Novelists No One Reads Anymore

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