FOT Forum
FOT Community => General Discussion => Topic started by: bruce on March 08, 2008, 08:48:26 PM
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I'm talking no mater what of theirs you read your were never disappointed. Plus I finally get a reason to use this pic of the two of them together.
(http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a19/minder125/two.jpg)
That's Ian Fleming & Len Deighton two great spy masters
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Flannery O'Connor. Scott Williams is playing a recording of her reading "A Good Man is Hard to Find" on his WFMU show this Monday.
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Flannery O'Connor.
This was going to be mine! Seriously!
"A Good Man Is Hard To Find" is my father's favourite thing ever. My mother had to talk him out of Flannery as a first name for me but it ended up being my middle name. I hated that name so much that I refused to read anything of hers and then one day I did, and that was it.
Anyway. Another one.
Miriam Toews can't do anything wrong, as far as I'm concerned.
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Tom Sawyer
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Tim O'Brien.
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Tim O'Brien.
You beat me to it, Dorvid! My favorite author of all time.
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Neal Stephenson.
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(http://www.barcelonareview.com/18/wf.jpg)
(http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/blacklizard/art/chandler.jpg)
(http://www.readysteadybook.com/images/HSelbyJr.jpg)
(http://www.bloomsburyusa.com/images/authors/a181.jpg)
William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Hubert Selby Jr, Nick Tosches
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Roald Dahl
Flann O'Brien
Dave Eggers
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A few more:
(http://www.splicedonline.com/features/ellroy.gif)
(http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/2006/bioimages/pelecanos.jpg)
(http://archives.cnn.com/2001/books/news/01/30/dennis.lehane/story.lehane.jpg)
(http://www.thecwa.co.uk/daggers/2004/images/larry.block.jpg)
James Ellroy, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, Lawrence Block
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James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene!!!!
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Literally every author Beth named ("Middlemarch" is hands down, my favorite book of all-time), plus Jonathan Coe, Julian Barnes, John Fowles, AS Byatt, David Grossman, Henry Fielding and Robert Graves.
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Literally every author Beth named ("Middlemarch" is hands down, my favorite book of all-time), plus Jonathan Coe, Julian Barnes, John Fowles, AS Byatt, David Grossman, Henry Fielding and Robert Graves.
I looooved Middlemarch, but I think my favorite of hers is Daniel Deronda. The Mill on the Floss also rocks
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I don't think there are any authors where I've read and loved absolutely everything. And it changes every so often - I still like Jack Kerouac, but he lost a lot of appeal after I turned 30. But here's a short list of faves:
George Saunders, Kurt Vonnegut, Luc Sante, Jonathan Lethem, Jim Shepard, Alice Munro, Herman Melville, George Orwell, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Naguid Mahfouz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Slavoj Zizek.
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Also Saunders! Also Vonnegut! Rudy Rucker, Wallace Stevens, John Irving (OK, I'm pedestrian, shoot me), Joseph Heller. Raymond Smullyan. Raymond Carver. Douglas Hofstadter. Sir Bertrand Russell. Philip K Dick.
Kilgore Trout!
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I also like everything Janwillem van de Wetering has written.
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The guy seems to get a ton of hipster backlash for some reason, but I really loved both Jonathan Safran Foer novels.
If we can include playwrights, Kenneth Lonergan and David Auburn.
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Since Master of Sparks has mentioned a good number of writers I read.
He forgot to mention Charles Willeford & Gil Brewer two old school Fawcett Gold Medal writers. Both have new reprints that just came out recently.
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If we can include playwrights, my list gets a lot longer and more diverse: Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill, Maria Irene Fornes, Mac Wellman, Len Jenkin, Robert Shenkkan, Suzan-Lori Parks, Naomi Iizuka, Naomi Wallace, Chuck Mee, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Brecht, Sondheim.
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EllroyEllroyEllroyEllroyEllroy
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Robert Olmstead, Harlan Ellison, Chris Offutt, Walter Gibson, Warren Ellis, Raymond Carver, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Tobias Wolf, J.D. Salinger and David Lee Roth.
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There are too many to consider, but my really like Martin Cruz Smith. His Russian detective Arkady Renko is a great character.
