Literary Fiction Authors Worth Checking Out

As I browsed through this week's "Sunday Book Review" section of the New York Times, I was struck by how long it seemed to have been since I've come across a work of serious literary fiction from an author about whose work I could truly get excited. Not just for a single book, but for an entire oeuvre, a body of work that I simply wanted to consume backwards in time and -- if not already deceased -- as far forward as that individual's literary production would continue.

Yes, I know today we have a few young lions, literary "all-stars" like Jonathan Franzen, Zaide Smith, Junot Diaz over whom the media seems always to gush when it's not busy trying to crown even newer ones (ex.: Rachel Kushner, whose The Flamethrowers proved only that flashy prose does not compensate for lack of plot and insufferable characters). Then, of course, there are a few long-timers who receive deserved adulation and have garnered by literary attention but never my total devotion: Paul Auster, Martin Amis, Jane Smiley, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Philip Roth, Mo Yan, V.S. Naipul, Doris Lessing, and Chang Rae Lee, to name a few.

Finally, there are the authors whose fiction I consume with total relish, reading backward in time to their earliest works and, where relevant, eagerly waiting to get my hands on their newest releases (or translations, in some cases). Herewith, I offer to seekers like myself an alphabetized list of my favorite literary fiction writers, individuals whose entire body of work are worth checking out.

Italo Calvino

Robertson Davies

Shusako Endo 

William Faulkner

Kazuo Ishiguro

Ismael Kadare

Mario Vargas Llosa

Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

Haruki Murakami

Cormac McCarthy

Jose Saramago

Graham Swift

Su Tong

There are, of course, other authors whose work(s) I have admired, but not quite enough to enter my personal "pantheon." Those writers would include Yan Geling, George Saunders, Ha Jin, Michael Ondaatje, Lawrence Thornton, Yu Hua, Ian McEwen, Barry Unsworth, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I also recommend one final author, a writer of mystery stories with an unusual cultural bent: Qiu Xiaolong.

I hope a few readers will find suggestions here for new literary directions and derive as much enjoyment in some of them as I have.