the top 5 most important non-American, non-British writers
the top 5 most readable non-American, non-British writers
(poets, novelists, experimentalists, mentalists, tightrope walkers, etc.
the egg breakers, the egg menders)
Putting the harm back in harmony since May 2007.
5 comments:
I don't do too well with lists, mainly because I don't keep a running tab on things that really get me going. Best I can do is a quick run of names of writers from the past 100 or so years that really some something strong and convincing and new. All non-English speakers, all writers who wrote poems/novels/stories that seem "major" to me (ie. evince some kind of deep and genuine synthesis):
Ryszard Kapuscinski
W.G. Sebald
Witold Gombrowicz
Yasunari Kawabata
Miroslav Holub
Claudio Magris
Roberto Bolano
Nadezhda Mandelstam
Leo Tolstoy
Cesar Vallejo
Isaac Babel
Paul Celan
Julio Cortazar
Jose Saramago
Jorge Luis Borges
Henri Michaux
Italo Calvino
Javier Marias
Anton Chekhov
Vladimir Nabokov
Junichiro Tanizaki
Marcel Proust
No surprises. They're all pretty well-known names. I wonder about the lack of women here, but honestly I think if this included English-speaking writers, there'd be a long list of ladies too.
Thanks, friend.
We gotta talk one of these days. Nothing new on my end -- which is good.
If I can pull away from the hubbub, I'm going to try and give you a call this weekend. It's been too long.
Funny, I've just been thinking about hubbub. It's getting the best of me, I tell you.
I whiffed this weekend. But was so busy forgot to swing. A cousin's wedding. A bar. Even a little dabble of PF Chang's. Soon, a phonecall. Soon...
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