Novelists No One Reads Anymore

I feel like the kind of people who read Wilbur Smith still insist on calling Zimbabwe "Rhodesia"

Yes, the pinefox otm. Thread would have been pretty short if we had only stuck to Type I Obscurity though, so mentally opened the gates to those other barbarians pretty quickly.

eBooks of works in the public domain are probably having an impact. I was pleased to discover that the Project Gutenberg website maintains lists of most frequently viewed/downloaded works (https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top) and books sorted by popularity (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?sort_order=downloads).

Starting to come around on J. F. Powers after seeing this:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-saint-with-a-bad-temper-j-f-powers-company/

Born in 1917, James Farl Powers in mid-life won the 1963 National Book Award for his first novel, Morte d’Urban, which Gore Vidal and his fellow judges found worthier than either of that year’s other leading contenders, Pale Fire or Ship of Fools. Nabokov’s masterpiece was “over-elaborate academic funning” compared to Lolita, as Vidal saw it, while Katherine Anne Porter’s best-seller had already been quite grandly, if not excessively, celebrated. Even Porter agreed with the verdict

We should start a thread on great short story writers whose novels suck, for Ship of Fools would land in the top five.

Go ahead!

That bbc article CaAL linked to is quite good and contains this interesting pull quote:

Unlike musicians or filmmakers, authors can vanish completely – Christopher Fowler

people keep recommending that i read mervyn peake. as well as peter curren brown, whose sole novel "smallcreep's day" was the inspiration for mike rutherford's solo concept album...

I own Smallcreep's Day but never finished it, it's pretty heavy-handed allegory imo

At some point I am actually going to back and talk about Wilfrid Sheed if I can manage

wilbur smith sold his name to his publisher around 10 years ago so I expect he was still selling well then.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/vdnwzb/wilbur-smith-gavin-haynes-sleepless-nights

legit "wow"

I read a lot of Jack Higgins, Alastair McLean, Frederick Forsyth etc as a kid and even then I thought Wilbur Smith was terrible

Wonder if a good way to come up with lists of writers no one reads would be to dig up old sales figures from past decades (something that's equivalent to the pop charts).

Bernard DeVoto's granddaughter is a friend of mine. His wife was also an interesting person - Julia Child's best friend.

Approximately a century ago I went to Virginia Commonwealth University, where the library (and several other things) are named after James Branch Cabell. I tried to read him but fell asleep on or about page 4.

Fun fact: apparently his name is supposed to rhyme with "rabble," not "cab bell" or "cable."

My favorite fact from Mervyn Peake's Wikipedia entry:

Peake designed the logo for Pan Books. The publishers offered him either a flat fee of £10 or a royalty of one farthing per book. On the advice of Graham Greene, who told him that paperback books were a passing fad that would not last, Peake opted for the £10.

Trying to calculate what his eventual income would have been had he chosen the farthing.

Thread delivers, thanks YMP!

Winston Churchill (not that one) definitely belongs in this thread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill_(novelist)

Heh, just noticed that Wallace Stegner wrote a biography of Bernard DeVoto.

Any relation to Howard Devoto?

hi there

https://i.imgur.com/95GTVBZ.jpg

bernard is where howard d got the name from -- a book he read as a student i think

(his birth surname is trafford)

I can confidently report that Bernard DeVoto is NOT related to Howard DeVoto of the Buzzcocks (which is, alas, a pseudonym).

lol xp

Any relation to Howard Devoto?

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Tuesday, September 27, 2022 1:01 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

"I definitely don't remember this happening."

I can't find an confimation of mark's explanation, much as I want to believe.

a or any

I wonder if Harry Styles has given Brautigan a slight bump in popularity.

Have read, and enjoyed, Snow's Strangers and Brothers series (under the influence of Burgess' 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939). Not great literature, but I intend to return and re-read a couple volumes at some point.

