Your favorite writer

[Zooey]

So who is your favorite writer? Or if there's more than one, list those who used their pen (or typewriter or computer) to speak to you like nobody else seems to. And I said writer, so that includes novelists, poets, short story writers, and everything and everyone in between- basically anybody who has puts words onto paper for us all to enjoy that means something to you.

And for the sake of discussion, give a few reasons as well, even if it seems impossible to put feelings into words.


(Don't worry, mine will be on their way very soon! :) )

[Munro]

When it comes to writers I'm fairly scattered. I read a novel by one author and don't read another by the same one for a year or two, which doesn't give me much of a chance to develop a strong liking for any particular writer.
Except for George Orwell, who I believe is the 20th century's greatest and most important writer. He turned political commentary into an art form with Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, wrote clear, simple yet brilliant prose, and his other novels also contain sharp social commentary worth reading. His works are significant now more than they ever were. By far he is my favourite writer, and is somewhat of a inspiration for me.

[jamesting]

Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Keats, Shelley, Tolkein, and DH Lawrence

[Eric, son of Chuck]

Malory, Dumas, Pratchett, Gaiman.... Pretty eclectic, eh?

[Who Moved My Cheese]

"Except for George Orwell, who I believe is the 20th century's greatest and most important writer."

In complete agreement with Munro, Orwell's brilliance is displayed both through his style of writing, and also his incredible ability to forshadow our social and political, self-created fates. Another outstanding writer that comes to mind is Edward Albee, who's exception pieces, "The Zoo Story" and "The American Dream", have also influenced my own artistic capabilities (in terms of writing; cause I am artistically challenged when it comes to drawing).

[Admin]

John Donne is my favorite poet, I don't have a favorite novelist though.

[Ian Walkinshaw]

My name is Ian. I'm very very new at this, and I'm having a little trouble figuring it all out so bear with me. I'm a big fan of Greene, Maugham, Mishima, Oe, Forster and Conrad. If anybody would like to...I don't know, chat, or email or whatever you do, give me a yell.

[crisaor]

I prefer to speak of writings rather than writers, for obvious reasons, but here are some (no specific order): Jorge Luis Borges, Homer, Aldous Huxley, William Shakespeare, Umberto Eco, Tolkien, Alan Moore, and I'll agree with eric about Gaiman.

There are many authors I like because of one writing only, not included here.

[Zooey]

Greene, Maugham

Hey Ian. Glad you could join us here.

Haven't read anything by either of these authors, but have wanted to for a while now. Was wondering what you would recommend.

[Sofia]

My favorite writer is Selma Lagerlöf (Nobel Prize winner 1909). Her novels mix the traditional Nordic myths with psychological portraits of amazing characters. Her language is simple but yet so precise - so beautiful it makes me cry… I don’t know how many of her novels are translated into English and how easy they are to get hold of but I recommend you all to read something written by her. My favorite novels by Selma is The Emperor of Portugallia, Jerusalem (or The Holy City as it sometimes has been translated into), and Gösta Berling’s Saga.

Other Swedish writers I like (who I know are translated into English) are Vilhelm Moberg and Marianne Fredriksson.

Some novels I like written by non-Swedish writers are: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, Bless me Ultima by Rudolf Anaya, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris and In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason.

And - of course - Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and Joyce's The Dubliners

[Shuai]

Doyle and Dumas. Robert Jordan is also a great writer in my opinion, even though he doesn't follow the trend of all the other authors mentioned above (i.e. he's not dead).

[Zooey]

And - of course - Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and Joyce's The Dubliners There's are all books I've been eyeing lately. I've been told that The Dubliners is the best place to start with Joyce. Would you agree?

And there's another thread currently in GL about Samuel Beckett that you might want to check out.

[grepi]

... Mishima, Oe, ...

since you are already into japanese writes, i guess haruki murakami would be a good read...

cheers

[Robert E Lee]

[quote="Zooey"]I've been told that The Dubliners is the best place to start with Joyce. Would you agree? [quote]

Yes, Dubliners (not The Dubliners) is the best place to start for Joyce, and it's also the best place to stop: it's the only decent thing that arrogant prick Joyce ever put on paper.

[Pequod]

afterr reading A Portrait of the Artist asa Young Man I hope I never have to read any of Joyce's work again ... :x (oops did I just type that??)

ok as for writers I really do enjoy...

I am very much into the poetry of edna st. vncent millayand edwin arlington robinson. I am very fond of millay's imagery and robinson's inscrutable yet touching characters.

Dramatists I enjoy include Millay, Susan Glaspell, and Sophie Treadwell their plays offer inspiring glimpses into the lives f ordinary people, especially women. I also adore Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and Arthur Miller, because while these three men have ery different styles each is able to peer away the veneer of society to expose the secret desires of their characters. I think Pinter and Stoppard are remarkably good at this as well.

Lastly, novelists:
Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad are writers I once disliked but have anew perspective on. In addition, Wilde's The Pcture of Dorian Grey, Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Cather's The Professor's House Ford's The Good Soldier, and Cisneros' The House on Mango Street. There are a million other's I have left out to be sure, but these come immediately to mind. Oh and I must reiterate, Orwell is a genius!

[ergill_sanchez]

Yes, Dubliners (not The Dubliners) is the best place to start for Joyce, and it's also the best place to stop: it's the only decent thing that arrogant prick Joyce ever put on paper.

Oh Lee, you never fail to amuse me. I imagine you feel that Ulysses as well as Finnegans Wake aren't worth a second, and obviously your allowed to have such an opinion, but just because you don't like them does not make you some sort of superior critic who has broken through the mindless hoard that is popular opinion. It just means you have a different opinion. As I have a different opinion than you . . . but once again, that doesn't make me better.

Thanks Zooey, for bringing up my thread.

[Arteum]

Greene, Maugham

Hey Ian. Glad you could join us here.

Haven't read anything by either of these authors, but have wanted to for a while now. Was wondering what you would recommend.

I am sorry to barge in, but I am also a great admirer of Maugham's works and I thought I could recommend a thing or two. I read almost all his short stories and now am finishing his most famous novel, "Of Human Bondage". It is generally agreed among critics that W.S. Maugham is one of the best short-story writers in English literature, if not peerless. Some of the especially dramatic stories that made a profound impression on me are:

"Unconquered"
"Mackintosh"
"The Alien Corn"
"The Door of Opportunity"
"The Human Element"
"His Excellency"
"The Fall of Edward Barnard"
"The Pool"

What to say of "Of Human Bondage"? It is the story of my life, if you lop off the details :)

[Shea]

I've never read anything from Maugham yet, but out of cuiosity what was "Mackintosh" about? And, because I'm not familiar, what sort of writer is he? You see, my maiden name was the same of this title only it was spelled 'McIntosh'. :)

[Arteum]

As a reply to Shea's recent post:

I believe you have a wonderful discovery ahead of you then, if you're still unfamiliar with W.S. Maugham. Read any opinions on-line (I have no doibt, you'll find plenty of them), but to save you some clicking, I'll just mention that one famous critic said that for an intelligent and educated person in 20th century it is simply unforgivable to ignore Maugham's works.

He was called one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, one of the finest masters of English language and an unmatched explorer of human character.

Although, not all the critics were so benevolent:

"[Maugham], is perhaps the outstanding contemporary British novelist in the naturalistic tradition. He is prolific both in fiction and in drama, but his serious reputation rests essentially upon "Of Human Bondage (1915)", which is generally considered the best of the frank, unsitimental autobiographic novels... Maugham has much culture, competence, and urbanity; but he has no poetry, no philosophy, and little imagination; and like all materialists he finds no significance in life..."

