Finding New Authors

February 1, 2020 5:37 PM

Back in the day (mid- to late 1970’s), I read a type of author that I don’t see anymore. They were generally taught in university level contemporary literature courses, and while not best-sellers, were somewhat recognized and popular (I bought a paperback copy of Gravity’s Rainbow at the grocery store.) Has that kind of writing died out, or am I just not aware of it?

Guys (and yeah, they were almost always male. Hopefully that has changed in the intervening 40 years) like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Russel Hoban, Thomas Pynchon, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Hawkes, etc., etc. That was 40 years ago – who are the now-contemporary contemporary literature authors? I tried searching for collage syllabi but came up empty.

posted by rtimmel to Writing & Language (19 answers total)

Pick up a couple of literary reviews - The London Review of Books, or New York or LA - and read them for who they review and who they refer to.
posted by clew at 5:56 PM on February 1, 2020 [4 favorites]

I may be missing something specific about your categorization and am coming at this from Canada, but my own browsing of Contemporary Lit courses on college websites turned up the recent literary fiction I expected to see (i.e. the ones I'd see multiple copies of at the bookstore, or at CostCo and other big box stores, or at the airport): Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Jeffrey Eugenides, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jhumpa Lahiri, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, Will Self, Zadie Smith, Jesmyn Ward, etc.
posted by northernish at 6:03 PM on February 1, 2020 [14 favorites]

List of winners and shortlisted authors of the Booker Prize
posted by caek at 6:06 PM on February 1, 2020

Best answer: Hi -- I read a lot of those authors. I think of them as "Sixties New Yorker Authors" Partly what happened is that the canon expanded so there are a lot more options and therefore not quite the same clot of "the usual dudes" who are on all the lists. But, I think there are still a lot of modern classics. Here are a few:

- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (note: he is problematic)
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
- a lot of the work of Richard Powers. I haven't read Overstory but many love it ,I am a huge fan of The Gold Bug Variations

All of those are dudes who have won Pulitzers which means the books are recognizable and popular. There are also women on that list but I haven't read their books (Goldfinch is supposed to be great) To find more women writers who are doing popular stuff the Orange Prize (now the Women's Prize) is recognition for female authors. A few notables from that list

- We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver
- The Time Traveller's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger

Booker Prize winners are another place to look. A few notables

- The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
- The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

And then there are some of the heirs apparent to the writers you like, men like George Saunders and Jonathan Franzen, J. M. Coetzee and Peter Handke. They are also fine writers, there's just so much more out there.
posted by jessamyn at 6:08 PM on February 1, 2020 [8 favorites]

Looking at the book lists for my university's intro to lit class yields the following ones:

A lot of them require Kindred by Octavia Butler. That's not totally contemporary: she's no longer alive. But it's pretty recent.

We The Animals by Justin Torres

There There by Tommy Orange

Underground Railroad by Coleson Whitehead

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden

These are all, I think, books that you'd be familiar with if you read something like the New York Times book review.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:22 PM on February 1, 2020 [5 favorites]

If you Google either famous college or college near you plus writers series, I think you'll find these types of books. I used to work for one that included several mentioned already.
posted by nakedmolerats at 6:34 PM on February 1, 2020

You might like Roberto Bolaño
posted by thelonius at 6:47 PM on February 1, 2020 [3 favorites]

The Complete Gary Lutz came out recently, and based on your list of exemplars, I suspect you'd enjoy it.
posted by Wobbuffet at 7:03 PM on February 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

UC Berkeley reading lists from a Contemporary Novel upper division course:

Spring 2020: Atwood, Margaret: Oryx and Crake; Egan, Jennifer: A Visit from the Goon Squad; Hamid, Mohsin: The Reluctant Fundamentalist; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go; Lerner, Ben: 10:04; McCarthy, Cormac: The Road; Watkins, Claire Vay: Gold Fame Citrus; Whitehead, Colson: The Underground Railroad

From 2018 (focus on Pulitzer Prize winners): Batuman, Elif: The Idiot; Diaz, Herman: In the Distance; Doerr, Anthony: All the Light We Cannot See; Greer, Andrew Sean: Less; Nguyen, Viet Thanh: The Sympathizer; Whitehead, Colson: The Underground Railroad

From 2012: Díaz, Junot: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Foer, Jonathan Safran: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go; McCarthy, Cormac: The Road; McCarthy, Tom: Remainder; McEwan, Ian: Atonement; Morrison, Toni: Home; Smith, Zadie: White Teeth
posted by vunder at 7:05 PM on February 1, 2020 [4 favorites]

Esi Edugyan's Washington Black is fantastic.

