List-making can be a thorough waste of time, and by “waste,” I mean, excess, dross, detritus, and not necessarily something that does not have value, however minimal or otherwise, but sometimes even this excess may prove excessive, especially when you respond to another list, a list that itself produces its own waste of time, among other things, i.e., Flavorwire’s “New York’s 100 Most Important Living Writers”: a conservative list as predictable, as it is vanilla, albeit with some colored sprinkles added for a semblance of variety. You might say that Flavorwire‘s staff was working within the confines of including only writers who live in New York. But this is one of the problems with it: The list fetishizes the New York writer, a myth as large as the hammer required to destroy it. (Adding insult to insult, Flavorwire‘s list also misses so many important New York writers.) As one corrective, and I hope there will be many correctives in its wake, here’s a list of writers in alphabetical order who are the most important living writers to me. Alas, the thoroughness of the waste here is not thorough at all, so please feel free to do with it as you would with any waste.

Note: I did not include any of Big Other’s contributors on my list, the omissions silly but perhaps necessary.

1. Giorgio Agamben
2. César Aira
3. Michal Ajvaz
4. Will Alexander
5. John Ashbery
6. Gary Amdahl
7. Alain Badiou
8. Jesse Ball
9. John Barth
10. Matt Bell
11. Andrew Bird
12. Judith Butler
13. Mary Caponegro
14. Kim Chinquee
15. Noam Chomsky
16. Cristophe Claro
17. Robert Coover
18. Susan Daitch
19. Samuel R. Delany
20. Don DeLillo
21. Annie Dillard
22. Rikki Ducornet
23. Umberto Eco
24. Julia Elliot
25. Brian Evenson
26. Thalia Field
27. César Aira
28. Forrest Gander
29. William H. Gass
30. Molly Gaudry
31. Renee Gladman
32. Jaimy Gordon
33. Peter Greenaway
34. Tina May Hall
35. Donna Haraway
36. John Haskell
37. Lyn Hejinian
38. Amy Hempel
39. Lily Hoang
40. Noy Holland
41. Susan Howe
42. Jamie Iredell
43. Luce Irigaray
44. Andrew Joron
45. Imre Kertész
46. Michael Kimball
47. Abbas Kiarostami
48. Naomi Klein
49. László Krasznahorkai
50. Julia Kristeva
51. J. M. G. Le Clézio
52. Eugene Lim
53. Alphonso Lingis
54. Sam Lipsyte
55. Norman Lock
56. Robert Lopez
57. Gary Lutz
58. Catherine Malabou
59. Micheline Aharonian Marcom
60. Ben Marcus
61. Eugene Marten
62. Carole Maso
63. Joyelle McSweeney
64. Anne Michaels
65. D. A. Miller
66. Bradford Morrow
67. Péter Nádas
68. Emine Sevgi Özdamar
69. Lance Olsen
70. Vanessa Place
71. Lia Purpura
72. Thomas Pynchon
73. Dawn Raffel
74. Jacques Rancière
75. Ishmael Reed
76. Julián Ríos
77. Avital Ronell
78. Arundhati Roy
79. George Saunders
80. Shya Scanlon
81. Christine Schutt
82. Damion Searls
83. Ken Sparling
84. Robert Steiner
85. Stephanie Strickland
86. Terese Svoboda
87. Cole Swensen
88. Alexander Theroux
89. J. A. Tyler
90. Jane Unrue
91. Paul Virilio
92. Keith Waldrop
93. Rosmarie Waldrop
94. Diane Williams
95. C. D. Wright
96. Can Xue
97. Mo Yan
98. Lidia Yuknavitch
99. Slavoj Žižek
100. Leni Zumas