In a 1990 interview between William T. Vollmann and one of his editors Larry McCaffery. An excerpt from the interview appears as a list in the Vollmann reader Expelled from Eden, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite books (seriously, let’s have another volume—this is clearly the optimum Vollmann delivery system). I’ve kept Expelled from Eden’s list format because, hey, let’s face it, we like lists—
LM: Who are your favorite contemporary authors?
WV: By “contemporary” I assume you mean “from the last two hundred years.”
1./2./3. Right now it seems like I’ve learned a lot from Mishima, Kawabata, and Tolstoy;
4. Hawthorne may be the best;
5. Then Faulkner;
6. Hemingway is usually a wonderful read, especially Islands in the Stream and For Whom the Bell Tolls—that is to say, the grandly suicidal narratives;
7. Tadeusz Konwicki’s A Dreambook for Our Time is beautiful;
8. I also love everything I’ve read by Mir Lagerkvist;
9. Sigrid Undset’s trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter;
10. Multatuli’s Max Havalaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company;
11. Kundera’s Laughable Loves;
12. Andrea Freud Lowenstein’s This Place (which deserves more recognition than it has received);
13. Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders (which I had the wonderful experience of finding and reading a few months after completing my own book about Greenlanders, The Ice-Shirt).
14. Evans and Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men;
15. Farley Mowat’s The People of the Deer;
16. The first three books of Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy (how could I have forgotten that?);
17. Random bits of Proust, Zola’sL’Assommoir;
18. Shusaku Endo’s The Samurai;
19.The first two books of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy;
20. William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land;
21. Poe’s stories about love;
22. Everything by Malraux (especially his Anti-Memoirs);
23. Nabokov’s Glory and Transparent Things and Ada;
24. Melville’s Pierre;
25. Thomas Bernhard’s Correction;
26. David Lindsay’s Voyage to Acturus;
27. Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly;
28. A few of Boll’s short novels (Wo warst du, Adam? and The Train Was on Time);
29. Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel;
30. Maria Dermout’s The Ten Thousand Things;
31. Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz;
32. James Blish’s Cities in Flight tetralogy (which is just plane fun);
33. The first three volumes of Lawrence Durrell’sAlexandria Quartet, and I don’t know what all.
There’s lots more. I am sorry not to be able to put down less contemporary things such as Tale of Genji, which is one of my all-time favorites.
Biblioklept 