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.