Favorite IRL authors

[EmilyMiller]

This must have been done before, but:

1. Steinbeck
2. Conrad
3. Greene
4. Cornwell
5. Blair
6. Fitzgerald
7. Verne
8. Dumas
9. Adams
10. Wells

How about you?

Em

 

[cdstefi]

J G Ballard for the sheer strangeness.

Stephen Baxter for genuinely inventive and thought-provoking sci-fi.

Then most of the above too, with James Joyce included. Also The Power by Naomi Alderman is one of the most impressive recent novels I've read.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

Joyce first and foremost. I reread Finnegans Wake every year to find more in it.
Eco
Calvino
Barth
Fowles
Melville
Steinbeck

Others, too, and these are just the novelists. There's playwrights and poets and essayists and humorists and ...

 

[CyranoJ]

This must have been done before, but:

1. Steinbeck
2. Conrad
3. Greene
4. Cornwell
5. Blair
6. Fitzgerald
7. Verne
8. Dumas
9. Adams
10. Wells

How about you?

Em

1. James Baldwin
2. Herman Melville
3. Joseph Conrad
4. Alexandre Dumas
5. Octavia Butler
6. Ursula K. LeGuin
7. Nnedi Okorafor
8. N.K. Jemisin
9. Leo Tolstoy
10. Patrick Chamoiseau

Really hard, but this is my answer at this moment. Honorable mentions to Anne Desclos and Johanna Lindsey, two key inspirations for my erotic writing.

 

[stonedinstilletos]

The ones that pop to my head when I read this are Harper Lee, CJ Cherryth, and Lois McMaster Bujold.

 

[SimonDoom]

Joyce
Fielding
Austen
George Eliot
Twain
Dickens
Nabokov
Tolstoy
Dostoevsky
Shakespeare
Neal Stephenson
Eb white
Edith Wharton
Roald Dahl
Hg wells
Updike
Swift
Steinbeck
Greene
Poe

Later additions:
John Le Carre
Elmore Leonard
Cormac McCarthy
Tolkien
Ray Bradbury
Raymond Chandler
George Orwell
Flannery O'Connor
Isaac Asimov

 

[ElectricBlue]

John le Carré
John Banville
Mervyn Peake
J.G.Ballard
China Mieville
Haruki Murakami
Gerald Seymour
Minette Walters
Richard Brautigan
Clive Barker
Joseph Conrad
T.S.Eliot
Ezra Pound
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

[onehitwanda]

1. Robin Hobb (Megan Lindholm)
2. Neil Gaiman
3. Terry Pratchett
4. Patrick Rothfuss
5. Neal Stephenson
6. Iain M Banks
7. Robert Heinlein
8. Cormac McCarthy
9. Ursula Le Guin
10. JRR Tolkien

 

[Bramblethorn]

It'll change from year to year, but currently something like:

Seanan McGuire
Neil Gaiman
Clive Barker
Cat Valente
Martha Wells
Stjepan Šejić (though hard to unpick the "writer" side from the "artist" side here, since part of his talent is in making the words and the pictures complement one another)
Ursula Vernon
Courtney Milan
Tamsyn Muir
Giovanni Guareschi

 

[AchtungNight]

It'll change from year to year, but currently something like:

Seanan McGuire
Neil Gaiman
Clive Barker
Cat Valente
Martha Wells
Stjepan Šejić (though hard to unpick the "writer" side from the "artist" side here, since part of his talent is in making the words and the pictures complement one another)
Ursula Vernon
Courtney Milan
Tamsyn Muir
Giovanni Guareschi

These and most of the others mentioned plus Rick Riordan, Brandon Sanderson, Carrie Vaughn, Stephen King, Lindsay Buroker, Clive Cussler, Michael Crichton, Jonathan Maberry, Janet Evanovich, Garth Ennis, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Gail Simone, Terry & Rihanna Pratchett, and Drew Hayes.

 

[Cagivagurl]

In no particular order...
A few of my favourites.

Jane Rule
Patricia Highsmith
Anita Cornwell
Mary Renault
Sarah Waters

 

[djrip]

Thomas Pynchon
Neal Stephenson
William Gibson
Gene Wolfe
Samuel Delany
Alan Moore
Robert Jordan
Neil Gaiman
China Mieville
Iain M Banks
Octavia Butler
Ursula K LeGuin
Haruki Murakami
JRR Tolkien
Alfred Bester
Ray Bradbury
Philip K Dick
Robert Howard
HP Lovecraft
Edgar Allen Poe
Edit: Vernor Vinge!