Mackintosh is the name of the person who was an aide of the governor of a small island, a colony of Britain in the 19th century. Secretly hating the governor, Mackintosh uses his intelligence to indirectly goad a native into commiting an enormity over his boss...

[Shea]

As soon as I've settled Monte Cristo, I think Mackintosh will be my next adventure! Thanks!

[Apathetic]

George Orwell without a doubt in my mind is the greatest novelist. His books 1984 and Animal Farm are two in which have paved a way in the political world today.

Jane Austen is another favourite, her books are a great read and allow you to relax and enjoy yourself with a serious yet humorous text.

And for poetry, Wilfred Owen is by far one of the best i have had the pleasure of reading. His war poems are tremendous and go into great detail the life during and after the War.

[maya]

I do love Albert Camus' "The First Man" although it is incomplete. The other one is Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". I read it with an adoring feeling that he could wrote a novel in a foreign language so fluently.

[AbdoRinbo]

George Orwell without a doubt in my mind is the greatest novelist. His books 1984 and Animal Farm are two in which have paved a way in the political world today.

You should read 'We' by Yevgeny Zamyatin if you think Orwell is such a great novelist. Big Brother, the Telescreens, the clandestine love story beneath the political climate, &c. were all torn from Zamyatin's original dystopia. At least Huxley had the common decency to admit his debt to the exiled Russian author who--unlike Orwell--actually lived through the Bolshevik revolution and the years of Stalin that ensued. 1984 is a great story, but Orwell is given far too much credit for his minimal contribution to high-school literature.

[kadamba]

Yeah all this Orwell hype gets tedious very quickly. I think stop signs made a more remarkable literary contribution to modern thought. Sure, hundreds of thousands of people are influenced by his writing, but the die-hard cynics like myself will continue to say things like this that actually say nothing but may at times sound worthwhile











still say he's not worth it though. Give me a few hundred lines from sara teasdale any day of the week

[alatar]

Personally, I prefer Tolkien, Homer, Lewis, Herbert, and Doyle.

[Munro]

I would say that all the Orwell critics here should perhaps read a few of his essays before they denounce the man so quickly. His major contributions to the English language and to history are in his essays and less in his novels, of which only a couple are recognised as classics. Read Shooting and Elephant, Notes on Nationalism and Can Socialists Be Happy? As for his experience with communism, he experienced it first hand when fighting the Spanish Civil War alongside the communists and anarchists.
Aldous Huxley was a brilliant man, more of an intellectual aristocrat than Orwell, from a rich background, unlike Orwell. However they are not to be compared, they were very different writers, and only one of their many works each are similar, and solely because they are dystopian. Other than that they didn't have much in common except that they were brilliant.

[AbdoRinbo]

I would say that all the Orwell critics here should perhaps read a few of his essays before they denounce the man so quickly. His major contributions to the English language and to history are in his essays and less in his novels, of which only a couple are recognised as classics. Read Shooting and Elephant, Notes on Nationalism and Can Socialists Be Happy? As for his experience with communism, he experienced it first hand when fighting the Spanish Civil War alongside the communists and anarchists.
Aldous Huxley was a brilliant man, more of an intellectual aristocrat than Orwell, from a rich background, unlike Orwell. However they are not to be compared, they were very different writers, and only one of their many works each are similar, and solely because they are dystopian. Other than that they didn't have much in common except that they were brilliant.

Yeah . . . hmmm . . .

[AbdoRinbo]

I would say that all the Orwell critics here should perhaps read a few of his essays before they denounce the man so quickly. His major contributions to the English language and to history are in his essays and less in his novels, of which only a couple are recognised as classics. Read Shooting and Elephant, Notes on Nationalism and Can Socialists Be Happy? As for his experience with communism, he experienced it first hand when fighting the Spanish Civil War alongside the communists and anarchists.
Aldous Huxley was a brilliant man, more of an intellectual aristocrat than Orwell, from a rich background, unlike Orwell. However they are not to be compared, they were very different writers, and only one of their many works each are similar, and solely because they are dystopian. Other than that they didn't have much in common except that they were brilliant.

is 'Huxley was an aristocrat' your best link? Sorry to rain all over your parade, but the aristocracy in England fell over a century ago.

[AbdoRinbo]

I would say that all the Orwell critics here should perhaps read a few of his essays before they denounce the man so quickly. His major contributions to the English language and to history are in his essays and less in his novels, of which only a couple are recognised as classics. Read Shooting and Elephant, Notes on Nationalism and Can Socialists Be Happy? As for his experience with communism, he experienced it first hand when fighting the Spanish Civil War alongside the communists and anarchists.
Aldous Huxley was a brilliant man, more of an intellectual aristocrat than Orwell, from a rich background, unlike Orwell. However they are not to be compared, they were very different writers, and only one of their many works each are similar, and solely because they are dystopian. Other than that they didn't have much in common except that they were brilliant.

Hee hee hee hee. You're right . . . just because I didn't mention 'Shooting an Elephant', &c. means I haven't read them. Please, for your own sake, come down off that ivory tower.

As much as it pains me to engage in quasi-intellectual discussion with artsy dilettantes, I should like to point out that Orwell's contribution to the sum of human knowledge is almost exclusively political. The fact is, Orwell should have stuck to writing essays . . . 1984 and Animal Farm--both political and social allegories of the Bolshevik uprising (which he did not partake in)--are poorly rounded justifications for the debunking of Marxism (but, perhaps, legitimate towards Stalinism too a small extent). If I had a nickel for every time some assclown shouted out in class that 'Hitler was a Commie', I'd have enough to buy a gun and shoot myself.

Then again, Orwell was right on the nose when he said that 'when the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys.' But trying to relate that to anything other than Imperialism or Deconstruction is a waste of breathe. Then again, you'd probably say that it is entirely debatable, which is fine. But how is that literary? Because Orwell wrote political stories that could be passed off as classic literature? Well, he wasn't the first. And I would be much more cautious when stating that two notable authors 'are not to be compared'. They might be incompatible, but they are most certainly comparable. I could compare Orwell to Joyce(!), given the right context. Anyway, let's keep those discussions literary.

[Tabac]

Yes, Dubliners (not The Dubliners) is the best place to start for Joyce, and it's also the best place to stop: it's the only decent thing that arrogant prick Joyce ever put on paper.



Come on, Robert E. Lee. Don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel!

[AbdoRinbo]

Yes, Dubliners (not The Dubliners) is the best place to start for Joyce, and it's also the best place to stop: it's the only decent thing that arrogant prick Joyce ever put on paper.



Come on, Robert E. Lee. Don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel!

Robert E. Lee should read the Richard Ellemann biography of Joyce before assaulting people with trite comments, useless pop trivia (actually, Lee, it is 'the Dubliners'--though not in the title, 'the' has become commonplace when speaking of the Dubliners), and other atrocities.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shows a Joyce who has matured far beyond the artist who wrote the Dubliners as a hostile retort to the Irish culture that framed his self-image (except, of course, for 'The Dead', which shows the germs of sympathy that would be cultivated in Ulysses and, finally, in Finnegans Wake).

