I’m voting Kazuo Ishiguro. I genuinely respect the consistency of his writing and the way he makes small events and details into fascinating stories.
I would have chosen (Haruki) Murakami, but he’s too obvious a pick, being as chic as he is (I think he deserves it though, I don’t think he’s just a fad at all)
Ishiguro is very good. David Mitchell is also very good. But all my favourite authors are dead, including Michael Crichton.
Me.
Brevel Monkey I take it by ‘Modern Author’ you actually mean ‘Contemporary Author’ as neither authors fall into the Modernist canon. Ishiguro writes historical fiction while Murakami is clearly Postmodern.
My favourite Contemporary Author is a Postmodern author named William Gibson.
I’m partial to the works of Tarō Gomi.
Kundera - just two middle period novels, unbearable lightness and book of laughter and forgetting.
Houellebecq wrote two amazing books - the possibility of an island is particularly powerful. He really captures in the opening of that book what it is like as a man to fall in love with a woman, and then in true Houellebecq style it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. But he doesn’t seem to have done much since then. Atomised and Whatever are also very good, Platform seemed a bit rushed to me. His short novella about Lanzarote is enjoyable, but does not include anything you couldn’t find in his better full length books.
I like his novels a lot.
Oh, yes…
Cormac McCarthy
especially his Mexico Trilogy.
I meant ‘modern author’, as in ‘someone who is fairly recent’. Sorry, I don’t give a shit about literary theory - to me its all just verbose crap. ‘Modern’ here just means ‘recent’. '. btw, Ishiguro doesn’t just write historical fiction, not any more anyway.
SIATD: I didn’t really specify ‘living’; Crichton counts. All I’ve read of Crichton was Jurassic Park, but I really enjoyed it. I’ve never read anything by David Mitchell - anything you’d recommend?
I can never think of names at times like this. Ishiguro is great. Also, V.S. Naipaul. I know there’s plenty more. My mind is mush sometimes. I know there’s a few authors I like that seem a bit “lighter”. If I think of their names I’ll come back to post about them.
EDIT: Oh yeah. Sabina Murray is a bit inconsistent at times but often she’s pretty great.
Perhaps I took ‘modern’ too literally. No matter, - :
Crichton - The second Jurassic Park book The Lost World is great, State of Fear is great, and of his older work my favourite is Terminal Man. I’ve not read his technothriller about nanobots.
Everyone raves about David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas but I much preferred Number9Dream, which has a lot of the William Gibson and Philip K Dick about it. Some of the lucid daydreams are truly astonishing feats of imagination.