Your Top 10 Authors of all Time?

[Caliban]

Everyone loves a good top 10 list surely

No restrictions fiction,non fiction, poetry, philosophy anything goes.

I'm gonna think about mine and come back with an answer later because I want to take time on my list.

If you like do a little explanation on why you love the author as well.

[Michael]

In order of influence

1. Thomas Ligotti
2. Jorge Luis Borges
3. Sun Tzu
4. H P Lovecraft
5. Shakespeare
6. Plato
7. Shantideva (The Way of The Bodhisattva)
8. Franz Kafka
9. Thomas Malory (Le Morte D'Arthur)
10 (Tie). Alan Moore
10 (Tie). Geoff Johns

[Liam Barden]

I know I'm breaking the rules with 13, but I couldn't leave any out.

I recently created a list of my favorite writers and their selected works that I need to perform an autopsy on . . . A lot of them are re-reads and flip throughs – pages / chapters of dope s#it I've marked with Post-it notes, etc.

This is that list in no particular order . . .

Yukio Mishima: Death in Midsummer, Acts of Worship, Forbidden Colors, The Sailor who fell from Grace with the Sea, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Five Modern Nō Plays, The Sea of Fertility.

Justin Isis: Welcome to the Arms Race, I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like, Girl Revolution.

Léon Bloy: Sweating Blood, Disagreeable Tales.

Marquis de Sade: 120 Days of Sodom, Philosophy in the Boudoir.

Michel Houellebecq: Atomised, The Possibility of an Island, Lanzarote.

Charles Baudelaire: Le FLEURS Du MAL, Paris Spleen.

Thomas Ligotti: Teatro Grottesco, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, My Work is Not Yet Done.

Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Black Spring, Henry Miller on Writing.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Human All Too Human.

Emil Cioran: On the Heights of Despair, A Short History of Decay.

Georges Bataille: The Story of the Eye, L'Abbé C, My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, Visions of Excess.

Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho, Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, The Informers.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Journey to the End of the Night.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Quote Originally Posted by Michael

10 (Tie). Geoff Johns

This one's begging for an explanation.

[Frater_Tsalal]

I was just talking to a friend about this yesterday. In terms of fiction, and not counting comic book writers or books written by friends (the one exception to this is Dennis Cooper, but I was a fan well before I befriended him), my list would be (in no order):

Thomas Pynchon
J.K. Huysmans
Dennis Cooper
Bret Easton Ellis
H.P. Lovecraft
Thomas Ligotti
Stephen R. Donaldson
Samuel R. Delany
William S. Burroughs
Carson McCullers/Caitlin R. Kiernan (tie)

with Denis Johnson, J.G. Ballard, and various others getting honorable mentions

Now, if I DO factor in comic book writers, I would put Grant Morrison on there and maybe bump either Delany or Donaldson down to 11th.

If I factor in writers in general, both fiction and non-fiction, things get tricky, though to be honest there are only a few non-fiction writers whose work I rate highly: E.M. Cioran, Colin Wilson, Kenneth Grant, and so on. Kenneth Grant is the only one who I could potentially see in my top ten.

[ChildofOldLeech]

Bruno Schulz
Edgar Allan Poe
Franz Kafka
H.P. Lovecraft
Shirley Jackson
Philip K. Dick
Cormac McCarthy
Thomas Ligotti
Laird Barron
M.R. James/ Arthur Machen (tie)

I didn't list any living writers as I see my experience with them as still inchoate and nebulous. I feel I can only have a 'full' experience with a writer when seeing their evolution from beginning to end. Listing an alive writer for me would like listing a favourite movie when I was only half done.

Of those still stuck on this dump, I'd say Justin, Cisco, M. John Harrison and Ligotti would be my top picks. I will read anything they create, and each deserve to go down as a major literary figure of this age.

[Caliban]

Quote Originally Posted by Prince James Zaleski

I didn't list any living writers as I see my experience with them as still inchoate and nebulous. I feel I can only have a 'full' experience with a writer when seeing their evolution from beginning to end. Listing an alive writer for me would like listing a favourite movie when I was only half done. Of those still stuck on this dump, I'd say Justin, Cisco, M. John Harrison and Ligotti would be my top picks. I will read anything they create, and each deserve to go down as a major literary figure of this age.

That's a really interesting perspective that I hadn't considered before.

I'm a big lover of Ligotti - obviously - and M.John Harrison as well. I definitely don't want either of them to leave us anytime soon.

[qcrisp]

'I believe in what the Germans term Ehrfurcht: reverence for things one cannot understand.' ― Robert Aickman, An Essay

Funnily enough, I'm hoping to get ear-####ed pretty soon, in Germany, at Wacken:

Wacken Open Air - Home

I think there'll be plenty of things there that are impossible to understand, too.

[qcrisp]

Sorry, that's off-topic. I promise it'll be on-topic next time.