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September 8th, 2009 / 10:33 am Riley Michael Parker—

I am very solipsistic, so it is hard for me to differentiate between my tastes and what is actually important to the world of literature. Let’s just agree they are one and the same. A lot of my list is made up of young and innovative writers of flash fictiony things, which seems risky to me. What if these people decide to start writing garbage? I’ll have egg on my face, that’s what. There’s a reason everyone talks about dead writers so much – because they can’t suddenly disappoint you out of nowhere. For example, if I would have made such a list a year ago, I would have predominantly featured Jonathan Goldstein because of the stunning brilliance of LENNY BRUCE IS DEAD, but then recently he released a new book that I’m not all that keen on, and I am now afraid that I will never like anything he ever writes from here on out. Anyway, with their yet-to-be failures aside, I like the work of Chelsea Martin, and everything Zachary Schomburg writes, and Gary Lutz, and Dave Eggers (but only his flash fiction, because his novels bore me half to death), and Sam Lipsyte, and more recently Sam Pink and that Shane Jones fella that everyone is gay for. Oh, and I still like Bret Easton Ellis, but not really any of his followers (anymore). I also have a spot for Jeffrey Eugenides, Jincy Willet, and Marilynne Robinson, because there is a little Oprah in all of us. Also, I like my writing, and that of Maurice Burford, and that Kevin Sampsell guy, but then again who doesn’t? Seriously, my list is garbage.

September 8th, 2009 / 11:58 am +!O0o(o)o0O!+—

In no particular order, first who came to me: Kenzaburo Oe, Jose Saramago, Phillip Roth, Don DeLillo, James Salter, Michel Houellebecq, Phillip Pullman, David Markson, George Saunders, Mark Leyner (funny must not be underestimated), Helen DeWiit (based on one book), Jonathan Ames (funny must not be underestimated), William T. Vollmann, Kobo Abe, Jim Crace.

September 8th, 2009 / 12:51 pm ryan—

Garcia Marquez
Rick Moody
DF Wallace (shut up, i wont believe it)
Vollmann
Evan Dara
Joyce Carol Oates
John Ashbery
Pynchon
Damnit. Every other name I reach for is dead. Dostoyevksy.

September 8th, 2009 / 1:11 pm Lily Hoang—

in no particular order:
raymond federman
carole maso
robert coover
steve tomasula (where’s the steve tomasula love at html giant? have you all seen/read VAS or TOC?)
kate bernheimer
anne carson
rikki ducornet
william gass
jose saramago
milorad pavic
marilynne robinson
david markson
ben marcus
gilbert sorrentino (is he still alive?)
and of our generation: joyelle mcsweeney-johannes goranson (i put them as a hybrid person although they’re quite different) & joshua cohen. and though his name will appear many times on this list: blake butler.

September 8th, 2009 / 1:18 pm Lily Hoang—

and shelley jackson. can’t believe i forgot her.

September 8th, 2009 / 1:33 pm Merzmensch—

As always: de gustibus non est disputandum, so don’t lynch me if you don’t like them.

Importance for me accords with it’s etymology: lat. importare (“bring in”). If the writer =>>brings<>in<>brings<>in<Mark Z. Danielwski because of his labyrinths
>Umberto Eco because of his clever slyness
>JC Hutchins (together with Jordan Weisman, surely), because of their fondness of experimenting
>Victor Pelevin because of his postmodernity (I know, I know)
>Pynchon because I haven’t read him (I know, I know)
>Gabriel García Márquez because of everything
>Kenzaburō Ōe because of his unique style
>Haruki Murakami because of some (not all) his works, freely
>William Gibson (I like him in cyberpunkish way, I dislike him in his sexy way)
>Mamoru Oshii (even if he is not really a writer, he writes, and this is cool, what he writes)
>Ray Bradbury (yeah, it’s cool to know, he’s alive! actually I thought… well, he’ll live even more because of it)
>Lev Rubinstein (a great Russian conceptualist, I wonder, why there is no wiki article about him)
>Helen DeWiit (her The Last Samurai was the first book in English language with more than 500 pages which I have read in about 3-4 days – I’m not native speaker, I’m naive speaker). Actually, with this book begun my re/discovery of English literature
>Is Netochka Nezvanova alive? Is it a writer? So in this case ¥ur m! favor!t
>I have a feeling, I’ve forgot somebody. Let’s make this place free for him or her then.

