What author's work do you most admire?
 

....?

kurt vonnegut + hunter thompson

Michael Moorcock
Philip K. Dick
Herman Hesse
Samuel R. Delany
Alastair Reynolds
Kathleen Ann Goonan
H.P. Lovecraft
C.J. Cherryh

admire or enjoy?

i admire hegel, amazing, but fuck if i'm going to read him. give me the cliff notes. i admire plato too, his bullshit is a historical feat, but ayayay, today it's a chore. i admire shakespeare too but can only comfortably read him in translation, and at the theatre i dont understand a fucking word (subtitles, please).

admire and enjoy: borges, cervantes, garcia marquez, homer (not a "writer" proper but let's not split hairs), dostoevski, tolstoy, nietzsche, goethe, rilke, baudelaire, rimbaud, quevedo, gongora, ruben dario, whitman, poe, garcia lorca, blake, etc etc, oh i adore la sontag, severo sarduy, lezama lima, joyce of course, kafka, vallejo, h.g. wells, i can write forever, i will keep editing this list

i also enjoy writers that i don't admire or at least don't admire on an epic level-- philip roth, russel hoban, pk dick, alan dugan, auden, tears eliot, cummings, kundera, the hernandez bros, the guy who writes "fables", that cock tennyson, mark twain, dante (fuck him), jhumpa lahiri (i might some day let's see what she does), some vargas llosa (asshole), some murakami, & lots more.

^ what he said, but with more umberto eco and rem koolhaas... also italo calvino, jennifer bloomer, harry crews, rimbaud, salinger, camus, derrida, lacan, hal foster, beatriz colomina, anthony vidler, herbert muschamp, gertrude stein, william gibson, neal stephenson, neil gaiman, art spiegelman...

I admire the reality of James Joyce and his works, but I read Ulysses and immediately afterward wanted a hug very badly.

Joseph Wambaugh for his first 5 and last 3 books is my favorite writer.
A good bit of chaff in that gap, though. The quality of the aforementioned 8 works is just too high, though; this guy went from an LAPD cop to a masterful novelist. I don't care if they don't teach him in schools, he's a treasure.

Also admire: Gibson, Dick, Vonnegut, Eco, Twain, Woolf, Flannery
O'Connor.

Probably William Faulkner. I know he won a nobel prize and all that, but I really feel like he doesn't get enough props.

Haruki Murakami

Kurt Vonnegut

burroughs, ballard, corso (more of a poet than an author but still) kerouac, hunter s. thompson...

r.l. stine.

Blake, Carrol, Suskind, Bulgakov, Dostoevskij, Queneau, Carver, Calvino, Ammaniti, Scarpa etc..lots for lots of different reasons.

I don't know if I necessarily admire them particularly but the novelists I most consistantly enjoy are Carl Hiaasen, Richard Price and Tom Wolfe.

j.t. leroy?

bump!

To name just a few:

John Kennedy Toole, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Pablo Neruda, Poe, Horacio Quiroga, Joseph Roth, Alfred Jarry, Paul Auster (I've only read The Invention of Solitude though), Patrick Süskind, Gustave Flaubert, Camus.

Albert Camus, Tolstoy... not going to find a much original list here.

baudrillard, beckett for the end, zizek, artaud, pkd and joyce for the wake on a technical level. and the invisible commitee

vonnegut, salinger, kerouac

on a slightly lower tier, douglas adams

dostoevsky, s. burroughs, palanuick others too.

Two names I have not seen:

Joseph Campbell

Clive Barker

and you guys are missing out on the post profound modern mythologist and the most diverse, abstract and bizarre fiction..

I was going to say three and put my absolute favorite author, Patrick Suskind but then I saw his name.. he is the best. I have never read an author who so perfectly captures my own personality.. perfect empathy, its scary even.

R L Stein. Who can write that many stupid books....seriously.

whoever wrote the babysitters club. she can write that many stupid, stupid books. i bet she made megabucks on that shit though.

aw yeah, chronicling the banalities of being 13 and the ups and downs of babysitting for sub-sub-minumum wage. tales from the mean streets of suburban connecticut. over 10000000 96 page volumes. positively riveting.

Goosebumps, and Fear Street novels were like razor-blade filled candy for my brain as a youngin'.

This thread makes me realize just how seldom I've been reading lately.

*sigh*

Well the stand beat poet (influnced things) and Oscar Wilde but that's more plays

American authors I most admire:

Stephen Donaldson
Gene Wolfe
John Scalzi
Joe Haldeman
H.P. Lovecraft
Robert E. Howard

Camus, Beckett, Blake, Ginsberg, TS Eliot

I sure forget other ones.

Dickens, Hemmingway, Puzo

i like brett easton-ellis quite a lot too. he is always very descriptive and has quite a lot of satire in his writing.

Michael Brodsky, Cormac McCarthy

[pussy alert!] american psycho is the only book that has ever made me feel, like, physically sick.

i'd consider that a good thing, though. somewhat negative reaction >>>>> no reaction

yes i did feel pretty uneasy after reading some of that book. my wife is reading it right now and keeps squirming everytime a nasty bit happens. the film was atrocious.

While he's not my favorite writer, I truly do admire Burroughs. It seems like he was writing in order to survive his problems. Writing his way out of the shit of the world. The best of his work is some of the most brutal and desparate stuff I've read, more so than anyone else coming to mind right now.

I also admire writers who can put extremely complex theories and ideas into understandable language.

And I fucking love Walt Whitman.