As Holden once told me, which authors would you call up?

[Munro]

I just finished The Catcher in the Rye which I adored, I'm gonna be thinking about it for ages, and when I finished it I wanted to call up old J.D. Salinger to have a chat and all, about the book and all. I remembered how Holden Caulfield once said that in the earlier chapters in Pencey College about authors he had read. It's quite an interesting thing to say, don't you think?

So, which author/s did you want to call up after finishing their book? Just for to chew the goddam fat and all for a while.

[den]

Would love to have a few words with Mario Vargas Llosa... :oops: Loved Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and well, all of his books.

Bohumil Hrabal, would love to hear how crusty and curmudgeonly he really is.

And would love to have some absinthe with Aldous Huxley and talk metaphysics and make fun of people with him :P

Camus, Sartre, Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea, a lovely movie too) and would love to drive to South America with Henri Charriere (Papillon and Banco)

[den]

Oh yeah, loved Catcher in the Rye, would love to talk to J.D. and Holden.

[AbdoRinbo]

I'd have sold my soul to shoot the **** with Jack Kerouac after reading On the Road.

[Munro]

Yes, J.D. Salinger would have been a good author to talk to after The Catcher in the Rye, and me and Holden would've gotten on well I think.
Like den, I always want to talk to Albert Camus after his books, and to talk about his journeys both geographically, and philosophically.

On the subject, as Holden once touched on, of authors I wouldn't really want to chat with after their books, I didn't really feel like talking to James Joyce. I loved A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it was beautiful and brilliant to me...but yes, he does seem arrogant.
Same goes for T.S. Eliot. There seems to be a lot of writers who were arrogant bastards. My English teacher and I were talking about it, and he wondered that if they're thinking on a level different to everyone else, then maybe they can be excused for not being...very nice. I still think that humility is an important trait for any person, great, brilliant or otherwise.

[Downer]

Oh crumbs, praticaly any of them.
Has anyone actually tried getting in touch with an author?
Downer

[AbdoRinbo]

Oh crumbs, praticaly any of them.
Has anyone actually tried getting in touch with an author?
Downer

I once crank called William V. Spanos, the author of such verbose, pompous, circumlocutious, bombastic, pretentious, derrogatory, condescending critical theory works such as America's Shadow and Heidegger and Criticism.

[fayefaye]

i'd LUV to call a. dumas, if he weren't dead and i could remember more than two words of french. maybe jand austen would be really interesting to talk to. once again, if she were alive now.

[Shea]

Actually, I would love to simply talk to Lucy Maud Mongomery. She's not my favorite author, but I did love the Anne series growing up, and she reminds me more of one of the fun little old ladies I go to church with that I like to talk to anyway.

I think talking to Hugo or Dumas would put me in an embarrassed silence after I've commended them on how much I loved their works. :oops:

[aentonius]

I related with Catcher immensely. I do feel exactly like Holden often. The world full of phonies! If only the world were innocent and true.

I would like to talk to Dostoevsky, Fyodor. His writings are kinda dark, but I like his understanding of the human condition, specially suffering. He was a brilliant suffering man. His best work--The Brothers Karamazov!

[EAP]

Actually, I would love to simply talk to Lucy Maud Mongomery.

Ditto.








The message you have entered is too short. Please lengthen your message to at least 10 characters.

[higley]

Hmm, Jeff Shaara. I love US history and his war novels are extraordinarily well-researched and thoughtful. I bet he'd be fun to talk history with. And Ray Bradbury, too--but I wouldn't talk, I just want to listen to him.

Also, I was fascinated by The Prince. I'd like to talk to Machiavelli, dig into his mind a little, see how the gears work.

[Ryduce]

OK heres my list and why
Twain=for laughter
Steinbeck=because he's my idol
Vonnegut=For war stories
Hemingway=To go fishing and have a good time
Rowling=So I could ask for money

[Unspar]

Has anyone actually tried getting in touch with an author?
Downer

I haven't, but I've heard a couple good stories.

I read an article written by a guy who was "chanelling" Joseph Conrad. The whole thing was pretty absurd. Apparently JC was coaching this dude on writing a novel, but about two-thirds of the way through, Conrad told him to quit. Sounded to me like Conrad made the right call cuz this guy could not write for the life of him.

One of my professors at UW-Madison tried very hard to get in touch with Thomas Pynchon, who's notoriously reclusive. He checked like every phone book, and none of them listed Thomas Pynchon. So then he checked the phone books for names of Pynchon's characters, and he found one (I wish I remembered who...my guess is Roger Mexico), got in touch with him, and made a lunch date. At this lunch, the guy kept insisting that he wasn't Thomas Pynchon, though my professor never suggested that he was. Very interesting, especially considering the vast paranoid conspiracies of Pynchon's books.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

I went to a Terry Pratchett book signing once to get my brother a signed book as a birthday present (I queued for 2 hours!) Obviously, we didn't have a lot of time to chat. But my brother was really impressed.