And actually, I really like Avantgarde at the beginning of XX century. But – alas! – nobody could get it to our new century… Or could somebody?

September 8th, 2009 / 1:36 pm Merzmensch—

Oh, I see, the code ate my message. before the list with Mark Danielewski begun there was following pre-text:

Importance for me accords with it’s etymology: lat. importare (“bring in”). If the writer _brings_ something _in_ my life, he is important for me. Even if he is unknown for main public. And (sic!) even if I don’t like him: If I read somebody and I hate his writings – he is also important for me, because of the power of his style/plot/etc. which _brings_ me _in_ negative state of beeing

But I usually try to like everything I read, because you know, there are so many perspectives, and to hate its variety is primitive imho.

OK, anyway, here is a list of living writers I feel important:

>Mark Z. Danielwski…etc.

September 8th, 2009 / 2:20 pm Zip—

FIFTEEN?

zip doesn’t swear
but zip says “fuck this”

September 8th, 2009 / 2:28 pm Stephen—

Bedient
Pynchon
McCarthy
Marcus
Pynchon
Maso
Graham Foust
Ashbery
Gudding

Regarding Tomasula, I read VAS in a class of Joyelle McSweeney’s (siq namedrop brah!) and wasn’t impressed. Sure the presentation was neat but I found the writing itself unremarkable if not weak. I often find this the case with these soi-disant hybrid texts

September 8th, 2009 / 3:27 pm mike young—

mark leyner is amazing, he’s like flann o’brien with a lip ring

September 8th, 2009 / 4:45 pm Dan Wickett—

Favorite. I have no idea what it means, Matthew, about my thought process between what I read for enjoyment vs. what I believe might be important. I think some of these authors fall into both categories, but not sure they’d be in the my top 15 important. But these are authors I’ll buy in hardcover, will buy journals because they are in them, tend to know when their next books will be out and hound publicists for galleys of them, etc.

Percival Everett
Peter Markus
Kellie Wells
Ander Monson
Brian Evenson
Lee K. Abbott
Alyson Hagy
Steve Yarbrough
Elizabeth Ellen
Matt Bell
Steven Gillis
Ron Rash
Beth Ann Fennelly
Michael Ruhlman
Yannick Murphy

September 8th, 2009 / 5:55 pm ryan—

in order of what popped in my head, criteria being writers whose work I anxiously await

Jack Driscoll
Pete Fromm
TC Boyle
Jonathan Lethem
Michael Chabon
Dave Eggers
Mark Z. Danielewski
Ha Jin
Ken Sparling
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Denis Johnson
Etgar Keret
Mary Miller (maybe too soon to say this, but I’m really digging her stuff)
Chip Kidd
Elizabeth Ellen

September 8th, 2009 / 5:58 pm Amber—

Missing from these: Mo Yan and Su Tong. Especially Mo Yan.

September 8th, 2009 / 6:14 pm gs—

i second Lethem.

What about Lorrie Moore?

September 8th, 2009 / 6:15 pm ryan—

haven’t read any of her work. not for any reason other than just haven’t gotten to it yet. i’ve heard many great things.

September 8th, 2009 / 8:43 pm Jimmy Chen—

weird, when i saw “Mo Yan” I read “Your Mom.” dyslexia is awesome.

