Cormac McCarthy's Replacement - Greatest Living Author?

I feel like I never hear about JM Coetzee, my man gets no love on the internet lol. But I really think he's definitely in contention now. Disgrace and Waiting for the Barbarians are flat out masterpieces on the only themes that matter in literature, death and sex and morality.

Man, I just wanna say I love your videos. I'm shit when it comes to reading. I read slowly and I have ADHD which really makes it hard to focus. But you really make me wanna read more and write more. And I love how you always seem to have so much to talk about it's almost as if you can't get it out fast enough. I'm really looking forward to getting to some of these authors you've recommended. Maybe I can be the type of reader that I want to be.

William T Vollmann. His depth, scope, and ambition is amazing. 1. Fathers and Crows 2. The Dying Grass 3. The Royal Family 4. The Ice-Shirt 5. Whores for Gloria

James Ellroy. He's often overlooked when mentioning great American writers. His Underworld USA trilogy is up there with his LA Quartet.

Honestly the only other living authors I really enjoy are Karl Ove Knausgaard and Michel Houellebecq.

Hey Write, I love your videos and I’ve noticed that you can read books very fast. I’m quite jealous of this as there are so many books that I wish to read. I feel that I read very slowly around the speed of normal conversation. I do this because if I go faster I can’t think about the text as much. I want to become a faster reader but I’m afraid I’m reading as fast as I will ever be able to comprehensively. Is there any recommendations to become faster at reading? Btw I’m fairly new to seriously reading, but I’m also slightly dyslexic so I’m not sure if its because I’m newish or the dyslexia

Gene Wolfe? Nope, disqualified due to death. D’oh!! My vote is for Kazuo Ishiguro. Maybe a little trendy choice these days, but his work holds up, as far as I’m concerned. I’d add The Buried Giant to his other masterworks that you mentioned. Also, maybe some consideration to Margaret Atwood?

I wish Gene Wolfe were alive so I could say Gene Wolfe. I think Alan Moore (speaking of Gaiman) deserves some credit for making comics more literary, plus Jerusalem is absolutely crazy. I have Jitterbug Perfume and IQ84 ready to read. Right now I am reading The Physiognomy by Jeffrey Ford, which isn't the greatest thing I've ever read, but it is weird as balls. Ford's short stories are super cool though. I've read some Murakami years ago and thought it was okay. An issue I have with many contemporary writers is that they all seem to be too influenced by what came before. I've read books that were attempts at sounding like Geek Love, or books that try to sound like Infinite Jest, but in an obviously inferior way.

It's sad that Pynchon and DeLillo are about all we have left. I actually disregard a lot of American authors as great "American" authors because their literary traditions are based in European literary traditions, and that's perfectly fine on an intellectual level, but I wish for America to have its own standards of literature, and to me our country's greatest "American" authors have always been the ones with distinctly American voices, starting with Benjamin Franklin (not an author per se, but his humor and homespun wisdom in his publications and letters are the hallmarks of my ideal of great American writing) and continuing on up through the tradition of Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller, Henry Miller, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Larry McMurtry, Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Bukowski, and of course Cormac McCarthy; all writers who are direct and insightful, with stories born of the land or steeped in the philosophy of the democratic values of the country, confronting their conflicts with the way the rest of the world views life, and ultimately twisting a sense of humor out of the torture of living in a miserable world gone awry. There's none of the Victorian romanticism which plagued American writers of the 19th and early 20th century, and while imitating that style may have led to literary acceptance for those writers in Europe, and the production of timeless classics in world literature, those voices are still not as distinctly American as the ones which emerged en masse after Hemingway. Those voices which could speak a fact to your face without the need to imply it politely or dress it up for the moralists and elitists who insisted on building citadels of virtue in a land of vice. They democratized literature for the common man rather than esteeming it only for the educated upper class as they did in feudal Europe, and McCarthy's biggest contribution to American literature was his reach for the heights of literary greatness while maintaining feet firmly planted on American soil, telling stories of the people and the land like Steinbeck, so rich in scope and vision yet so grounded in a reality where despite his beautiful language, he's still taking you on a tour of the most violent and broken places of rural America. He's about as high as an aspiring American writer can hope to reach without lifting up off the ground and separating themselves from what makes an American writer truly "American"; that willingness to work with their hands, to bare their feet upon the earth, to take pleasure in simple things, to find the world and its contradictions as endlessly humorous and absurd as they are endlessly bleak and depressing, and to possess dreams and aspirations and hopes beyond any sensible reckoning: that stubborn and inexhaustible American hope which has been the definining characteristic of this country since its inception.

Michel Houellebecq, William T. Vollman, Thomas Pynchon, Karl Ove Knausgard all come to mind; you already mention Kazuo Ishiguro and Haruki Murakami whom are great as well!

I’m with you on Tom Robbins-greatest living author that I’ve read.

Need help - which CM video do you go into the nature of god being as a malevolent hawk? I thought I saved it but can’t find the t

Not living either but the other author that I put up there with Cormac was Phillip Roth. His sentences were so well put together and beautiful, always ending with a bittersweet twist, like the stories as a whole. He was amazing in my opinion.

Bro, most of my favorite authors are dead or committed a Mishima. Anyway, for me, I consider Irvine Welsh (Joyce for the Urban Beatnik Junkie), Alan Moore (his understanding of language and evolution is amazing), Karl Ove Knausgaard, Haruki Murakami (shoot me dead, don’t care, he’s wonderfully weird and human), Mircea Cărtărescu, Samuel Delany (legit can’t think of any other author who made me gag and physically ill before), and China Miéville when he isn’t acting like a spaz. Maybe Peter Sotos, but I’m honestly finding a lot of his artistic expression less so of a character and more so something a bit worrying at times, especially after what he did with Pure and some of his recent stuff. Same for Kaur Kender, he can do some real good stuff, but he gets into trite and down and out questionable stuff at times.

Damn, I loved every minute of this!

How did you manage to read the orchard keeper 5 times in a month AND put out all this content? Your output is crazy, honestly curious how you do it.

My vote is for Joy Williams. She's wrote 5 great novels and maybe a hundred masterful short stories. Unfortunately she has not been canonized but fans of Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver will find her nestled in a sweet spot between the two and carrying their torches ably.

Thomas Pynchon is the greatest living author in English and has been so for a long time. Don DeLillo would be my second choice.

Small presses are where it's at, but unfortunately get buried under big, big names. B.R. Yeager is certainly one of the best living authors right now. Dennis Cooper, though he's definitely not up and coming. Lindsay Lerman and Charlene Elsby are greats. Brian Evenson another. Blake Butler, also fantastic and super contentious. My two cents! Great authors keep popping up but Big Five aren't typically where you'll find them.

The Handmaid's Tale Oryx and Crake novels Atwood is one off to be 5. Id argue her work may not be as literary as his but just as deep