Authors I Wish More People Knew About

Regular readers of this web site probably do know about them by now. Ten off the top of my head, alphabetical order...unfortunately, although I started raving about these writers while they were alive, in some cases that was a long time ago. 

1. Joan Aiken 

Conrad Aiken, who was rated high as a poet in his day, was the father of two internationally renowned authors of genre fiction, Joan Aiken and Jane Aiken Hodges. Genre fiction was considered sort of opposite to poetry or "great" fiction, in their century, the twentieth. So, both daughters could write their "frivolous stuff" and get paid for it without competing with their father, and they did. Jane Aiken Hodges did it well. I think Joan Aiken's frivolous fiction is great in its own way. Her superpower was drawing even me into even Regency Romances, at an age when I was not buying or reviewing books for resale and would not normally touch a Regency Romance with a ten-foot pole. 

2. K.A. Ashcomb 

Nobody else will ever write like Terry Pratchett, and nobody else should try, but this young writer has admittedly studied Pratchett's techniques at length, and uses them to good effect in writing a different kind of stories. 

3. Wendell Berry 

A lot of people have known about Wendell Berry for a long time. An early contributor to Organic Gardening & Farming, Mother Earth News, etc., he wrote excellent essays, fiction, poetry, and criticism. Berry fans tend to be quiet inconspicuous people who enjoy feeling just a little bit like a revolutionary cell--his work is too Green to be promoted by corporate interests, though also too popular to be completely snubbed by the commercial media, a situation that seemed to amuse Berry and his fans inordinately for an inordinate length of time. 

4. Emily Dana Botrous 

She's broken out of the Book Funnel. This is a young writer, still pounding out potboilers while raising small children; in another twenty years she may be great. Currently what she writes are romances, but much more thoughtful, insightful, than the average romance. And she writes honestly about the Blue Ridge Mountains as they really are today; though also about other places. 

5. Anna Dale 

Author of frivolous fantasies for children, but also the author of the statement that Amber-Eyed Silver Tips are "the creme de la creme of witches' cats." So she obviously has things to say about the real world.

6. Suzette Haden Elgin 

She wrote about the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, she wrote whimsical science fiction, she basically invented the genre of science fiction poetry, and she had one of the first and best blogs, still available "as a memorial" at ozarque.livejournal.com. Always with wit and charm and a writing "voice" that could only belong to a Southern Lady. In each of the niches to which her writing appealed, her writing quickly formed a small hard core of admirers. I'm one. I even admired her crocheting...and I'm a knitter. 

7. Ruth Ozeki 

A year of writing documentaries for TV that were sponsored by a cigarette company, and required each episode to show someone smoking the sponsor's cancersticks, too, prompted a debut novel called My Year of Meats, in which a fictional TV documentarian is supposed to give Japanese audiences a better impression of beef, but every show she and her crew work on gives them a worse impression of the beef industry. Pretty frank about the effects of synthetic hormones on humans--the protagonist tries to have a baby (though she's not married) and fails, her boss is impotent and blames his wife, a man she interviews is somewhat "feminized" although a grandfather, a five-year-old girl is suffering premature puberty--but that kind of thing does come up when we study the facts on this topic. When this novel came out I reported to the Friends of the Library that its one fault was that "it does nothing to break up the stereotype of Japanese people being perfectionistic overachievers; it is a perfectionistic overachievement." Enough reviewers made that kind of noises that Ozeki made her other books quite different from My Year of Meats. But still excellent. 

8. Laurence J. Peter 

Best remembered for the assertion of The Peter Principle (an early book) that everyone is promoted to per level of incompetence. He wrote further books about his further observations of Life. 

9. Barb Taub 

The only mom-com books that have made me laugh out loud as often as hers did were early Erma Bombeck. I don't know why she's not a super-seller, as Bombeck was. It's not radical political views; she's such a moderate D she's married to an R. She writes within the rules. I think it's just that although mom-com is still madly popular with actual readers, it doesn't fit into the left-wingnut agenda that dominates the conglomerate of what used to be the big publishers.

10. Iris Yang

So far, this living writer's been best known for a series of novels about how to be an excellent human being, in the specific context of the Flying Tigers, a real group of Chinese pilots who teamed up with the US Air Force in the 1940s.