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.
- Giorgio Agamben
- César Aira
- Michal Ajvaz
- Will Alexander
- John Ashbery
- Gary Amdahl
- Alain Badiou
- Jesse Ball
- John Barth
- Matt Bell
- Andrew Bird
- Judith Butler
- Mary Caponegro
- Kim Chinquee
- Noam Chomsky
- Cristophe Claro
- Robert Coover
- Susan Daitch
- Samuel R. Delany
- Don DeLillo
- Annie Dillard
- Rikki Ducornet
- Umberto Eco
- Julia Elliot
- Brian Evenson
- Thalia Field
- César Aira
- Forrest Gander
- William H. Gass
- Molly Gaudry
- Renee Gladman
- Jaimy Gordon
- Peter Greenaway
- Tina May Hall
- Donna Haraway
- John Haskell
- Lyn Hejinian
- Amy Hempel
- Lily Hoang
- Noy Holland
- Susan Howe
- Jamie Iredell
- Luce Irigaray
- Andrew Joron
- Imre Kertész
- Michael Kimball
- Abbas Kiarostami
- Naomi Klein
- László Krasznahorkai
- Julia Kristeva
- J. M. G. Le Clézio
- Eugene Lim
- Alphonso Lingis
- Sam Lipsyte
- Norman Lock
- Robert Lopez
- Gary Lutz
- Catherine Malabou
- Micheline Aharonian Marcom
- Ben Marcus
- Eugene Marten
- Carole Maso
- Joyelle McSweeney
- Anne Michaels
- D. A. Miller
- Bradford Morrow
- Péter Nádas
- Emine Sevgi Özdamar
- Lance Olsen
- Vanessa Place
- Lia Purpura
- Thomas Pynchon
- Dawn Raffel
- Jacques Rancière
- Ishmael Reed
- Julián Ríos
- Avital Ronell
- Arundhati Roy
- George Saunders
- Shya Scanlon
- Christine Schutt
- Damion Searls
- Ken Sparling
- Robert Steiner
- Stephanie Strickland
- Terese Svoboda
- Cole Swensen
- Alexander Theroux
- J. A. Tyler
- Jane Unrue
- Paul Virilio
- Keith Waldrop
- Rosmarie Waldrop
- Diane Williams
- C. D. Wright
- Can Xue
- Mo Yan
- Lidia Yuknavitch
- Slavoj Žižek
- Leni Zumas
I studied with 53. Alphonso Lingis – a freshman philosophy class – “Antecedents of Existentialism” – at Penn State during the autumn of 1985. What a charismatic genius. So glad you have him on your list!
Oh, I’d love to hear more about that class, Ron. Do you still have the syllabus?
Hey, John–
I’ll be bringing your #4 to Rutgers tomorrow for a poetry event:
http://michaelleong.wordpress.com/2012/12/04/new-directions-in-innovative-black-poetry-125-5pm-rutgers-university/
M
Very cool. Wish I could be there, Michael.