Coterie Writers Of Minimum Distinction Memorial Thread

Thomas Berger

James Salter

Patrick Hamilton

John Hawkes

'minimum distinction'?

mere inflated spoofs

panoptic pseudo-cogencies

I quite like the one John Hawkes book I've read. Tempted to say Bernard Malamud

Bernard Malamud

Don DeLillo, personally

Oh wait, he isn't dead, sorry

( also doesn't fit because he gets a lot more attention than the above, but mainly because he is a Big Ideas/Systems/Do U See? writer)

Stanley elkin

Cynthia Ozick

i only for the first time just now got around to googling the thread title

others may confirm/deny but: i feel like literally no one in europe has ever read a novel by wallace stegner?

Strike out "in Europe" maybe

Harold Brodkey? Is Wallace Stegner actually any good, btw? I keep getting his name in my head because I'm reading Wallace Stevens but don't really remember who Stegner is or what he did.

I've read a Stegner novel.

Wallace Stegner prob has a Wikipedia page with a better sketch of him, but briefly, he is usually identified as one of a coterie of writers whose work is associated with the western USA and its local problems, culture, characters and point of view. iirc, he taught writing at some Montana university.

I liked his non-fic book The Hundredth Meridian, about Powell's explorations of the Colorado River.

Correction: Beyond the Hundredth Meridian.

Looking at his Wikipedia page, he taught creative writing at Stanford U, not in Montana. Now I'm curious which Montana prof I mixed him up with.

I've decided I was thinking of William Kittredge, a much less talented writer than Stegner, but who grew up in Oregon and taught at U of Montana.

Looking at his Wikipedia page, he taught creative writing at Stanford U, not in Montana. Now I'm curious which Montana prof I mixed him up with.

he really didn't!

A decent courtesy is more than sufficient.

Nicholson Baker to thread

I liked Salter's The Hunters and Light Years in different ways, the latter going toward his lush (prob in more ways than one) later style, but the former reeling in the impressions because fighter pilot on morning runs---not quite like anything else I've read. Think he was fairly famous, for a coterie/writer's writer (sometimes showing you what not to do, inadvertently)

Also read a Sorrentino story, in Esquire, I think, about a writer who twisted his life around one manuscript of a novel---eventually, he badgered someone into reading it who told him it became two stories, tangled; he needed to pull them apart, and then...he rejected this worked and partied and sneered on, on, on---pretty good!

Richard Elman (I found his memoir Namedropping wonderful.)