I recall the forbiddingly difficult third episode of Ulysses, as well was the seemingly endless array of mindless pleasures in Finnegans Wake. But, in spite of all the criticism surrounding him, Joyce is a salutary splash of water in the face of modern literature. In the opening episode of Ulysses, for example, the sun is not rising over the sea, it is 'merrying over the sea'. It's the attention to detail that makes Joyce, not a 'literary' genius, but a man whose works contain, within themselves, a rainbow's manifold of genius. Anyway, all three novels are fraught with riddles (especially the latter two), and it goes without saying that, not only has Joyce changed the way we read literature, he has changed the way we read the world around us. After all, the fluid flow of Finnegans Wake is 'the brook of life'.

[pankaj]

Hi,
I don't have no doubt about it .I feel Dostoevsky is the greatest writer that has ever walked on this earth.My other favourite writers are Leo Tolstoy, Albert Camus. :D

[pooh_bear]

i really, really like mary higgins clark.... i like her because she really makes good, unique stories and admirable flow of events... shes not like other authors who tend to replicate stories again and again... roll which made her earn the title "queen of suspence." wink

[Tamara Kaye Sellman]

Gabriel García Márquez is way up there on the list for me.

[Munro]

Adbo Rinbo, I enjoyed your fiery reply very much. You write very well.
I actually said "more of an intellectual aristocrat than Orwell, from a rich background, unlike Orwell." An intellectual aristocrat is an aristocrat not in the sense of wealth and social status, but as you might concede by the precedent to the word in question "intellectual", I actually meant that Huxley had descended from a remarkable background of arts and sciences (the poet Matthew Arnold and the scientist Thomas Huxley, both of whom were pioneers of their fields at their times), not necessarily a rich one. Your rain, therefore, is not falling after all.
I concede I was mistaken in saying that the two authors were 'not to be compared', and the correct word is 'incompatible', as you propose.

If you believe that political writing doesn't qualify as literature, then I suppose that you will be willing to denounce poets like Shelley, Yeats and Neruda as 'not literature' because their writing was political, despite it's beauty and brilliance? I suppose then, according to you, that Arthur Miller's plays shouldn't be considered literature, as they were political also? Political writing can be art, and it was what Orwell intended to achieve before his death. Politics affects society, and writers respond to society, and therefore one would affect the other.

I agree with a lot of your reply, and your views interest me greatly, but I especially agreed with this: Let's keep this discussion literary, and not personally insulting. If you are brave enough to converse with quasi-intellectuals and artsy-dilettantes like myself, then go a bit further to do so with respect for our opinions, and try to stifle that contempt for the lessers you obviously find so repulsive.

[AbdoRinbo]

If you believe that political writing doesn't qualify as literature, then I suppose that you will be willing to denounce poets like Shelley, Yeats and Neruda as 'not literature' because their writing was political, despite it's beauty and brilliance? I suppose then, according to you, that Arthur Miller's plays shouldn't be considered literature, as they were political also? Political writing can be art, and it was what Orwell intended to achieve before his death. Politics affects society, and writers respond to society, and therefore one would affect the other.

When the 'literature' suffers as a result of the political aspect . . . it ceases to be literature. Shelley was a great poet, as well as a captivating thinker (politically and otherwise), but his political commentary couldn't have saved him had he written poetry as lame and useless as Joyce's (I'll be the first to admit it). Orwell, on the other hand, had the grace of political eloquence, but was not a profound novelist in my opinion; so, subsequently, we should look to his political essays for the good stuff.

We have to be careful, though. Right before Operation Iraqi Freedom there were some very heated debates going on . . . none which were in the least bit literary. I'm sure a lot of people simply quit frequenting this board altogether because of the constant bantering back and forth. I apogize for my little outburst, but condescending presuppositions like 'I would say that all the Orwell critics here should perhaps read a few of his essays before they denounce the man so quickly' only invite hostile retorts. You are obviously an admirer of Orwell, and I am a firm believer that (as Henry James once wrote--and I'm paraphrasing) 'the only obligation a novel has is that it be interesting'.

Orwell does interest me . . . but what makes a novel interesting and what makes a novel a work of literature are two questions that are almost entirely exclusive. But isn't that the reason why we have these forums--to ponder what it is that makes art so profoundly human?

[Aurica]

Shakespeare
Oscar Wilde
Pushkin's prose
Gogol

[rafewheadon]

Fav writers

Christopher Marlowe
Dante Alighieri
Homer
Virgil
Aeschyles
plutarch
sophocles
Shakespeare
William robert shepard
Maynard James Keenan

[AbdoRinbo]

Maynard James Keenan

Héé héé héé héé. That's funny.

[gterpenkas]

Aldous Huxley, Kurt Vonnegut, Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde, Aristophanes (read Nicholas Ruddal's translation of Lysistrata, its the closest translation to the original Greek that I've ever seen), Tom Robbins, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

And by the way, Orwell was a fool, plain and simple. If you really take the time to re-read and digest his works, you find that he cuts off almost every idea very short, almost as if he is affraid to truly express himself. To me, this is a very serious crime, as literature is an art form, and there are no restrictions in good art. Don't get me wrong, he has my utmost respect. Even though there are many flaws in his writing that can ruin the work, the ideas are just gold, pure gold. And for those who love 1984, read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, then re-read 1984. You will see what I mean.

Sorry for going off on a tangent here, but 1984 goes down as one of the worst written books I've ever read. His ideas are brilliant, but he does so many things that are absolutely disgusting. For example, when Winston et. al. first hear the voice from the telescreen, "You are the dead," the chapter should have ended. The following six pages are boring, and completely ruined the novel for me. Ponder on this: Wouldn't the book be better without that crappy, boring part that completely killed the climax?

[Phoenix_Tears]

My favourite writer would definitely be J.K.Rowling. She has her faults to be sure, but i cannot help losing myself for hours immersed in the Harry Potter realms. Stephen Kking criticized her work saying that she used many expressions in how her charactours talked, expressions that were not supposed to be used in the way she used them. 'he spoke angrily' for example. you do not speak angrily, you speak in an angry tone. But i am a big fan of J.K.Rowling.

[Arteum]

Is it allowed to pronounce such names as J.K. Rowling and Stephen King at a literature website?? :-? :evil: These authors stand in the same relation to literature as Spice Girls do!

[Blackadder]

The question was who's your favorite writer, Arteum, not which writer will you claim to like in order to impress others. Give them a break, please.

[Phoenix_Tears]

My dearest Arteum!
It was not fair for you to take a go at me so. The topic was merely what my favourite authour was. Must i be persecuted for telling the truth?! It is not for you to judge Mrs. Rowling or Stephen King. When Mr. King's books have made many a classic movie and Mrs.Rowling's books fly off the shelves faster than the people can stock them. I believe you owe me an apology. Why must you be such an ***?
-Phoen-X-

[gatsbysghost]

For sheer entertainment value I have to go with Douglas Adams. I didn't find anything really groundbreaking or revolutionary in the Hitchhiker's series but at the same time I couldn't draw myself out of that world until he ended it. So he must have done something right.

Aldous Huxley and George Orwell for chilling portraits of the future, which appear to be ringing more true as time goes by.

Mark Twain for taking on the social ills of his time in a light hearted manner that makes for good reading today.

And F. Scott Fitzgerald for teaching me that revision is the most effective route to excellent storytelling.

