Novelists No One Reads Anymore

Isn't Zachary Quinto playing him on stage right now?

uh yeah

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/sep/05/zachary-quinto-star-west-end-production-best-of-enemies

Had no clue.

Umberto Eco

I read The Prague Cemetery a few years ago. I thought it was quite good.

Many xps

I teach Priestley (An Inspector Calls) and have tried a few bits of late. English Journey is a decent, angry trawl around England of the 1930s (Owen Hatherley cited it as the main inspiration for A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, FWIW). Margin Released is a decent writing memoir, where he spends a good deal of time NOT writing about his WWI experiences (while writing really well about his WWI experiences). And Bright Day, which, the further I get away from, I'm convinced is a damn fine novel.

I'll be interested to see what happens to Ballard over the next 20 years or so.

Anyone still reading Lewis Grassic Gibbon?

Does anyone read Joaquin Miller anymore? Mostly a poet, but wrote some novels too.

Miller was championed, although not enthusiastically, by Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce. In his time, Miller was known for his dishonesty and womanizing. Bierce, his friend and contemporary, said of him, "In impugning Mr. Miller's veracity, or rather, in plainly declaring that he has none, I should be sorry to be understood as attributing a graver moral delinquency than he really has. He cannot, or will not, tell the truth, but he never tells a malicious or thrifty falsehood." Miller's response was, "I always wondered why God made Bierce."

Joaquin Miller's literary works seem to have been locked into a cabinet of Victorian era curios around 1920 and largely forgotten since. He wasn't a very good poet or novelist, but he was one hell of a character with a talent for self-promotion.

I'm mentally going back through my college-era faves and realizing I haven't heard much about Margaret Drabble lately.

I hope she's still being read in the UK at least.

I enjoyed reading the beginning of some Margaret Drabble book recently but couldn't keep up the momentum, but that is more my problem than hers, haven't been able to read a novel in quite a while. Being an empty nester might change that though. *fingers crossed*

heh, I read The Ice Age after Lester Bangs mentioned it somewhere (do people still read him?)

Greil Marcus mentioned it, I think.

Is Gore Vidal much read? He enjoyed a renaissnce during the Iraq War. But since his death -- nope.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, September 29, 2022

Our book club just read Julian

I think hardest novel I ever actually made it all of the way through was Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. It was assigned to our book club on my recommendation and I was the only one who finished it

Yup, I'd say Gore Vidal's lease on literary life hasn't expired, yet.

Drabble > Byatt

I've got a modern translation of The Magic Mountain, looks like all the French is translated too, and it's promising to skim. I should dig it up and dig in, considering that even H.T. Porter-Lowe's old Britishy roast beef version was intriguing enough.
Ice Age and the other two Drabble novels I read in the 70s and 80s had some good bits but ran out of steam. The first was, "Yes, we are in the 70s, and the 70s are fucked, ah yes, ah yes," which was what Bangs and Marcus seemed to like about it.

Lawrence Durrell is a good answer. Robertson Davies too?

Some favourite Gissings:

New Grub Street
The Odd Women
Born in Exile
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories
By The Ionian Sea (poor George having a miserable time in southern Italy but good fun anyway)

Some favourite Bennetts:

Anna of the Five Towns
Riceyman Steps
Old Wives Tale
Buried Alive (a Borges recommendation)
The Card
Clayhanger

(why late in the week in the uk does mark s get all pynchoned out: Thomas Pynchon )

Dunno if this Magic Mountain stuff is just a tangent but I can't imagine Thomas Mann not being widely read in German speaking countries still at least.

martin amis lol.

Heh. But Money might still be good, or is that challops at this point?

well i was discussing this with an intermittent ilxor the other day and the answer was a tentative yes. but more the point was just how much he isn’t part of *anything* these days. “he hasn’t even been cancelled” was an observation.

Hah!

He wasn't even the best curmudgeon in the Amises.

yeah does anyone still read kingsley amis?

or john braine, alan sillitoe, john braine etc

all those dudes were still in the school library when i was at high school (end of the 70s) but i get the feeling i was in the last generation to read them

might be wrong

Much easier to watch the films iirc.

Because I’m out for a good time. All the rest…

no one reads either of the john braines any more

The Man with Two Braines

lol oops

the other john braine is john wain i guess

Figured that’s what you meant but didn’t want to call you on it as it was kind of funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJf7_5vH1WE

you read one angry young man you've read em all

motherfuck him and John Braine

Lol!

(xp)
Never noticed until now that that song has a sub-Police faux reggae groove.

Insane in the Membraine

yeah does anyone still read kingsley amis?

― lambert simnel (doo rag)

hell does anyone read _martin_ amis lol

i read his book about pac-man i think

Julian Barnes?

Anybody seen
My old friend Kingsley
Can you tell me
Where he’s gone

Thought I saw him out walking
Out over the hill
With John Osborne
John Braine
And John

DO U SEE?

Jilted John to #onethread!

Jeez, you're busy, man

Sorry. Do you have a thread of your own you’d like to attend to?

(Thought I might have to help with homework tonight but kid is taking a break)

Again in truth I think this thread has undergone a, maybe inevitable, maybe somewhat productive, mission creep -- from genuinely listing people who are now very obscure (but maybe once weren't), to listing people who were once central and are now, necessarily, past, and recognised as important in an earlier generation but not current.

Anyone studying, say, England in the 1950s is likely to read Sillitoe (I've read SN&SM maybe 3 times, others here may have too - not to mention the LONELINESS book), and also the early Braine and Wain. (Wain btw was quite an interesting critic - a good essay on Orwell for one, as I recall.) I have actually been lining up HURRY ON DOWN and ROOM AT THE TOP to read for months myself.

These authors are not now extensively read as current authors (which they're not), but they are still read and part of the catalogue of cultural and literary history. In sum I don't think they are really good candidates for the thread.

I believe that people do still read Kingsley Amis, though clearly his stock has fallen since say 1995.

Martin Amis is I think a more specific and interesting case - he ought still to be, or could be, central and current in some way, but has faded away from that - as is correctly noted. I think that he made a number of particularly bad calls - the wayward statements on feminism and matrimony around PREGNANT WIDOW an example - in an attempt to maintain public profile. In that, indeed, it is hard to resist the obvious parallel with Morrissey - people vaguely know the controversial opinions, better than they know any of the later work.

MONEY I would say is (naturally?) as good and bad as it ever was. It was outrageous, extreme, nasty, brilliant, central. I still think it's his most impressive feat by far.

Sorry. Do you have a thread of your own you’d like to attend to?

― If The Damned Are United (James Redd and the Blecchs)

That was a compliment.

yeah does anyone still read kingsley amis?

― lambert simnel (doo rag)

*raises hand*

The NYRB rereleased his only good books.

So The Alteration then.