Twenty Contemporary Authors

Several months back I realized that there are quite a few relatively contemporary authors that are not on everyone’s reading list. One clue to this phenomenon was that the best-seller and must read lists being published around the internet and even on ink & paper publications seemed to contain the same dozen or so authors month after month with only a few new authors touted, often because their first novels either came out of some prestigious creative writing school or because they followed the rules of popular fiction espoused by the more established and possibly less imaginative best-selling authors.

What do writers write for nowadays? Is today’s writing more internal or external? Does it attempt to understand and explain human existence or is it a fast buck and a movie contract? Is this quotation an accurate representation of publishing and reading in today’s world?

"Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade;
today it is the reverse." -- Joseph Roux

So I started a little list of authors I suspected were not being universally read but who had a good chance of breaking through the proverbial Jacqueline Susann syndrome and consigning all of Stephen King’s books to the recycle bin. Here is that list of authors, limited to only twenty names even though it could have been much longer:

Twenty Authors to Consider

1. Kobo Abe
2. Kathy Acker
3. António Lobo Antunes
4. Angela Carter
5. Julio Cortázar
6. Robert Coover
7. J. P. Donleavy
8. Rikki Doucornet
9. Marguerite Duras
10. Raymond Federman
11. Juan Goytisolo
12. Alain Robbe-Grillet
13. Peter Handke
14. Michel Houellebecq
15. Bohumil Hrabal
16. Clarice Lispector
17. Naguib Mahfouz
18. Javier Marías
19. Hanan al-Shaykh
20. Robert Walser

How many of these famous authors do you recognize? How many have you read? Do you have any authors of a lesser known fame that you would recommend?