Novelists No One Reads Anymore

My best friend at high school was an obsessive reader of Alexander Kent novels, was he ever a big deal? Certainly wrote a lot of books, and he only died five years ago.

What about Henri Barbusse? Feel like he would be difficult and lack the cache of say Celine.

i didn't know nautical fiction was an entire genre

OCEANS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS

Poster Boy Arnold Bennett is a Penguin Classics kind of guy, so while this definitely disqualifies for Type I Unread, not sure about Type II Unread. Maybe Type II should have subdivisions of the clade: Type IIa- famous for being unread, but still read and in print, Type IIb - unread and unknown by most but still in print but a publisher you know etc.

definitely need some empsonian classifications of that sort.

have read two Arnold Bennett's in the last couple of years - the card and Anna of the five towns. was figuring him for stoke's version of gaskell based on descriptions of the latter but the card was a bit of a knockabout. tptv shows the film from time to time.

gissing also, New Grub Street, slightly depressing

Most recent Arnold Bennett reference prior to this thread

i was right to say it

Lol

I think the important thing about Bennett is that Stoke is now widely understood as a racist shithole

So George Meredith doesn't seem to be in print with any publisher of note in the US but it seems maybe Penguin UK does have The Egoist.

So his Penguin Score is very low but non-zero.

**ahem** a more recent Arnold Bennett reference:

Bright Remarks and Throwing Shade: What Are You Reading, Summer 2022?

sort of a related question that one, _genres_ that have fallen out of favor probably they have at least niche followings.

Good point. In identifying Grey and L'amour, I was kind of thinking of them in these terms, and my suspicion, at least, is that the pop Western as a genre was basically replaced by the likes of Clancy, Grisham, Patterson, etc. There are undoubtedly some large gaps in that history; Stephen King might belong there, but I always think of him belonging to slightly different, if related, literary traditions. Basically, I'm arguing for Grey and L'amour as the "airport reads" of their day, if that makes sense.

Oh wait, sorry, maybe I was sorting by relevance instead of date.

lol

EIther that or I just can't read or something.

Stephen king has a new book in the top ten just this week

he's the new winston churchill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSzJNQSkbi8

probably nobody still reading j.b. priestley? pretty big in 50s & 60s, lots of his books still in op shops (uk -"charity shops") - i read one once, was a sort of heavy handed satire of an arts festival

op shops is probably where you'd get a pile of answers for this thread but i seldom go into those places any more

Good one, Priestley. I always get him confused with J.R. Ackerley tbh who had a recent revival via NYRB, not sure how high he got on the Type-O-Hype-O-Meter.

At the risk of dragging out the big gun for dinosaur and aiming it at Stonehenge (DO U SEE?), there is a kind of hauntology associated with these kinds of authors.

lot of '90s "chick lit" & "lad lit" dudes in the op shops last i looked but i don't remember any of those authors' names & anyway maybe ppl still do read em idk

^^ those feel like a different category, as far as an omnipresent best-seller (Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain) that never entered a canon vs. one that endured for a while and has now petered out.

That said, not sure Millennials or Gen Z are getting into High Fidelity or Bridget Jones's Diary unless it's picked up from a Little Free Library.

yeah those are ubiquitous in the ol' LFL & i don't know if that means nobody reads em any more or if it means lots of ppl still read em

actually i realise that i don't have very much idea what other people are reading at all

probably nobody much still reading susan hill or andrea newman (also ubiquitous 2nd hand & both actually good imo)

this thread is a delight & i'm awed and charmed by many posts

I read a few J. B. Priestley plays in that same modern drama course I mentioned earlier. Maybe the instructor was some kind of freak?

SF/fantasy seems like a slightly different thing, but I hope no children are reading Piers Anthony like I did.

I'm curious if kids these days are into Baum or (older kids) Vonnegut? Is Kerouac too toxic masculine now? Bukowski? I feel like the category of "genuinely popular in my lifetime but now not read" is harder to fill. I remember my parents reading The Jewel in the Crown when the miniseries was on Masterpiece Theater—I assume that's a tough sell these days

I meant to include Heinlein in my childhood wonderings

SF/fantasy seems like a slightly different thing, but I hope no children are reading Piers Anthony like I did.

― rob

god, even when i was young piers anthony had a well-known reputation as a creep.

Daphne du Maurier. (Surprising that she died as late as 1989.)

Andre Norton btw? idk

People surely still read Du Maurier (and Brautigan), a lot.

Daphne du Maurier. (Surprising that she died as late as 1989.)

she was still in her 20s when she wrote her big hits, hitchcock was on it!

Is kind of mad that she wrote Rebecca and Jamaica Inn and The Birds and Don't Look Now, if we judge an author by their film adaptations she's a world-beater.

I just downloaded a du Maurier novel onto my Kindle! And I recently read a collection of her stories that included Don't Look Now. It was patchy, but very readable.

i think of those four as the birds expanded universe tetralogy

I've read two of her short stories and tried to read Rebecca (not bad but life is too short)

First encountered Rebecca as part of my stepmother's set of "classic novels" audiobooks, think it was the only thing from the 20th century in the set, still odd to me that it was written so late

There’s a sub-group of novelists who were sort of big deals because they were related to famous authors:

Julian Hawthorne
Constance Fenimore Woolson
Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie

They're the literary equivalent of James Taylor's siblings.

Someone who knows more of the English Canadian literary canon could probably come up with a bunch of names that were considered important in their times. Brian Fawcett was a writer (and quasi-novelist) who died earlier this year; celebrated in the 80s as Canada's foremost post-modernist, but there's only one, non-circulating copy of Cambodia : a book for people who find television too slow now in the Toronto library system.

So I said later for this thread and went striding the stacks of my local library this afternoon, and for the first time spied a novel by xpost Margaret Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks, another xpost Penguin Classic. The back of it referred to Q.D. Leavis (this phrase is the only direction quotation): heroine is a "missing link" between Austen's Emma and Eliot's Dorothea, and Leavis likes her better. Well I glanced through long tunneling sentences in tiny type: Miss M is not the heroine (whom she tells to drop by tomorrow only if she can "pick up someone amusing"), seems to be queen bee or enforcer of high-ish society types I got sick of in Proust, but maybe I'll read it some more, having liked the few anthologized stories I've come across (though she may be one of those great or good short story writers who suck at novels, as mentioned by Alfred).

direct quotation

Does anyone read Norman Mailer any more?

oh that brian fawcett book is great. i never read or even saw any other books by him or talked to anyone else who'd read it (far as i can remember) so i guess he might be a writer nobody reads any more

or maybe never did, i dunno

Mailer's Armies of the Night still speaks to ongoing frustrations: levitate the Pentagon? Sure, why the fuck not, let's go, Fugs. "Out Demons Out."