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Neil Gaiman
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There are too many to consider, but my really like Martin Cruz Smith. His Russian detective Arkady Renko is a great character.
I love his super early writing career myself
(http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a19/minder125/Scan10003-1.jpg)
He wrote three of them to be exact, just total mindless spy action
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OH MAN his Inquisitor series looks hilarious! I've never read them, but I love the covers.
I read Nightwing and thought is was going to be trash-horror, but there were some genuinely horrifying things going on in there. I was hoping he'd be completely slumming to pay bills, but it was a smart book. But yeah, there's a good reason he changed his pen name when he wrote Gorky Park. I like to imagine some publisher giving him a hard time, asking if his new detective will be fighting horde of bats.
C!
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Oh, so Nightwing is a bat horror story. I've had it around for ages but somehow just haven't had the gumption to read it. Now that I know it involves bats and creepiness, I'll be more likely to pick it up.
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Take the plunge! I got really hooked as the story went on.
I heard a movie was made out of it. I should sniff around for that. It's probably doesn't have the book ending though. I don't want to ruin the ending, but in the you find out the Head Bat is also a robot. And then everyone is a robot.
IT'S A TWIST!
C
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I don't normally read a whole lot of fiction but the stuff I do read seems to be more of the genre kind than proper literature.
Having said that, if want to read a good horror/mystery that actually gave me the willies try Brian Evenson's The Open Curtain. I wonder what Mitt Romney thinks of this one.
Also his collection of short stories The Din of Celestial Birds is more surreal but equally willy inducing.
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Charles Portis, Richard Yates, Cormac McCarthy, Joseph Conrad, Jim Thompson, Philip Roth, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Martin Amis, Raymond Chandler, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekov, Eugene O'Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor, John Fante, Knut Hamsun, Henry Miller, etc.
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Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver can do no wrong.
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Here is a super quick list:
Mickey Spillane, Ross Macdonald, Richard Stark, Donald Westlake, Harry Whittington, John D. MacDonald, Margaret Millar, Hank Janson, Warren Murphy, Richard Sapir, Lester Dent, Maxwell Grant, Megan Abbott, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dashell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Max Brand, George Gillman, Donald Hamilton, Edward Bunker, and Bret Halliday
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What do you think of Ross MacDonald? I was told he was supposed to be the heaviest hitter of the noir writers, but honestly, I wasn't that thrilled. Not saying he was a snooze or anything, but I didn't see what was separating him from the pack.
C
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so it is Maxwell Grant, Walter Gibson or both? I guess I have Shadow books under both names.
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What do you think of Ross MacDonald? I was told he was supposed to be the heaviest hitter of the noir writers, but honestly, I wasn't that thrilled. Not saying he was a snooze or anything, but I didn't see what was separating him from the pack.
His first few are direct takes on Chandler and Hammet. But once he gets to The Doomsters he becomes his own writer, since instead of the crime being the main selling point. It's more about Lew Archer finding out what drives these people to commit them.
Also The Instant Enemy is a total kick to the balls of a read.
Totep: Maxwell Grant was the house name used for all Shadow books, but Walter Gibson is the creator of the series and wrote the bulk.
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Totep: Maxwell Grant was the house name used for all Shadow books, but Walter Gibson is the creator of the series and wrote the bulk.
Oh yeah. Thanks, Bruce.
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I am sort of fond of John D. McDonald, too, if you're looking to kill an evening with decent snappy dialogue and the manliest of macho men (Travis McGee, that would be.)
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Nabokov
García Márquez
Neruda
Vonnegut
McEwan
Eggers
Saunders
Denis Johnson
Et Cetera
Et Cetera
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Lots of greats mentioned. I'll only second Graham Greene as my favorite, throw a shout to Russell Banks for you Carver fans (think New England trailer parks instead of the Pacific NW), give Jersey love to Philip Roth, and mention my favorite noir stuff is Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins books.
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My favorites:
John Steinbeck, Robertson Davies, Wayne Johnson, David Rakoff, Vickram Seth....
Thats all I can think of right now.
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Vonnegut
YES!
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(http://farm1.static.flickr.com/227/457918129_241de6392c.jpg)
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rudy rucker, jk huysmans, and matt drudge
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Tom Robbins..i just love dirty, insane screwball novels.