[Pendragon]

Mark Twain
J. R. R. Tolkien
Dave Barry
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Edgar Alan Poe
H. P. Lovecraft
Robert E. Howard

for poetry

Emily Dickinson
Odgen Nash

Many may think me strange. I'm used to it. Dragon out. :)

[Lady19thC]

For novelists:

Jane Austen
The Brontes
Charles Dickens
George Eliot
Thomas Hardy
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Tolkien
Ray Bradbury

For poets:

Longfellow
Christina Rossetti
Lord Byron
Thomas Hardy
Tennyson

Best story-teller:

Washington Irving :)

[Edmond]

not in order
Dickens
Lao Tse
Huxley
Doyle
Guy. De Maupassant
D.Quinn
A.Dumas

[Scatterbrain]

Oscar Wilde
Arthur Rimbaud
Sylvia Plath
Jean-Paul Sartre
Shakespeare
George Orwell
Friedrich Nietzcshe
Virginia Woolf
Anne Sexton

[adilyoussef]

Charles Dickens
Jamse Joyce
Virginia Woolf
Thomas Hardy
Allan Folson
Hemingway

[Satine]

Poetry:
Emily Dickinson
Walt Whitman

Literature:
Hemingway
Emily Bronte
Harper Lee
J.D. Salinger
F. Scott Fitzgerald
C.S Lewis (don't know if he qualifies as lit, but a favorite for sure)

You know, I'd like to think that my favorite writer has not yet been discovered. That someday i'll pick up a book by someone I've never read before or have read very little of before, and be blown away. Days like that are great. A friend recommended "The Sun Also Rises" by Hemingway and I'd never read his stuff before (only short stories), opened a whole new world for me...SO...who knows? Hopefully my list will evolve over time...

[Nocturnal]

Poetry:
John Milton
Percy B. Shelley
John Keats
Lord Byron
William Shakespeare
William Wordsworth
Y.B Yeats
Fernando Pessoa
Camilo Pessanha
Emily Dickinson

Novelist:
Thomas Hardy
D.H Lawrence
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Melville
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Eça de Queirós
Leo Tolstoy

Drama
William Shakespeare
Aeschylus
Sophocles
Marlowe
Henrik Ibson
Oscar Wilde
Seneca

[shortysweetp]

Jane Austen
Brontes
Alcott
Tolkien
there are more I just cannot think right now

and when I was younger Laura Ingalls Wilder

and my guilty pleasure
Stephen King

[burnsie13]

So many cool people ... Pequod, you must like Melville! So many Orwell fans, and that is cool, but I don't see him as the most important of the 20th CENT. Hemingway? Faulkner? Fitzgerald? Orwell gave us double speak but he did not change the structure of the language as Hemingway and Faulkner did. And Fitzgerald... no one should learn to drive a car before first passing physics class AND THEN reading Gatsby.

send some love,
burnsie

[Wendigo_49]

Laurence Sterne
Par Lagerkvist
Hermann Hesse
William Faulkner
Joseph Heller
Jonathan Titchenal (google it)
Samuel Beckett

Many to come.

[Literal]

Margaret Mitchell
Jane Austen
Charlotte Bronte

(But, of course, this list will constantly be revised and added to) :)

[chatnoir1311]

Emily Bronte
Oscar Wilde
Ovid
Friedrich Nietzsche
Choderlos de Laclos
Jane Austen
Friedrich Schiller
Samuel Richardson
Jean Paul Sartre
Shakespeare
Edgar Allan Poe

.........hope the list will be continued

[mono]

I think I have avoided this thread for long enough, because even trying to think of a favorite writer, or narrowing them down to five, even, sounds difficult, but . . . here goes, and no one has to actually read this:

In fiction: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Honoré de Balzac, Washington Irving, Giovanni Boccaccio, Edgar Allan Poe, Zora Neale Hurston, J.D. Salinger, and Harper Lee.

In non-fiction/philosophy: Immanuel Kant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Leonard Shlain, Dwight Goddard, Lao-Tzu, Confucius, Dag Hammarskjöld, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, George Berkeley, Carl Jung, Cicero, Michel de Montaigne, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, James Carse, Robert Anton Wilson, and Lucretius.

In drama: William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Arthur Miller, Oscar Wilde, Christopher Marlowe, Tennessee Williams, Heinrich von Kleist, and Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere.

In poetry: Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, Elizabeth-Barrett Browning, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dante Alighierhi, Petrarch, Jalaluddin Rumi, D.H. Lawrence, William Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Sylvia Plath, Arthur Rimbaud, T.S. Eliot, William Stafford, Lord George Gordon Byron, William Blake, William Butler Yeats, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Sappho, Ben Jonson, Pablo Neruda, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sharon Olds, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Theodore Roethke, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg.

[MrBojangles]

I have alot of reading to do...but personal faveorites used to be J.D. Salinger and H.P. Lovecraft a couple of years ago. At the moment, my faveorite writer is Thomas Mann.... and how come no one has mention Kipling, OR Agatha Christie (mothers faveorite)

[becca2389]

Novelists
Zadie Smith
Evelyn Waugh
Kingsley Amis
EM Forster
Jane Austen
Sebastien Japrisot

Poets
Christina Rosetti
Wilfred Owen
Seamus Heaney

Drama
Shakespeare (you have to put that....but he is simply genius)

My ultimate favourite (the one who completely changed the way I look at/approach/analyse/write literature) is Salman Rushdie. Midnight's Children is just brilliant, though I admit some of his other works are well below this standard

[YellowCrayola]

Novelists so far I've liked. I have yet to read others. :)
Ray Bradbury
Richard Bach
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Harper Lee

Poetists
Pablo Neruda
E. E. Cummings

[Monica]

Eco, Eco, Eco, Eco. The rest is Eco... :D

[Pensive]

My favourite writers are:

Katherine Paterson

JK Rowling

Emily Bronte

Charlotte Bronte

Jane Austen

George Eliot

Betty Smith

Edgar Allen Poe

[vidyanjali]

Dramatist: Ibsen, Tennessee Williams & GB Shaw
Poet:Rabindranath Tagore, William Wordsworth,Emily Dickinson, Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes and many more.
Fiction writers:Helen Dunmore,R.K.Narayan,Charlotte Bronte,Jhumpa Lahiri and many more...

It's a long list actually!

Vidyanjali

[slipperyyoke]

Hemingway, Tolstoy, Miller, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, Melville, Cronin, and, and, and...... Dang it, I'll post again when I can narrow it down to merely a handful. Don't hold your breath on that happening anytime soon though.

[subterranean]

Am currently reading Measure for Measure. As I have only reached scene 4, I don't want to jump in to conclusion that I like Shakespeare (I never "liked" his works other than the sonnets). Yet, I found this play quite amusing. So I suppose I'll wait till I finish and then I'll decide whether it'll be my first and last play, or I'll be tempted to read other plays.

[Pensive]

oh, I forgot Charles Dickens. He is also one of my favourites.

[bhekti]

Dostoevsky and Hemingway, yes.. , and Pramoedya Ananta Toer

[starrwriter]

I'm going to sidestep your question a bit and tell you the funniest writer I ever read.

It used to be Hunter S. Thompson until I read "The Ginger Man," a novel by J. P. Donleavy (who not coincidentally happened to be Thompson's favorite writer.)

"The Ginger Man" is insanely hilarious. While reading it, I laughed so hard I got a stomach ache. It's about an American married to a young British woman and going to college in Ireland. The plot is a strange combination of the mundane and the bizarre: drunken pub crawls and private parties, the reek of body odor because no one seems to own a bath tub, dodging landlords due to lack of rent money, sodomistic infidelity with campus girls, twisted Irish humor about bestiality and incest, etc.