September 8th, 2009 / 10:26 pm Riley Michael Parker—

Maybe I am establishing myself as a fool, but I don’t care about a great deal of the authors that people have been listing. Moody? DeLillo? Pynchon? Chabon?Are these people really the most important authors of our time? Not to say that these folks aren’t good at what they do, it’s just that I read their books and feel like they aren’t doing anything to evolve the form. Chelsea Martin, on the other hand, writes things that establish the reader as the subject of the story – she talks to her reader, about her reader, and behind her reader’s back, all in the same five sentences. She writes things that challenge what a story can be. When Chelsea makes her way to writing a novel, it will be groundbreaking and singular, like everything else I have ever seen her do. Zachary Schomburg and Maurice Burford create existence from the ground up every time they put a pen to paper, but without the over-explanation that ruins the work of other surrealists. They find a balance between dry wit and sentimentality that keeps the reader on their toes, laughing one moment and then feeling ashamed the next. To me, this is something to talk about. Kevin Sampsell is getting ready to release A COMMON PORNOGRAPHY, a book that is being marketed as a memoir but is structured as a collection of flash fiction. It doesn’t matter that the events in the book actually happened, because as a whole it is bigger than non-fiction. Without posturing in the text, but instead telling his story from neither the standpoint of the hero or the victim, Kevin has in a way recreated himself as a fictional character – one that brings about shame and disgust, but is in every line relatable. By presenting the truth like fiction it becomes neither, and it’s fantastic. The traditional novelist, to me, is not important to the future of literature. The people who are important are the people who bring something to the table besides a story, the people who play with form; the poets turned novelists, the visual artists painting with words, and the writers who have no interest in writing the great American novel, because they are ready, and have been their whole lives, to move on already.

September 8th, 2009 / 10:39 pm ryan—

wasn’t the question, though, to make a list of your favorite authors, on the heels of the “towering” authors conversation, and isn’t that incredibly subjective? i’m not trying to start anything, more just saying that if i were to make a list of 15 authors i thought were doing the most to be innovative with literature i would probably have a somewhat different list than my 15 favorites.

September 8th, 2009 / 10:42 pm sarah m.g.—

I need to add Mary Robison & Matthea Harvey to this and second the Ander Monson & Etgar Keret.

September 8th, 2009 / 10:58 pm D—

yeah hard to be a “towering” figure in literature when you have like, one book out on a small press.

September 8th, 2009 / 11:28 pm Ken Baumann—

Interesting question, Matthew. I like this probe. I’ll try to wrangle a 15 and a 15 and see…

September 9th, 2009 / 7:21 am Riley Michael Parker—

This thread is on the heels of the towering authors conversation, but it is indeed a different conversation, one that, as Ryan mentioned, has to do with taste, which is subjective. What stuck out to me, however, was the end of Matthew’s question and the word “important”. Between this conversation and the previous one, I personally do not feel that a majority of the authors listed are important by any means. Like I said before, I don’t think they are bad writers, and in no way do I challenge their ability, but they are not doing anything that I recognize as new or innovative, and therefore are not important to the future, or even the present, of literature. These people are simply participating. At the end of my list I mentioned Jeffrey Eugenides and Marilynne Robinson, because I like them and part of this conversation is about taste, but I would not argue that they are important living authors. Gary Lutz, on the other hand, I see as being very important. Book sales and publishing houses do not necessarily reflect a writer’s importance in the long run, but I will agree with D that one book on a small press does not make someone a towering author. Personally, my taste does not include a lot of those who are known to tower, nor do I see them as important to the overall landscape of modern literature. In my opinion, all of our important living authors are still young and developing their craft, like Chelsea and Zachary, and with any luck these people might end up the towerers of tomorrow, only to be dethroned by the next group of important writers. From these conversations I have to conclude that I just have different standards for what makes a writer important, and I may look foolish for it at the moment, but oh well to that. These are my favorite writers and the ones that I feel are the most important, whether they tower or not, because they are daring to do something new.

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