What desperately unfashionable writers do you really like?

most of the stuff i love is firmly in the middle. i mean i love a lot of the "greats" too but i don't really spend a lot of time reading them anymore. maybe when i'm older. ILB spurred me on to finally read Flaubert many moons ago when we had a book club thing going and i'm really glad i did just in case i died in a freak accident or something and never got old enough to read him when i got older.

i'm not even sure what current HIGH would be in 2016. that people actually read. lotsa middle and low. i guess there is still fancy poetry that more than 10 people read. actually, you guys here seem to read a lot of stuff that seems to fit the definition of high.

Reminds me: while you haven't gotten into Ulysses, I think, based on what you do like, you might dig Dubliners.

i loved dubliners when i was a teen. haven't read it since. i should read it again.

i get most of my HIGH from movies. and music. they just put up a bunch of Kieslowski movies on Hulu and i'm gonna watch some of those. and right now i'm listening to a ROUSING production of Romeo & Juliet by Berlioz (Boston/Ozawa). which will be followed by Tchaikovsky's Romeo & Juliet (San Francisco/Ozawa). as close as i get to Shakespeare too....

Xp

It's true I don't really hear people talking about Rechy these days (and when I do, it's almost always about "City of Night"), but I have been meaning to read his early work, soap operatic or not, if mostly out of interest in pre-Stonewall trans streetlife, and because I imagine it occupies a space similar to that of early Hubert Selby ("Last Exit" made a strong though discouraging impact on me as a closeted teenager).

(Selby is probably one of the "grove press shockers" who has less of a charge today, though...)

i'm pretty sure if i read The Room again by Selby i would be just as shocked and horrified. that book is a monster. he had a profound effect on me in the old days. but he should kinda be a genre of one. though punks will probably always seek him out.

i actually read one of his later books and enjoyed it. Waiting Period. his last book.

Yeah, it's been years since I've read him and I'm not sure how I would respond to his work now, but my feelings about "Last Exit" will probably always be colored by the fact that when I was 12 or 13, "The Queen is Dead" was one of maybe three narratives about trans women I had access to that weren't just jokes about men in dresses.

I know Selby Jr and Coover have both recently been Penguin Classics-ed in the UK. As to whether that leads to many more people reading them... It made me give Coover a second shot, I guess, but I didn't like it any more than my first one.

I still read all these dudes but they do seem out of vogue to me

coover's latest novel reads like just-slightly-higher-brow stephen king

Hubert Selby Jr is one of those that I always intend to revisit - I had intended to read all of the five novels in a stretch. Brutal yet tender and funny is how I recall it.

Don't think he is "desperately unfashionable". Ok so there are no plans for making any films out of his work, but still, he talks about things that are too present to feel out of time, or conversation.

a lot of people still like that one film

:-(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gregory_Dunne

unfashionable can mean lots of things obviously. i take it all into consideration. out of print. not read as much by readers/writers/academics now. not talked about. not used as inspiration by current writers. not politically/socially in vogue. but they should have had SOME sort of presence/importance in the past. obviously john rechy will always have a place in history and in queer lit classes but i don't think very many people read him at all anymore. and i'm suspicious about a lot of people who bought his books originally reading them either because every hardcover i see is completely pristine and looks untouched.

(i don't read him now either and i never got very far into his books. though his flat mod affectless prose certainly inspired the hell out of a lot of people i read in the 80's. i can see tao lin being a fan! as dennis cooper was in my youth.)

― scott seward, Sunday, January 10, 2016 10:21 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and it'd be interesting to hold some sort of poll or something here to see who the 50-100 most "important/remembered/admired" authors ever are

a lot of people still like that one film

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51C802BXB5L.jpg

Coover - who I still read with great pleasure - seems like a clear influence on someone like Ben Lerner, and he's had recentish work published in McSweeney's, so I think his reputation has by and large held up, at least as a kind of grizzled-vet-of-the-avant-garde (whereas yes, John Barth already feels like a fogotten figure.)

james branch cabell.

man i've been meaning to read cabell for so long

Coover - who I still read with great pleasure - seems like a clear influence on someone like Ben Lerner, and he's had recentish work published in McSweeney's, so I think his reputation has by and large held up, at least as a kind of grizzled-vet-of-the-avant-garde (whereas yes, John Barth already feels like a forgotten figure.)

― Chicamaw (Ward Fowler), Monday, January 11, 2016 9:02 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

on the other hand, ben lerner's novels are the epitome of poshlust and anyone publishing work in mcsweeney's this decade is impossibly naff --

I've been kind of amazed to discover what a huge deal Anthony Powell was, even quite recently - I'd somehow managed to reach almost 30 with only the very vaguest awareness that he'd ever existed, whereas I think I were even ten years older he'd register as a much bigger name. I suppose this is probably the exact peak of his unfashionability, somehow.

Anyway 'Dance' is the best.

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Ben Lerner and McSweeney's are not the gang I would ideally take into hipster battle w/ me, but as John T. Chance says in Rio Bravo, "That's what I've got." And the Coover story in McSweeney's, printed on large size playing cards, really is a beauty - they did him proud.

I've got a three volume set of Dance to the Music of Time tied in to the C4 TV adaptation - which, looking up now, I'm amazed to see is nearly twenty years old.

I didn't know it was adapted for TV. If I can catch it (check youtube later) that might be an option.