Oddly enough, "The Ginger Man" made the list of the 100 most important novels published in the 20th century.

[ponynikki]

Mikhail Artsybashev-Sanin, Nietzsche, Dante, Donne, Gaiman, and of course- Dahl :D

[Vampire Kari]

Anne Rice. Without a doubt, she's my all time favorite!

[A Hard Rain]

Well... I've only recently renewed my fervor for literature.

what a feeling.

It seems like I fall for every writer that comes my way. Even if the novel isn't particularly good as a whole, there always seems to be some great germs in it someplace.

Right now, for me, it's Hemmingway.

I like Faulkner too.

Hemmingways style is neat.

I've not heard much of anyone mention hemmingway on this board yet.
How do you feel about Hemmingway?

[el01ks]

Georgette Heyer, Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time series), Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Trudi Canavan, Terry Pratchett.

And a big round of applause for all the people who said steven king or JK Rowling! This is a literature forum, not just for 'classics'.

[starrwriter]

I've not heard much of anyone mention hemingway on this board yet. How do you feel about Hemingway?

It's PC party line today to knock Hemingway as an over-rated writer, mean drunk and wife abuser, but I still enjoy his writing. I started reading Hemingway when I was a teenager and I loved his concise style and snappy dialogue. He definitely had his limits as a writer, but he worked very hard to become a craftsman of modern fiction. And he strongly influenced a whole generation of American writers more than Faulkner or Steinbeck.

I think the novel of purest Hemingway is "The Old Man and the Sea." He wrote it at age 54 after most critics thought he was burned out as a writer. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, which helped to propel Hemingway to the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Because he wrote so much about war, Hemingway has been unfairly criticized as a warmonger. But no warmonger would write this: "In modern war you will die like a dog for no good reason."

Like many authors, Hemingway had two distinct identities. One was the public personna he invented to keep the world at arm's length: macho big-game hunter, deep-sea fisherman, soldier of fortune, etc. The other was a rather sensitive introverted man given to philosophical reflection. Real macho men don't sit alone for hours every day and dream up fictional characters to write about.

[strategos]

Pre-1923
Charlotte Bronte
Charles Dickens
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Arthur Conan Doyle
Alexandre Dumas
George Eliot
Herman Melville
Leo Tolstoy

Post
William Faulkner
William Golding
Joseph Heller
Guy Gavriel Kay
Daniel Keyes
George R.R. Martin
James A. Michener
James Jones
Philip Roth
John Steinbeck
Neal Stephenson
John Updike
Connie Willis

[Kiwi Shelf]

Let's see who I can think of:

Carol Shields
Madeleine L'Engle
Anita Shreve
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Lilian Jackson Braun
Tolkien
Barbara Gowdy
Douglas Coupland
Douglas Adams
James Rollins
James Fray
Wally Lamb
Judy Blume
Nicholas Sparks
C.S. Lewis
Sue Miller

There are others, but it is too early for me to remember everything. Those are just the authors that I have read recently and enjoyed.

[el01ks]

Personally, I prefer Tolkien, Homer, Lewis, Herbert, and Doyle.

Which Lewis?

[A Hard Rain]

starrwriter-- thats interesting. Thank you for the input. Yeah, like there is certain things that hemmingway does with his style that blows me away. Other times i'm like man maybe he didn't even do that on purpose. But, he had to of. It is just a little perplexing. And he does seem to have a certain stigma like you mentioned. I did not know much about him but i just finished his a fairwell to arms. I knew about his lodge in Idaho, the alcohol, and the rifle.

Whatever you say, he was beautiful. And i agree that the old man and the sea may be his most minimalistic, true to his style piece.

'Up the road, in his shack,the old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions.'

It is hard at times, the blood and sweat, the aching pains that we go through. Hemmingway just seems so full of life when I look back at him though. Being young and in Europe. The war and the culture.

His short stories and sketches are what first caught my attention.
Like this one:

Chapter V
They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.

[starrwriter]

"Maugham has much culture, competence, and urbanity; but he has no poetry, no philosophy, and little imagination; and like all materialists he finds no significance in life..."

That last part was difficult for me to swallow after I discovered it was true. Maugham died a nihilist. I wonder how he could have written such a spiritually uplifting novel as "The Razor's Edge" if he believed in nothing.

But I still enjoy his short stories. They are effortless to read and always fascinating. I rank Maugham among the best short story writers with de Maupassant, Hemingway and Salinger.

[ThatIndividual]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, George Orwell, Friedrich Nietzsche...

[Countess]

There seems to be a common appreciation for the Russian novelists (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy) on this site. I find that interesting. I share that admiration.

I also love Oscar Wilde, even if he did only write a single novel. The man's anagrams are pure genius.

Of course, I appreciate God's work, and also occasionally read Kierkegaard, Poe, Shakespeare. I've read the other German / French existentialists, but have lost interest in them. Dabbled in Salinger and Vonnegut in High School, but likewise, have not found them as compelling now that I am older.

T

[ThatIndividual]

When you say "God's work," is it the Kierkegaard to which you refer? Do you mean to include also Poe and Shakespeare? (As tone is impossible to communicate/decipher through text in a discussion thread, know that this inquiry of mine is neither sarcastic nor disrespectful in any way, but rather, one amiably rooted in genuine interest.)

[starrwriter]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, George Orwell, Friedrich Nietzsche...
Someone is an existentialist. You forgot Kierkegaard.

[MiSaNtHrOpE]

My favorite books were written 40-50 years ago or more

Lit. Fiction:
Aldous Huxley (#1 favorite)
George Orwell (who denies the power of 1984?)
Anthony Burgess,
Ray Bradbury (F451: The only lit. fiction book I've read where the author is still alive)

Drama/Playwrites: Shakespeare (I loved Macbeth and I plan to read Hamlet)
Henrik Ibsen for Enemy of the People
Arthur Miller

[ThatIndividual]

Indeed. I've been accused of that more times than I can count. However, we existentialists tend to shun the label 'existentialist.' So really, I'm the non-existentialist existentialist. I disagree with every existentialist I've ever encountered in some way or another, as they all do with one another.
(Actually, it's from Kierkegaard that I lifted my screen name. I love him very much, despite his religious deficiencies :) Little joke there. I guess...

[starrwriter]

There seems to be a common appreciation for the Russian novelists (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy) on this site. I find that interesting. I share that admiration.
I like Dostoevsky more than Tolstoy. His psychological insights go much deeper. "The Kreutzer Sonnata" is the only Tolstoy novel I really enjoyed. "Anna Karenina" is soap operish like Flaubert's "Madame Bovary." And "War and Peace" is far too long with too many characters.


I also love Oscar Wilde, even if he did only write a single novel.
Me, too. Wilde was the supreme European wit. Too bad he died so miserably.

[starrwriter]

Indeed. I've been accused of that more times than I can count. However, we existentialists tend to shun the label 'existentialist.' So really, I'm the non-existentialist existentialist. I disagree with every existentialist I've ever encountered in some way or another, as they all do with one another.
It wasn't an accusation. Existentialism was the most influential philosophy of the 20th century. Some of my best friends are existentialists.

[Countess]

>When you say "God's work," is it the Kierkegaard to which you refer?

I see why you ask. Taken metaphorically it could be argued that all good literature is a derivative of God, since God is the ultimate source of all talent.

