What desperately unfashionable writers do you really like?

hah yeah good point!

who was the Martin Amis that was briefly prominent from 1886-1892?

Brautigan / Vonnegut / Thompson / Robbins

really makes sense as a category of writers whose style is really unfashionable now.

I didn't discover Brautigan until my early 30s but I still love him, especially the later stuff.

I think Thompson and Vonnegut are still pretty fashionable with younger readers.

I think Kesey feels really unfashionable and has for quite a while. Whenever I mentally compile a list of favorite novels, Sometimes a Great Notion is way up there, but I wonder how much of that is due to being much younger when I read it.

Yeah Robbins is the hippie Salinger

I don't think Chabon ever had a Monster that's a mainstay of every used bookstore in America, though

As a weird and terrible outlier, his Sherlock Holmes novella - called, ugh, The Final Solution - is very, very, very bad. This would be Monster (which I like!) if every song on it was "Bang and Blame".

I hated Pittsburgh after the great opening chapters, but Wonder Boys & Kavalier I would happily reread someday, although I have a sinking feeling that Kavalier has not aged well. Maybe it's the 2000s take on the "stylistically flashy novel about The World And Everything".

Brautigan - Actually this thread has persuaded me to try him again. Only read Sombrero Floats as a teen but remember *loving* it.

hate Chabon so much, I sure hope he's finally unfashionable

i feel like i saw kavalier paperbacks everywhere for years. thrift stores, etc.

yeah that book was huuuuuuge

I read Kavalier in 2004 and it seemed like every time I had the book on public transport or at a cafe, someone would approach me and be, like, "oh gosh, I love that book". It was weird! Never happened to me for any other book. And, you know, in the height of my "twentysomething bad hair no deodorant" phase, people were generally not breaking down doors to chat to me otherwise.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was a massive influence on me and my sexuality. I was aware of its deficiencies (e.g. way too indebted to Gatsby, indifferent gangland shit), still recommend it.

my dad bought me that book for my birthday when it came out. i think he had read something good about it. and i know for sure he didn't know there was any gay content or he probably wouldn't have bought it for me. because homophobia. i liked it.

i think i probably liked it more than bright lights/less than.

There are some pretty fine sentences in Mysteries of Pittsburgh. One about the "snapped spine of a lemon wedge at the bottom of a drink" is still in my mind. And I'm quite sure haven't read the book in more than 20 years.

It was very influential on me and my social circle but I would not recommend it as a guide to life. (Of course almost no novel is a good guide to life, with a few exceptions like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.)

If MoP was the only Chabon people read, and he subsequently vanished from sight, I think that would be okay. I cannot and will not defend every subsequent career move he's made.

Ditto Wallace's Girl with Curious Hair. I don't THINK I am a "DFW bro" but I like that book a lot.

Ditto Franzen's Twenty-Seventh City, which remains a sentimental favorite of mine because it's set in my home town. It treads a line between being a conventional thriller and a reasonably perceptive realist novel.

based on his first two collections, he's a sharper story writer than novelist -- the American disease.

Yeah Robbins is the hippie Salinger

I swear to God he is

"I like "Knots" by R D Laing."

i do too! it's cool.

― scott seward, Wednesday, June 21, 2017 12:59 PM (eight hours ago)

i also love this book, glad to find other fans of it