Novelists No One Reads Anymore

Wow. Watch out for dust mites and silverfish!

Michael moorcock?

i still read Moorcock sometimes

His intros to other people's books or his own stuff?

I read him for the first time this summer, the Elric Saga Vol. 1 collection, i.e. the first four Elric books in terms of internal chronology.

They're pretty fun, but I don't think I'm a huge fan yet.

He's a writer with excellent ideas who has a lot of trouble using words well. I read the Elric books as a kid and really had to force my eyes through his prose on a re-read a few years ago.

Fantasy strikes me as a genre where there are lots of readers willing to dig deep, and where writers can have a long shelf-life compared to literary writers of similar relative status.

i feel MM kept his excellent ideas well out of the elric series

(xpost!)
Sinkah has had some choice words to say about Moorcock's way with words but hard to locate them in the archives.

yeah, fantasy, horror and science fiction readers are quite willing to read older, out-of-fashion writers

he was always the go-to pop poet for midbrows to hate on (runner-up: leonard cohen)

― mark s, Friday, 28 October 2022 bookmarkflaglink

✔️✔️✔️

Didn't get into first Elric trilogy (too soon after Urth of the New Sun, for one thing), didn't really focus on his Hawkwind lyrics, but in last five years or so have come across some good new stories. Well, the first part of one (I think in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) about most recent (American & allies involved) Afghanistan War seemed a bit stilted in the battlefield, maybe because he'd never been in war, but when the main character gets to Kabul, and re-encounters a woman x olde webs of complicity and duplicity re dealing with various factions of governments, as well as each other---it gets better. Also liked the brawny sandy savvy steampunker he contributed to Old Mars, a good RR Martin-Dozois-edited collection of all-new stories. Di

I had no idea Hawkwind was an actual band when I read Time of the Hawklords.

he was always the go-to pop poet for midbrows to hate on (runner-up: leonard cohen)

― mark s, Friday, 28 October 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Rod McKuen piece in Slate recently

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

I’m in my 40s but only heard his name as a punchline in Giffen & DeMatteis Justice League comics

That Slate link is the ICP of this thread

Insane clown posse?

Yes

Just a reference to the “Bands with their own subculture “ thread where people continuously post ICP
(The Slate link has been posted here 3 times btw)

Ha oops

In fairness one of those posts was within the quote part of a reply to the previous such post.

As Angus Wilson and Murdoch have both been mentioned I came across this review of a book by the former on the latter.

Wilson's value, if any, was as a gossip.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/sep/06/biography.highereducation?

You're confusing AN Wilson with Angus Wilson there

Haha ah so that's a writer I do not know a lot about.

the old men at the zoo (angus w) was made into a TV drama in the early 80s!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldvbZmtm7_E

tho tbh i feel this was a last little throb on the slope of his forgetting

that title has stuck with me, and that appears to be the extent of my knowledge

Two kids authors that were relatively omnipresent on the mid-80s WH Smith shelves of my childhood, but now never even turn up in charity shops: JH Brennan and John Antrobus

None of the novelists today will be read.

there’s so little contemporary literature that has the potential to be classic (i.e. to be appreciated outside its immediate context). nobody in a hundred years is going to read donna tartt or sally rooney as literature (even if they might read them as cultural history)

— rose ❤️‍🔥🗡 (@roselyddon) November 1, 2022

tweeters with a time machine

Incidentally I am not sure if I ever read a piece of old literature as cultural history xp

I read Madame Bovary once to find out what kinds of hats were considered unfashionable at the time.

Think cultural history is at least a component in my enjoyment of...everything, really.

Yes, what will last is silly. But there are many novels published in the last two decades that will have an interest as exciting things to read

xp = guess the Anatomy of Melancholy is interesting as an insight of how people thought about depression, but it's the expression of it that really holds for me.

I kind of feel like the default case for literature is to be forgotten. What percentage of old books are remembered decades or even centuries later? I would guess much less than 1%. So predicting that something will be forgotten is kind of easy.

OTM. See also all the languages gone missing over the millennia.

It is hard to think of recent authors who I actively hope will be read in the future. Whether as literature or as a time capsule.

It's a very abstract question and it is, of course, not ours to decide. There's a (possibly apocryphal) thing about how if Henry Ford had asked his customers what they wanted, they would have said "faster horses."

Elinor Glyn was pretty popular; so was I dunno Tom Clancy or whoev. If you time-traveled to 1850 and asked art critic which painters would still be talked about in 100 years, they would almost certainly answer wrongly.

I do not weep for the legacy of, say, Donna Tartt. But in my secret heart I kinda hold out hope that maybe George Saunders will still be read in future.

Think the concept of timelessness during the time of the author’s life is weird and it’s not as though it’s remotely objective.

Also, books not being read anymore is hardly indicative of this quality, like trends affect books too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2ujNVw8Shk

I know, we’re talking novelists, but George Crabbe is a perfect example of this— someone well-regarded in his time by Byron, Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, and others, he is virtually unheard of in English letters today. I think that part of it is his form— he wrote exclusively in heroic couplets lmfao— and part of it is that the narrative poem, with some exceptions, has dramatically fallen out of favor with the reading public.

The whims of the reading public are unpredictable, and so any predictions re: timelessness are quite silly.

I predict the Captain Underpants books will still be read in 2407

I met a traveller from an antique land iirc

Every other sentiment an antique.

Crabbe was on the syllabus when i did English Lit in the late 80s, tho only in a minor way. his biggest connection to the present is probably Britten's Peter Grimes i'd guess

anyway it's hard to write anything at length about the contingencies of what "lasts", never mind a quick Tweet with a lazy handwave at The Canon

my tweets will last, yours are already forgotten

Crabbe was on the syllabus when i did English Lit in the late 80s, tho only in a minor way. his biggest connection to the present is probably Britten's Peter Grimes i'd guess

We read him alongside Pope in an 18th century lit class.

Dryden obv has more name recognition but he's not much read/discussed, is he?