Hmm...I meant the Bible, but now that you mention it, your implication is more accurate.

>Do you mean to include also Poe and Shakespeare?

For the record, if you've read "The Imp of the Perverse", you understand I can imagine no greater work on the psychology of sin in the mind of man (except Chapter 7 from Doestoevsky's "Notes" that bears a *very striking resemblance* to "Imp".).

Shakespeare - all his tragic figures notably asked the very gravest of life's questions.

Good question / conversation.

You could call me an exexistentialist - LOL - but it's a lie. Every day I get up I wonder why.

T

[Countess]

Originally Posted by Countess:
I also love Oscar Wilde, even if he did only write a single novel.
Starwriter said:
Me, too. Wilde was the supreme European wit. Too bad he died so miserably.

I have a friend who is intimately aquainted with Oscar Wilde - knows his biography by memory, met his sons and is familiar with his father's work. Wilde was the victim of his own decadence, which ironically he parodied in Dorian.

It is sad. In my opinion, he has no peers like other writers.

T

[ThatIndividual]

I didn't take it negatively. An accusation isn't always bad.

[ThatIndividual]

I just added that signature coincidentally. I surely don't mean that to be directed at anyone. I think now that I've seen it in print again I'll remove it! Sorry if anyone was offended. :angel: :angel: :angel:

[ThatIndividual]

Oh, good it's been removed!! (It was some lyrics to a song by a writer that I adore. I realized that given the context of one of these very recent discussions that it was likely to offend, and likely to offend more than a little.)
Anyway, cheers!

[Massalex]

What's with the anti-Joyce? I realize he is hard but I thought the people in these forums, were I don't know, intellectuals? I like to believe there is an art in what Joyce threw down, even if he was a jerk. Look at Hemingway.

[Annamariah]

Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, L. M. Montgomery, J. K. Rowling

[amalia1985]

Ian McEwan, Bernard Cornwell, Emily Bronte, and many others...

[Bakiryu]

Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, Shakespeare, Terry Pratchett, Geoffrey Eugenides, Anne Rice, and a whole roomful more.

[NickAdams]

I enjoy Jorge Luis Borges for his wonderful worlds.

I enjoy Ernest Hemingway for his masterful control of details: the iceberg principle.

I enjoy William Faulkner for his suspense and emotional impact.

I enjoy Samuel Beckett for his humor and clarity of medium.

[higley]

Ah, cool. :)

Ray Bradbury, Robert Louis Stevenson, HG Wells, Michael Chabon, Dean Koontz, Michael and Jeff Shaara(s), Erik Larson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Shakespeare, Agatha Christie and CS Lewis.

[Reccura]

Louisa May Alcott (yeah yeah, I know, many people think I'm childish), Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, William Golding

[Nico87]

And for poetry, Wilfred Owen is by far one of the best i have had the pleasure of reading. His war poems are tremendous and go into great detail the life during and after the War.

Ooh, very much agree with this comment. I've read every poem of Owen and Sassoon. You should take a look at Sassoon's 'Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man' and 'Memoirs of an Infantry Officer'.

'Parable of the Old Men and the Young' by Wilfred Owen is by far the greatest poem I've ever read. It's included in Regeneration, the movie, where you can also see Owens, Sassoon and Robert Graves. At the end of the movie Dr. William Rivers recieves a letter from Sassoon, I believe, where it says that Owen has been killed in France. Sassoon included 'Parable of the Old Men and the Young' in the letter and you can see Dr. Rivers dropping a tear or two. That scene always makes me want to cry.

For those who have read about WW1 and know what the men in the trenches went through, what kind of massacre WW1 really was, this poem will make a lot of sense to you.

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son....
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Oh, and I also like 'Spring Offensive' and 'The Sentry' by Owen.

[applepie]

Shakespeare, H.G. Wells, Orwell, Dante... I'm sure there are a few more, but those are the ones off the top of my head.

[NathanFisher]

Melville, purely for Moby Dick, Dostoyevsky, Pratchett and Orwell.

[Oniw17]

Plato, Pearl S. Buck, Steven Pressfield, and Roger Zelazny.Also, maybe Keith Taylor, so far I've liked the Bard series.

[Granny5]

I enjoy Hemingway, Orwell, Wells, Buck, Bradbury, early King, Capote, Joyce, Faulkner,Kafka, Tolkien....way too many to list. I think I read Hemingway more than anyone else.

[PVachon]

Victor Hugo, Melville, Dumas, Camus, Ken Bruen, Roddy Doyle, Dan Simmons, Anna Gavalda, Fred Vargas, Daniel Pennac, Arthur Conan Doyle (not just Sherlock Holmes folks!), George Pelecanos, Philip K. Dick, Jasper Fforde, Maupassant, Michel Houellebecq and Vladimir Nabokov!

[NickAdams]

I enjoy Hemingway ... I think I read Hemingway more than anyone else.

:thumbs_up

[Jane's Nemesis]

Call me a weeping willow, but I like Sylvia Plath...I loved her dark sense of humour in The Bell Jar and I really love her evocative style.

P.G. Wodehouse is another favourite, without a doubt. Hilarious comedies with feel-good endings. His jokes and turns of phrase have made me laugh out loud on the bus more than once.

Jane Austen also has a great sense of humour, as well as a great way of creating characters...to the point that someone actually wrote an entire book about Mr Collins alone.

[Erichtho]

My favourite writers are Friedrich Hölderlin and Franz Kafka, the former due to his hauntingly beautiful writing style combined with the highest ideals and an ethereal character, the latter more because of his topics, his disillusionment, simply the way he describes reality.
There are many more writers that I thoroughly enjoy, but those two are my absolute ikons. I feel a strong affinity to both their personalities and biographies. Noone describes the world how it is better than Kafka, and noone can compare to Hölderlin when it comes to how the world should be.

[bazarov]

Dostoevsky, Hugo, Tolstoy.

[johann cruyff]

A tie between Hesse and Kafka.Two of the greatest writers of the XX century,in my opinion.

[Ryduce]

Steinbeck,Faulkner,Dostoevsky,Hugo,and Vonnegut.

[islandclimber]

poet would be Pablo Neruda... Writer is Dostoevsky... and there are so many others I love as well but these two first and foremost...

[Julian Koller]

Tolstoy, Goethe, Pushkin

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Stephen King. Now, before you pounce on me, he is my favorite to read, that doesn't mean I think he is a great author. Just fun stories to read. Now, as for who I appreciate most for there literary talent, I'm not sure. I haven't read enough yet.

[Mark F.]

My top five is Hemingway, Beckett, Kafka, Camus, Chekhov and those tend to remain the same, but yeah I also love Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Bukowski, Salinger, Flaubert, Hunter S Thompson, P K Dick...

[shetland9]

Emily Dickinson would have to be one of my favorite writers, she puts deep feelings into her poetry and has been recognized for it.

[Mockingbird_z]

well i read not that much and many of the books mentioned above i am just planning to read but i think i can mention some:
F. Dostoevsky, J. Steinbeck, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Harper Lee, Turgenyev, Orwell, Woolf, and many others
=)

[moose gurl]

Faulkner is my all-time favorite, then Shakespeare, J.M. Coetzee, and Vonnegut. I have a taste for South African literature or literature set in South Africa or South African writers, like Coetzee and Doris May Lessing. My favorite themes are usually ones that deal with race (Faulkner, Coetzee, Lessing)...I don't really have an explanation for this, maybe it's being raised in the South that did that to me, but it happened that way, and I just find those books fascinating. But Faulkner takes my cake.

