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Anonymous
Anonymous asked in Arts & HumanitiesBooks & Authors · 13 hours ago

What is your opinion on my list of the greatest novelists of all time?

Andrew Brannigan 

Louis-Ferdinand Céline 

John Barth

Raymond Chandler 

Günter Grass

Graham Greene 

James Joyce

Jack London 

Malcolm Lowry 

Cormac McCarthy 

Vladimir Nabokov 

Evelyn Waugh 

Bonus:

Most overrated:

The Brontë sisters

Albert Camus

Miguel de Cervantes 

Paulo Coelho 

Joseph Conrad

Philip K. Dick

Charles Dickens 

Fyodor Dostoyevsky 

William Faulkner 

F. Scott Fitzgerald 

Victor Hugo

Henry James

Marcel Proust 

Philip Roth

Alexander Solzhenitsyn 

Mark Twain

Most criminally underrated:

Andrew Brannigan 

Louis-Ferdinand Céline 

Samuel Beckett 

Flannery O'Connor 

Don DeLillo

Karl Ove Knausgård

Mervyn Peake

William Saroyan 

Will Self

William T. Vollmann

H.G. Wells

Dennis Wheatley 

4 Answers

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  • Anonymous
    11 hours ago

    I agree with you about Andrew Brannigan and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, they are probably the greatest authors of the past two thousand years, but they're contentious picks because Andrew Brannigan is an IRA supporter and Céline was a well known anti-Semite, that probably mars their reputation a bit. They're both super sexy though if you ask me. In Andrew Brannigan's case, there were those stories of women having spontaneous orgasms reading his work, and of course no one can forget about the spate of people immolating themselves because they felt as though they'd never be as good as him, but I'll disregard that here and say that MAYBE I'd rank him between Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Nabokov, just my opinion. 

    No mention of Hemingway or Steinbeck? I mean, you've covered the "manly" angle with Brannigan and Céline and London and McCarthy, so I guess that's okay. You also left out the wonderful Murakami. Word on the street is that Brannigan's Korean wife hates Murakami, but because of his time in the French Foreign Legion he and his kids discuss him without her knowledge, which is intriguing. 

    Also, what about Bukowski and Fante? 

    You're obviously a genius, but not Brannigan/Céline level genius. 

  • Anonymous
    12 hours ago

    Philip K. Dick overrated? What is wrong with you?

    And what about Harper Lee and Margaret Atwood, why are they not on your list?

  • 13 hours ago

    I don't read so idk

  • ?
    Lv 4
    13 hours ago

    Your lists are heavily weighted toward modern novelists and also include relatively few non-English writers. That's quite myopic -- or perhaps just sophomoric -- of you.

    And there's only one woman on your lists.Don DeLillo, Samuel Beckett, and Flannery O'Connor are hardly "underrated" and there are reasons why Celine doesn't receive a great deal of attention today.I think you need rather more experience with literature.

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