Authors We Worship, Part 1 (not necessarily in order)
These are some of the authors that have informed our existence, reminding us that publishing is a modern, essential act, one that can save readers from earthly damnation.
John Fowles lies you down in the nurturing sunlight of beauty and wonder, only to slap you awake with the blood-curdling truths and horrors of our baffling existence.
Work: The Magus
Patricia Highsmith paints achingly poignant, breath-catching panoramas from the nakedness of life and the intricate tapestries we use to cover it up, employing language so adept and so stunning, you’ll wonder why she isn’t ubiquitously taught in literature courses. (But then you won’t, remembering that she’s a woman.)
Work: The Price of Salt
Chang-Rae Lee assembles a kaleidoscopic, visionary landscape of human beauty and vulnerability that will seam-rip your heart out stitch by stitch, leaving you on your knees in gratitude.
Work: My Year Abroad
J.D. Salinger leads you by the hand through the intimate lives of his lovingly-crafted characters, somehow highlighting the ugly and absurd while leaving you with the impression that life is so precious, so gossamer, there is no other choice but to handle it with the greatest of care.
Work: Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour
F. Scott Fitzgerald sails you through diamond-sparkle seas and swelling white curtains to a land where mankind’s greatest missteps can lay themselves out in all the tragic drama we think our existence deserves. (In all its beauty, but more.)
Work: Tender is the Night
Ernest Hemingway strips vitality to the precise degree of undress we can stand, while simultaneously pinning down beauty in such an abrupt, heart-breaking manner that we aren’t sure what happened to us when we read him, but know that surely we have changed.
Work: A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream (Hot take, I know.)
One of the rare fish to notice the water, Jane Austen astutely observes her world, braiding it into the notes and lyrics of universal characters and stories that allow us to view the complexity of life and character within ourselves.
Work: Pride and Prejudice
Haruki Murakami pulls you through a manhole made of clouds into an underworld of magical realism, a place where uncooked courses render themselves eerily digestible. Led only by his own quietly howling soul, he guides us to the precarious cliffs of his unmuffled mind to look upon possibilities hitherto unreachable.
Work: Kafka on the Shore
Catherine Lacey tunnels straight for your soul’s achilles - your slippery relationship with that serpentine thing, your self. She steals away your world for her immediate one through a siren song of circumstances that feel so real they could consume you.
Work: Biography of X