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The Most Criminally Overlooked or Underrated Writers Ever List


The Killer Snark

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How many posts does it take?

I'm putting the over/under at 7. But, it very well could happen in the next freaking post.

Although I have never read him I'll just take the bait and be done with it :p Bakker :p

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Perez-Reverte. Not underrated in Spain, but not at all known outside Spain.


Folks may know his work through Polanski's adaptation, The Ninth Gate, which covers one storyline of his El Club Dumas


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If we're talking current sci-fi/fantasy writers, Lucius Shepard surely deserves to be better known than he is outwith current sci-fi cognoscenti. Life During Wartime is an absolute masterpiece. His technical ability and strangeness of imaginative scope are second to no-one's, if that one novel is an indication of the quality of his other work.


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Patrick O'Brian. He is well-known and respected amongst fans of naval literature, but should be more widely acknowledged for his fine stories.



Only reminded of this as today is the anniversary of the execution of John Byng in 1757, which gets mentioned several times by Jack Aubrey in the course of the novels.


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Perez-Reverte. Not underrated in Spain, but not at all known outside Spain.

Folks may know his work through Polanski's adaptation, The Ninth Gate, which covers one storyline of his El Club Dumas

Wow, do I think you're wrong there. Perez-Reverte's works have been widely translated and have sold extremely well in many parts of the world. I think he is probably the living Spanish author (by which I mean author from Spain itself, not the entire Spanish-speaking world) who is the MOST well-known and widely read in the United States.

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If we're talking current sci-fi/fantasy writers, Lucius Shepard surely deserves to be better known than he is outwith current sci-fi cognoscenti. Life During Wartime is an absolute masterpiece. His technical ability and strangeness of imaginative scope are second to no-one's, if that one novel is an indication of the quality of his other work.

this, yes, absolutely. (and i ain't even read life during wartime yet.)

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In SFF, my list begins with Stover and ends with Bakker. But Bakker has a lot of things holding him back - bad rep in some places, very dense books, etc. Stover is harder to figure out. His books are assloads of fun without losing the thematic depth. I honestly blame the cover art and blurb for Heroes Die. The cover art is nearly convulsion-inducingly bad.

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In SFF, my list begins with Stover and ends with Bakker. But Bakker has a lot of things holding him back - bad rep in some places, very dense books, etc. Stover is harder to figure out. His books are assloads of fun without losing the thematic depth. I honestly blame the cover art and blurb for Heroes Die. The cover art is nearly convulsion-inducingly bad.

I almost didn't read Heroes Die because of that cover. Luckily, some of my more trustworthy forumites pushed this and I took the dive. The Acts of Caine is one of my top five favorite series, maybe even top three.

Gene Wolfe is as he should be, IMHO. I had one hell of a time making it through Book of the Long Sun. Still haven't taken the Short Sun dive yet.

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William Carlos Williams is the best poet of the 20th century.

All of the other poets that you mentioned other than Pound (especially Eliot) set poetry back 20 years.

OP seems to loathe, or at least deeply distrust, Eliot.

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Patrick O'Brian. He is well-known and respected amongst fans of naval literature, but should be more widely acknowledged for his fine stories.

Only reminded of this as today is the anniversary of the execution of John Byng in 1757, which gets mentioned several times by Jack Aubrey in the course of the novels.

Are you fucking crazy? Those books are mega popular. They made a goddamn movie!

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Datepalm - I distrust Eliot. My relationship towards him is abivalent. I like The Wasteland a lot, though there are better long poems of the 20th century. A handful of his other poems are great, but to me don't display any exquisite thought or emotion beyond a clever allusion here and there. Four Quartets is of course a masterpiece. His output, however, was slender, and the majority of that, compared to what Pound was up to prior to The Cantos (where he lost it) is either clumsy or quite bad. HIs criticism was mostly destructive and based entirely on personal prejudice, but has been catastrophically influential in terms of the people he made his cronies. He was a bad editor into the bargain. His executive involvement in Faber and Faber is part of the reason our current state of poetry is so bad.



Blue Steel - I like William Carlos Williams (having read Paterson, and thinking it works pretty well as a narrative), but I have a bias towards poetry that expresses more music, and WCW was himself influenced by the more experimental sections of The Bridge, so you see how ahead of his time actually Crane was, despite his HIgh Romantic lineage.


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I wouldn't call Wolfe underrated, but underread certainly. Gaiman and a bunch of other authors I'm blanking on at the moment pretty much consider him to be the greatest living author in any genre, and his books almost always get super positive glowing rewviews. He certainly isn't as popular as he should be, at least here in the US. But people here are JUST starting to catch on to the whole Iain Banks thing, so, fuck, amreican readers and scfi, I dunno man.

Ahem. End of Rant

Some of us are well aware of Iain Banks, and wish he was still writing. Robert Silverberg, Samuel Delaney, and Roger Zelazny are at the top of my list as too often ignored, and brilliant writers.

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I'm of the rather myopic opinion that if I've heard an author mentioned in positive tones he can't be criminally underrated. Although I'm probably more likely to pick some popular-but-frequently-derided author. An obscure author that everyone who read likes isn't really underrated is he or she? Someone who everyone dislikes *but they keep reading* is, surely?


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maarsen - Ah, yes, Robert Silverberg and Roger Zelazny. The Book of Skulls and Lord of Light are two of my top sci-fi novels of all time. The first, in fact, is one of the best books I've come across, period. Both highly respected writers, though, who've sold a fair amount of books.


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