Sometimes A Great Notion, was most sympathetic to the female character, but the two brothers fighting over her seemed like a false or extreme dichotomy, the manly man (more "sympathetic") and neurotic artso (two sides of the author?) Got to be an outdoors soap opera, although liked the bit about some people being influenced/pressured by their good looks.
He published some others way later, after the Pranksters travels, but I rarely saw them.

(There's really no good reason not to look into more Percy; thanks for the tips. Adam.)

To me the only good Percy novels are the first two. He turned into a grumpy old man after that. Seem of his essays are good though.

I have no quarrel with the notion that Moviegoer and Last Gentleman are the best of his novels.

For essays/belletres/nonfiction (stretching the term), Lost in the Cosmos is great and Message in the Bottle is pretty good.

Those four are probably all you need of Percy, but you definitely need him to have existed.

Yes. This is about my assessment as well. I am a pretty big fan of all of those. I liked a few bios of him I read too.

I guess his other claim to fame is kind of midwifing or being the doulos for A Confederacy of Dunces.

I'd never heard a "Jane ghost-wrote for Paul" accusation before, but a friend did describe to me at length one evening a scenario in which Paul was blamed for spiriting Jane away from her social circle, her descent into alcoholism, the drop-off in her literary output, and even complicity in her death. I re-read "Without Stopping" for any clues that this was the case, but if it was the case, Paul's autobiography didn't suggest it. I haven't read Jane's biography, but "Camp Cataract" is stronger than anything Paul wrote, imo

Bukowski widely reviled by most literary types, fwiw— people find his misogyny appalling, because it is!

Like, edgelord bros and pervy straights will always love him but anyone with sense knows the guy wrote maybe one book’s worth of food poems.

Mickey Rourke playing Charles Bukowski in Barfly was pretty much peak 80s bad bro masculinity.

John Irving

― Misirlou Sunset (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, October 2, 2022 12:51 AM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Was just thinking about him and wondered if he had been mentioned yet. I did my independent essay (let's not call it a thesis) for A-level English Literature on The World According To Garp, do not think I've a word of his since.

Nobody has mentioned E. L. Doctorow, is that because he's still widely-read?

Haven't read Bukowski since the 90s but think he had his moments.

Doctorow a good candidate, no idea who's reading him this days. In fact I tend to get him mixed up(!) with somebody who I believe was already mentioned, the author of The White Hotel, D.M. Thomas.

as far as the hipster-friendly writers go, Bukowski is the most enjoyable to me by far and seems like the one who is most likely to retain his cachet.

Going by what's available at my local Barnes and Noble, yes. Bukowski has more books on the shelves than Burroughs, Kerouac, Miller and Nin combined.

I started a book of his last night, but James Purdy was a real critical favorite back in the day, and despite the fact that many of his books were recently reprinted, I know very few people who have read any of them. Almost none of those who have have read anything beyond Malcolm or Eustace Chisholm.

I just read the New Yorker essay and was startled by how Purdy was considered part of the "hot center" of the literary scene in the early 1960s.

I never even heard of Purdy until I found a used copy of a 1960s black humor anthology a few years ago (not the Bruce Jay Friedman one, but a later one).

Oh, and although this is obviously drifting away from the thread topic, the rows of Dave Barry, P.J. O'Rourke, and Erma Bombeck etc. books in the humor section of the local used bookstore make me wonder if anyone still reads old humorists of the essay/non-fiction variety if they're not, say, SJ Perelman or someone of that stature.

Wait, that reminds me of one of the greats who is now out of print and barely read and fits the original, narrow parameters of this thread, Veronica Geng.

Except not a novelist. :(

John Edward Williams wrote four novels between 1948 and 1972. Stoner (1965) is his most famous and is really good, and Augustus (1972) won the National Book Award, but he definitely fits the description of a novelist who no one reads anymore

I’m not a fan of Bukowski’s misogyny but like many other awful people I find a lot of his work compelling.

You're probably not that awful, omar.