P.S. I also really loved The Bell Jar. I am hesitant when it comes to female authors, and I don't like much of Plath's poetry, but I just really related to Esther Greenwood (heroine) in a way that's almost scary, and so I absolutely adored that book. It's probably one of my top 20. Just incredible.

[superunknown]

It seems that the more I read Hemingway the more I like and am amazed by him, so I'm gonna go with that.

[mohakom]

leo tolstoy..........> william bulter Yeats ............> Edgar allan POE..........................>

[moose gurl]

I discovered today that Hemingway wrote a book set in Africa and now I'm totally going to read True at First Light. I'm excited.

[ben.!]

Not too sure of mine. Maybe Oscar Wilde or Nick Hornby. Their prose is so amazing.

moose_gurl, have you ever read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad? That's a tale set in Africa, about a steamer that goes up the Congo, and is also a parallel of going deep into the dark intricate jungle of the human heart.

It's an awesome novella.

[unleashed]

Ian McEwan, Poe, Wilde, Dumas...

[moose gurl]

No I haven't. I've heard of it, but I never knew what it was about. Now, it's on the list.
Thanks.

Nick Hornby is a unique writer. I read A Long Way Down and gave it a 7/10. I love his movies--About a Boy and High Fidelity are both really good. I thought the book was good but at times uninspired. Really good character development, and very interesting story-telling approach. Light-hearted, yet profound.

[Prometheus]

Oscar Wilde.

More to come soon. :p:

[byrd]

From my limited experience, E. E. 'Doc' Smith.

[aabbcc]

Dante and Milton. Currently, at least. Though, to the former at least, I seem to constantly return. Milton is a relatively new discovery in my life, on the other hand, whilst my connection with Dante goes back to my childhood. :D

[libernaut]

http://anatomylesson.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/demian2.jpg

HERMANN HESSE

[Desolation]

Friedrich Nietzsche, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jack Kerouac, Marcel Proust, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry Miller, and Arthur Rimbaud.

[eyemaker]

one of my favorite all-time writer:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NC09_vO_9oQ/ScK14FQwcPI/AAAAAAAACfo/t2BiWjwsNZc/S1600-R/Dostoevskij_1863.jpg

Feodor Dostoevsky
:banana::banana:

[Madame X]

Is it me, or is the resemblance to Jack Nicholson, like, uncanny? :idea:

[Barbarous]

pretty much Joyce & Borges, not quite the limited world.

[wessexgirl]

one of my favorite all-time writer:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NC09_vO_9oQ/ScK14FQwcPI/AAAAAAAACfo/t2BiWjwsNZc/S1600-R/Dostoevskij_1863.jpg

Feodor Dostoevsky
:banana::banana:

No Madame X, although there's a hint of Nicholson, check this out!!!!!




http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.radiotimes.com/content/features/galleries/john-simm/06/mainImage.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.radiotimes.com/content/features/galleries/john-simm/06/&usg=__b2bWf9MwREtHRpA5AkmIFf8ErsE=&h=450&w=450&sz=24&hl=en&start=1&tbnid=BVfgHW0B8HB5OM:&tbnh=127&tbnw=127&prev=/images%3Fq%3Djohn%2Bsimm%2Bas%2Braskolnikov%26gbv% 3D2%26ndsp%3D21%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN

Separated at birth ot what? :lol:

(Just scrape Simm's hair back, or pull Dosty's forward...........)

[DisPater]

I say: William Faulkner.

[dodong]

Eleazar Famorcan in Health and Home and Christopher Marlowe because of Dr. Faustus...

[janus1us]

Dostoyevsky consistently leads me into contemplation of self, society' rules and intrapersonal politics. I love reading this guy.

[WICKES]

Evelyn Waugh is my personal favourite. I am in love with his beautiful, exquisite prose (he is also funnier than PG Wodehouse).

After Waugh comes Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Robert Graves, P G Wodehouse.

As for poetry, my personal favourite is Philip Larkin.

[Jozanny]

I cannot really pick *a* favorite, but for branding the American novel as an equal to the European: Melville, and as the penultimate bridge fusing this at the end of the 19th century, James; of the high modernists, tough but I have to cede to Proust, despite my affection for the Italians, and of the late 20th century, Lessing, Byatt, Gardner.

[five-trey]

Fyodor Dostoevsky towers slightly above George Orwell for me. His writing style is freelance genius and the works I have read from him thus far are markedly impressive. The Idiot is probably the most complex novel I've ever read. Its remarkably difficult for me to fully grasp the implications of that novel...

[Lord Bas]

I'd have to go with Camus being my personal favorite followed by Dostoevsky. Currently I'm finishing Swann's Way by Proust, and although at first his prose style was "different" to what I would normally read, I've grown to like him enough to add him to the list.

[My name is red]

Orhan Pamuk

[Vavasor]

This will sound strange but probably William Godwin. Especially FLEETWOOD.

[larryF]

Couple of guys come to mind:
David Foster Wallace
William S Burroughs
Aldous Huxley
Don DeLillo

[iamnobody]

Dostoyevsky and Vonnegut

[breathtest]

Probably I would have to say Kerouac, as his novels have so much feeling in them, and he had a good appreciation for beauty and was a very sensitive writer.

[osho]

My favorite writer – and he never wrote and only spoke and who surpassed all and rose to a height few could. That is Osho and I am untiringly reading his discourses and each of them is stirring. He is an ocean of inspiration. If you read a particular writer you will read only one aspect of life but when you read Osho you will read a multiple discipline at the same time. He is a timeless person, a mystic. He has no match in this world

[MarvellousG]

James Joyce and Dostoevsky, definitely.

[OPTiiMUM]

That's a tough question to answer; I tend to find a point or idea of value in everything I read. In the majority of literary works, one may find one philosophically or morally important or striking sentence/idea after wading through fifty pages of stories - with different qualities or impact levels. My criteria for a writer who is particularly important to me is one who I find elements of the truth on each page, and this is very rare.


Novelists who fit this criteria include Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Chekhov (though maybe to a lesser extent than the others) Edgar Allan Poe, and Goethe. Philosophers would include, among others, Friedrich Nietzsche.


Having said that, based on my rather loose criteria, poets tend to be much more direct, due to them (usually) having less words with which to get across their point. Poe would also be included in this, however poets such as Rimbaud, Coleridge and Pushkin (also for his short stories) are particularly important to me.

I used to read much more fiction than I do now, as most of my time spent on the humanities involves the reading of pure philosophical work, however those are the writers who have contributed most to the development of my own personal philosophy.

[scarjo]

Russian: Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Czekhov, Gogol
British: Dickens, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Roald Dahl, Graham Greene
American: Poe, James, Wharton
Crime: A. C. Doyle, A. Christie

[soniat]

George Orwell....i think he deserves the credit

[lowradiation]

Pynchon

[Kyriakos]

Guy De Maupassant, followed by Franz Kafka.

[WymanChanning]

My favourite writer would definitely be J.K.Rowling. She has her faults to be sure, but i cannot help losing myself for hours immersed in the Harry Potter realms. Stephen Kking criticized her work saying that she used many expressions in how her charactours talked, expressions that were not supposed to be used in the way she used them. 'he spoke angrily' for example. you do not speak angrily, you speak in an angry tone. But i am a big fan of J.K.Rowling.