 

[yowser]

My list has duplicates from many others but three on it which are unmentioned so far:

David Foster Wallace
Jhumpa Lahiri
Elif Batuman

 

[MillieDynamite]

The shortlist, in particular order

Bram Stoker
Mary Shelly
Robert Louis (pronounced Lewy) Stevenson
Jules Vern
H.G. Wells
Louis L'Amour
Clarence E. Mulford
Walter Mosley
Ralph Ellison (Oklahoma native)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Dashiell Hammett
Agatha Christie
Raymond Chandler
Edgar Allan Poe
P. D. James
Erle Stanley Gardner
James Baldwin
Zora Neale Hurston
Toni Morrison
Maya Angelou
Alex Haley (who is not to be confused with the next writer)
Arthur Hailey

EDIT: The clumping together of a few black writers wasn’t intentional. Didn't even realize it until it was done.

 

[Comshaw]

1. Issac Asimov
2. Mark Twain
3. Jack London
4. Joe Haldeman
5. Frank Herbert
6. Ursula Le Guin
7. Robert Louis Stevenson
8. Steven Barnes
9. Jack Kerouac
10 . Alexander Dumas
11. Tim O'Brien
And many many more, but this is the top tier.

Comshaw

 

[StillStunned]

One of my favourites is Dorothy Dunnett. She doesn't do "show, don't tell" so much as "create a picture and let the reader do the thinking", She also has a very subtle way of presenting breaks in dialogue to let the reader guess the speaker's thoughts and feelings without explicitly naming them.

It's a style that's hard to shake once you see how it works, but unfortunately not a very popular one. I keep finding myself having to say things explicitly that I feel are implied.

 

[AlinaX]

1. Octavia Butler
2. Nnedi Okorafor

I need to read more Butler, and I loved Binti.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

Oh you all have such good tastes

In order of their appearance in my mind and my favorite book of theirs:

Ursula Le Guin - A wizard of Earthsea
Agatha Christie - Murder of Roger Aykroyd
John Le Carre - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Jim Harrison - Legend of the Fall
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Katherine Paterson - Bridge to Terabithia
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
Anne Sewell - Black Beauty

answers might be different tomorrow.

 

[onehitwanda]

Cormac McCarthy - The Road

The best book I will never, ever read ever again.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Ya sure about that? Come on, crack that spine open one more time.

The best book I will never, ever read ever again.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

The best book I will never, ever read ever again.

So gut wrenchingly terrifying... But so poetic. One of those books that after finishing, I couldn't do anything except Homer Simpson stare into the distance.

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

Last line from the road. Soo beautiful and haunting.

 

[onehitwanda]

Ya sure about that? Come on, crack that spine open one more time.

I'd rather go down on Uglúk the Uruk

 

[Auden James]

How about you?

Off the cuff and with a focus on eroticism, since this is a site for erotic fiction after all, I'd propose the following writers and major works:

• Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Famly Chronicle, Lolita
• Georges Bataille, Histoire de l'oeil (Story of the Eye), Madame Edwarda, Le Bleu du ciel (Blue of Noon)
• Arthur Schnitzler, Traumnovelle (Dream Story)
• Arno Schmidt, Seelandschaft mit Pocahontas (Lake Scenery with Pocahontas)
• Alina Reyes, Le Boucher (The Butcher)
• Nicholson Baker, House of Holes, The Fermata
• Anne Desclos, Histoire d'O (Story of O)
• Anaïs Nin, Little Birds, Delta of Venus
• Marquis de Sade, Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu (Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue), Les 120 Journées de Sodome (The 120 Days of Sodom)
• Régine Deforges, L'Orage (The Storm)
• Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus im Pelz (Venus in Furs)
• Rudolf Borchardt, Die neue Dido (The New Dido), Weltpuff Berlin (Berlin: Brothel of the World)
• Vanessa Duriès, Le Lien (The Ties That Bind)
• Henry Miller, Opus Pistorum, Tropic of Capricorn
• Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Onze Mille Verges (The Eleven Thousand Rods)
• Michel Houellebecq, Les Particules élémentaires (Atomised)
• D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
• Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
• Felix Salten (or Anonymous), Josefine Mutzenbacher (Josephine Mutzenbacher)

 

[MillieDynamite]

Does Portnoy complain about being portly? Sorry, that's bad.

 

[Auden James]

Does Portnoy complain about being portly? Sorry, that's bad.

No, I don't remember anything about this particular complaint, but he sure complains about not having had a place to wank off in peace at his parents' house!