It was pretty well done, though shorn of a lot of things that make the Dance... novels so interesting, in particular the vast array of characters and their periodic disappearance and re-emergence. Simon Russell Beale is excellent as Widmerpool, though.

Yeah, I must be about ten years older and he was more prominent when I was figuring out the literary landscape (because he was alive and publishing and reviewing and being reviewed), but is he that unfashionable? He wasn't that big a deal (compared to say Greene), and tbh I'd expect him to have a small but hardcore fanbase that's a mix of literary types and Downton lovers.

I think he has a bit of a reputation as being an author writing about the upper classes, for the upper classes, c.f. this LRB review http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/ian-sansom/every-rusty-hint This is unfair in my view.

only the hippest lit person on my masters course read powell. frankly if you like him rn you're probably ahead of the curve

i didn't realize themcswys coover under discuss was the playing cards one. that must be the better part of a decade ago

When you're as old as I am, the better part of a decade ago feels 'recentish' (also, only picked up that partic MCS second-hand a couple of years ago)

Am intrigued by Wins' comment that 'coover's latest novel reads like just-slightly-higher-brow stephen king' - sounds good to me

Was just thinking of someone I used to live, with who collected forgotten/unfashionable authors like Dornford Yates and Alec Waugh - reading the latter's Wiki entry, came across this little nugget - Waugh also has a footnote in the history of reggae music. The success of the film adaptation of Island in the Sun and the Harry Belafonte title track provided inspiration as well as the name for the highly successful Island Records record label.

I think of Mishima as very unfashionable.

'unfashionable' is a strange concept to apply to authors, since only a very small handful could be called 'fashionable' at any time (as opposed to 'popular' or 'critically praised'). for example, Rabelais was fashionable for a time in the 1930s, but he isn't in fashion now, although he is still critically praised - and he hasn't been popular for centuries.

my english (discipline not country) friends and i read barth in college in the late 90s, i would not be surprised if at least lost in the funhouse was still read in some circles? though i never see him talked about now. another who was very keen on the avant-garde canon at least read coover and followed him, w/ as much as i was reading at that time i still found that coover was too boring to stick with.

do people still read john hawkes? or robert coover? or john barth? all those blazing mod lights that were required on hepcat bookshelves once upon a time. feel like pynchon is the one who came out smelling like a rose.

I think of all these guys Donald Barthleme is actually the one everybody still enthusiastically likes and reads

Barthelme

I guess my own definition of unfashionable is the sort of writer who was once a very big deal, but who is now out of print, and whose books are very easily found jamming up the shelves of second-hand bookshops everywhere: ie the supply waaaaaaaay overruns any sort of demand

Just was recently reading John Hawkes.

Hhen I was working in book and music stores, saw artists go in and out of fashion, in terms of customer interest, during times of hype (movie-tie-ins etc) and nothing I could put my finger on, necessarily. Although The Great Gatsby, for instance, might have come back in the 70s even without hype of the Redford movie, because the glazed grand delusions, glitz and violence seemed to fit the times, and Scott and Zelda were already making a comeback...Can't think of any recent re-surfacings---suggestions??

^ often the case. And I wouldn't apply this to anyone pre-20th century as such. Popular/critical praise worked quite differently.

wrt Mishima this notion is unique as he is talked about re: manner of his death and that overshadows the work. Politically I would expect him to make a 'return' as nationalism is such a big deal - but there is v little about. xxp

"ie the supply waaaaaaaay overruns any sort of demand"

yeah, and this fits giles goat-boy perfectly. at least in the states. a million paperback copies of that book in the states.

I love that book

Ward, it's dope. Religious mania in a small town.

"desperately unfashionable" is pretty extreme though. people probably don't read milan kundera and manuel puig like they did in the 80's - when i felt like everyone was - but they probably still read them, right? they just aren't talked about like they were back then.

Hi Scott, guess this isn't too off-topic, in terms of popular authors prob never to be on the covers of Vanity Fair or NYRB---maybe Publisher's Weekly?---where's a good place to start with John Sanford? So many books!

I really love Anthony Trollope, am too out of fashion myself to know whether he's unfashionable.

for sandford i would say read any of the virgil flowers books. he's kinda my fave sandford character. but the lucas davenport/prey books get better as they go along. i think the later the better with those. so, i guess that means the 21st century books. the flowers series started in 2007 and they are all strong.

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Thanks Scott--I'm rounding up stuff for my sister, the crime novel junkie. She's into the forensic especially, but also seemed to like this Harry Bosch omnibus I scored from library discards (like most books I buy these days, def all the crime), and some of Connelly's others, and an Ed McBain from the 70s, and recently James Lee Burke's Rain Gods: "So many horrible things, but so beautifully described, " she sez. Okay---she's currently off to NYC with Pelecanos's The Night Gardener and a couple more in that vein; got a Karin Slaughter (Metro Atlanta, intensely researched, judging by all the cops etc. she thanks in afterwords), waiting at home with a Lynda La Plante (creator of Prime Suspect, but this 'un's a disfunctional detective--not only ex-LAPD, an ex-hooker to boot, starting over with her own practice).

Some of the New Directions John Hawkes ebooks have really bad OCR typos.

Also, wasn't there an ILB thread recently in which some of these authors might have been discussed but it was a picture thread?

Found it. Sadly the OP photo has gone off the internet because of wins
coolest-looking author on the back of this book of interviews from 1974