Stephen King criticized J.K.Rowling? I would like to criticize Stephen King. He really likes the word "damn". Literature is art, is the highest form of human civilization. How can he indulge himself to use that stupid word so frequently. A masterpiece of literature is a feast. It consists of many different dishes, of which some are made of cheap materials and some are made of expensive ones, but they are all elegantly and delicately cooked, and whille the guests are appreciating the favors of these food, they can still tell the raw material from which they are made. The words like "damn" really can not be presented to the guests because it is bad cooked and made the whole feast disgraced. I don't know whether other American writers also incline to this word or not, if so I will not touch American literature any more, I have got peevish of this word very much.

[Chris 73]

Shakespeare,Harold Pinter,George R R Martin,Robert Holdstock,Daniel Woodrell and Kelly Link.

[TheChilly]

Stephen King criticized J.K.Rowling? I would like to criticize Stephen King. He really likes the word "damn". Literature is art, is the highest form of human civilization. How can he indulge himself to use that stupid word so frequently. A masterpiece of literature is a feast. It consists of many different dishes, of which some are made of cheap materials and some are made of expensive ones, but they are all elegantly and delicately cooked, and whille the guests are appreciating the favors of these food, they can still tell the raw material from which they are made. The words like "damn" really can not be presented to the guests because it is bad cooked and made the whole feast disgraced. I don't know whether other American writers also incline to this word or not, if so I will not touch American literature any more, I have got peevish of this word very much.

As good as both Stephen King and J.K.Rowling are... I'd definitely admit that King has a bit of an ego.

[Peregina]

My favorite write has to be GK Chesterton. He wrote about everything, and I think he wrote it better than anyone else.

[stuntpickle]

Nabokov, Kafka, Munro, Lowry, Coleridge, Keats, Dickinson, and my guilty pleasure Lord Dunsany

[Delta40]

I bet you all enjoy a nice piece of stilton too while I make do with cheap cheddar....Agatha Christie, Chaucer, Enid Blyton and - Whizzer & Chips comics

[kinesj]

William Faulkner for prose, as well as my all time favorite

John Milton for poetry

Samuel Beckett for playwright

[Lohena]

Faulkner and Nabokov for their complex skill and unique prose

[blondiemcfi]

I would have to say :

Guy de Maupassant
Charles Dickens
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Agatha Christie
P.G. Wodehouse (can never resist one of his:smile5:)
Jane Austen

But there are such a huge amount of authors out there that I want to read that I'm sure my list will never be complete!

[Manuel Cruz]

I´m young and have not read that much yet but from what I´ve read so far I´ll have to say Tolkien. Lord of the Rings is a masterpiece.

[Lykren]

It's a tie between James Joyce and Murasaki Shikibu

[phoenixtears]

I haven't read much but I loved Dickens from the moment I got hold of Great Expectations and having read a few more of his novels I've got to say he is one of the best novelists of all time and surely my favourite.

[Kyriakos]

Probably still Kafka. Others include De Maupassant, Borges and Dostoevsky.

[Clovis]

As far as contemporary crime fiction mystery I like Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks Series.

As far as modern international fiction I enjoy Heinrich Böll.

Too many excellent authors to mention individually...

[Desolation]

J.J. has definitely eclipsed the competition in the last year.

Honorable mentions go to Proust, Faulkner, and Beckett.

[assedo]

My all time favorite writer would have to be Hunter S. Thompson, I love the way he writes, it's so unique. He keeps it real :cornut:

[kev67]

In terms of numbers of books read then my favourite author is George MacDonald Fraser. He wrote the Flashman series of historical novels. Not all of these were great, but added to those were many fine books outside that series. My favourite books of his were Black Ajax and Mr American. Black Ajax was about a black prize fighter who came to England from America to fight Tom Cribb, who was the champion prize fighter at the time. Mr American was about another American, this time a wild west outlaw, who came to England and married into the upper classes. Fraser wrote three books based on his army experiences about a particularly dirty, stupid, ill-disciplined soldier called Private McAuslen. Those books were different in tone to his other books and I found them very funny. Another book, which was different in tone again was called The Candlemass Road (I think). This was about Scottish and English borderers, constantly raiding, cattle-rustling, kidnapping, extorting and robbing each other. The only book of Fraser's I did not like was The Pyrates. It seemed like an experimental book, which tried to be funny, but failed badly. Come to think of it, I think I tried reading one of his non-fiction books about the border reivers, but did not get on with it.

[mjb]

becket- best book is his trilogy, novels, far above all his other work

my fav writers are Sophocles , Dante , the bard, the 3 Russians , Chaucer

[mjb]

Joyce's the dead is best short story in English methinks
here he is both Flaubert n Tolstoy
the shame is he went off the road in Ulysseus about pg 555, instead of toward those two writers he went into the obscure
path toward pure language- which is never pure since it is the embodiment of experience

[_August_]

As of today it's John Fowles. He's like a painter of words, descriptions are so vivid.
... Just remembered William Faulkner. Enjoy his prose for another reasons, remember being slightly shocked by the rawness of "As I Lay Dying".
Also Jose Saramago is one of the major figures in modern literature. His ideas are quite deep, although I'm not completely satisfied with translations of his novels (unfortunately I can't speak Portuguese).

[mtpspur]

Rafael Sabatini for his conversations between characters. Rider Haggard for his Allan Quaterman series and John Mortimer for his Rumpole of the Bailey and finally Dashiell Hammett for his Continental Op stories.

[EmptySeraph]

I've enjoyed a lot of works by a very heterogeneous mass of authors, but lately (let's say... twenty to twenty-five years) I've taken a fancy to the tormentors of language, so, naturally, I'll say: Mallarmé, Joyce, Celan.
Special mention to Heidegger and Céline, mainly due to the same reason.

[spikepipsqueak]

Currently enjoying Mary Doria Russell. First fell in love with The Sparrow and its sequel many years ago and then was alerted to the existence of other books (I think by someone on a thread here) and having the impression confirmed. Lovely insights into the nature of being human.

[EvoWarrior5]

I have to say Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I'm a fan of postcolonial literature, and she's a goldmine for that.

[prendrelemick]

I like my prose to be simple and effective, the subject and ideas can be huge and detailed and complex and as subtle as you like, as long as the writer can get them across sucessfully. I don't want flowery overblown prose or padding or any awkwardness, I'm not here to admire a person's use of a thesaurus. A good author knows what to leave out.

I can say all this because I'm reading a self-published book at the moment and it is hopeless. Splattered with inappropiate adjectives, characters that act out of character, emotions that need to be explained rather than felt - explanations of exactly the wrong thing - hopeless. Sometimes you have to read something bad to know what's good.
So anyway;-

Jane Austin - every word chosen for effect, and not a single one wasted.
Marquez.
Tolstoy.
Tolkien.

[EmptySeraph]

I like my prose to be simple and effective.

How is Hemingway not amongst your favourites?

P.S.: Austen, not Austin :lol:

P.S. 2: Oh, Flaubert and Kafka too -- they had this manner of writing that one could classify as being brutal, but so effective and appropriate!

[prendrelemick]

Oh gawd! I have some friends called Austin - I'm always doing that.

Hemingway is - but there are so many (and they change from month to month)

Yep, Kafka too, and Von Arnim at the moment. (only read one Flaubert) and Patchett and Joyce can be when he wants and so-on and so-on.

But Austen is the greatest, If she does become verbose she's done it on purpose and for a very good reason.