Ronald Firbank probably belongs here? (The Flower Beneath the Foot: Being a Record of the Early Life of St. Laura de Nazianzi was a good read for me last year)

Disappointed by the new thread title*

*Please don't change it.

Wrong thread!

https://wikimili.com/en/Buzzcocks#cite_note-14:
↑ Some sources claim that the surname came from a "bus driver in Cambridge" mentioned by a philosophy tutor at Bolton (e.g. Dave Wilson, 2004, Rock Formations: Categorical Answers to how Band Names Were Formed, San Jose:, Cidermill Books, pp. 38–9). Other accounts link it to US novelist Bernard DeVoto. (See, for example, Adrian Room, 2010, Dictionary of Pseudonyms: 13,000 Assumed Names and Their Origins, 5th ed., Jefferson, North Carolina/London, McFarland & Company, pp. 38, 144.

i mean it's possible it's the "bus driver in cambridge" mentioned by the "philosophy tutor at bolton" (maybe it was a trolley not a bus)

that's not where i read it btw (but my music books are all in boxes and anyway probably i remember it from being a clean teen slate reading the inkies in 1977)

i will tentatively add Jocelyn Brooke here, even though i bang on about him a lot, and he didn’t sell *that* much even when he was around. now in the Faber Finds graveyard. But extremely good, especially The Image of a Drawn Sword, and well respected by his peers.

And I think Ronald Firbank, while a reasonably well known *name* is v little read these days despite being moderately significant in his connection between fin de siecle aestheticism and subsequent 20th C comic novels.

Ronald Firbank may go unread these days, but his offspring Butch Firbanks still looms large in his legend.

Hi bulb after bulb that was the series I embarked on the first book of and tbf I could have continued, it just didn't hold me at the time. I'm definitely interested in Snow for historical reasons if nothing else

Does anyone read Ben-Hur or Shepherd of the Hills anymore? Huge in turn of the century US.

How about The Robe for that matter.

Lloyd C. Douglas.

What was the name of the guy who wrote Seven Who Fled again? He was in the comeback kid mode around here for a hot minute.

The Flower Beneath the Foot
bulb after bulb
The Flower Beneath the Foot
bulb after bulb
*please don't change it
The Flower Beneath the Foot
bulb after bulb

Zane Grey? Louis L'amour?

(not answering James's question; just wondering if anyone still reads 'em)

What Are You Reading
The Flower Beneath The Foot
bulb after bulb

Grey L'Amour
Fall '22
bulb after bulb

James Gould Cozzens.

wow Winston Churchill really was a giant at the time

His first novel to appear in book form was The Celebrity (1898). However, Mr. Keegan's Elopement had been published in 1896 as a magazine serial and was republished as an illustrated hardback book in 1903. Churchill's next novel—Richard Carvel (1899) — was a phenomenal success. The novel was the third best-selling work of American fiction in 1899 and eighth-best in 1900, according to Alice Hackett's 70 Years of Best Sellers. It sold some two million copies in a nation of only 76 million people, and made Churchill rich. His other commercially successful novels included The Crisis (1901), The Crossing (1904), Coniston (1906), Mr. Crewe's Career (1908) and The Inside of the Cup (1913), all of which ranked first on the best-selling American novel list in the years indicated.[2]

That quote about novelists vanishing, when compared to musicians or filmmakers, rings pretty true. I wonder if a lot of it has to do with stylistically a lot of writing simply becoming unfashionable or dull compared to other eras, which might lean more into poetry or a sort of hardboiled realism, or working in a genre which has fallen into complete disfavor. For example I've got to believe there were so many writers of western novels which will never see the light of day again, whereas western films and music influenced by the west will always have a huge audience. L'Amour and Grey are obv largely unfashionable (maybe the latter has been since he was obliquely zinged in The Third Man) but they'll always be known.

Peter Benchley probably sticks around in the public consciousness exclusively due to Jaws. I'd be curious to see if Mario Puzo would have suffered a fate of being forgotten, too, if The Godfather was never filmed.