Novelists No One Reads Anymore

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.