It appears on this particular syllabus along with:

David Chariandy, Brother
Esi Edugyan, Washington Black
Rawi Hage, Cockroach
Eden Robinson, Monkey Beach
Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:23 PM on February 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

Well, a lot of the people who would have been writing these books are TV showrunners now.

That said, I remember "The Goldfinch" being pretty widely available, and Franzen made the cover of Time magazine, so they still exist.

This is weird, but Esquire magazine is one of the few general-market magazines that still seems to care about literature. It's how I first got into Jonathan Safran Foer, for example, and while that's a 20-year-old example, they seem to have gotten even more lit-y since then. They also published some DFW, I remember, as did Rolling Stone.

Of course, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Harper's are widely-available magazines that take contemporary literature seriously. Maybe not available in every grocery store, but they're in every airport "bookstore" I've ever been in. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, some of these Hudson News-type places do generally stock some pretty highbrow stuff mixed in with their YA paranormal romance and self-help.
posted by kevinbelt at 8:26 PM on February 1, 2020

Best answer: You need to follow book blogs that cover this sort of literature. The following are examples and all of them will have other recommendations. Many of them review books in translation, where the more interesting writing is happening.

Books and Bao
The Literary Saloon
The Modern Novel
Obooki's Obloquy
Tony's Reading List
Wuthering Expectations
posted by TheRaven at 1:40 AM on February 2, 2020 [4 favorites]

I’m also not totally confident I know what you’re looking for: is it as broad as “currently popular literary fiction”? With apologies if I’m missing the mark, here are a few more suggestions that have been “buzzy” among my lit-fix-reading friends in recent years, omitting authors I saw mentioned already: Rachel Cusk, Otessa Moshfegh, Ocean Vuong, Sally Rooney, Akwaeke Emezi, Kyung-Sook Shin, Elizabeth Strout, Téa Obreht, Lauren Groff, Helen Oyeyemi, Ali Smith, Helen DeWitt, Lesley Nnekah Arimah, Sheila Heti, Yaa Gyasi, Celeste Ng, Hilary Mantel.
posted by somedaycatlady at 4:35 AM on February 2, 2020 [4 favorites]

Yeah I think the issue is that the culture changed and so the 'it' literary author group got bigger. Instead of like 10 mostly white men who write within a fairly narrow genre range, you have a much bigger group that embraces more genre influences as well as more cultural experience. This means there are just too many for us all to share one set of writers we perceive as good literary fiction authors. But good contemporary literature is still sold at the airport and Target (along with the less artful, trope-filled stuff) and taught in universities! I agree that the many literary reviews out there are a good place to see what's 'trending' in literature. I like the LA Review of Books and I listen to the New York Times Book Review podcast. Lots of blogs and magazines to choose from too.
posted by latkes at 7:53 AM on February 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

Roxane Gay recently was an editor for a Best American anthology - if you want non white authors whose names will get big soon, I would start with that.
posted by yueliang at 9:02 AM on February 2, 2020

Ben Lerner

Michael Cunningham

Colson Whitehead

Colum McCann

Teddy Wayne
posted by loveandhappiness at 10:02 AM on February 2, 2020

Check out The Millions; particularly keep an eye on their top 10 list, especially the books that made the all-time list because of the length of time they spent on the top 10. It’s the kind of thing you’re looking for.

You’ll also probably like their lists of most anticipated new titles, which they do a few times a year. They cover almost entirely litfic and have dealt with most of the authors others have mentioned here.
posted by verbminx at 10:54 PM on February 2, 2020

Colson Whitehead is a good recommendation. He was a Grantland contributor, which is about as pop-culture-y as literary fiction types get these days.
posted by kevinbelt at 6:22 AM on February 3, 2020

Here’s Duke’s contemporary novel course which focuses on novels from 1988 and later but also covers novels in translation.

“ Novels will be drawn mostly from the following: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend, Zadie Smith White Teeth, J.M. Coetzee Disgrace, Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things, W.G. Sebald The Emigrants, Tom McCarthy Remainder, Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.”
posted by vunder at 1:37 PM on February 3, 2020