I asked these major fiction writers who they thought was the most important contemporary fiction writer, and what had been his/her influence on their own writing and on the writing of other contemporary fiction writers. I defined contemporary as either someone alive or very recently dead. What do you think of these choices? What other contemporary fiction writers would you pick as having had the most influence? Check out what Ha Jin, Mona Simpson, David Bezmozgis, Arthur Phillips, Francine Prose, and other leading writers have to say.
Who Is the Most Important Contemporary Fiction Writer? Major Writers Weigh In
Mona Simpson chooses Alice Munro(01 of13)
I think I'm influenced by the writers I read, but not necessarily by the things I'd choose. When I first read Proust, I imbibed his melancholy, without gleaning the structural underpinnnings he used to manage his great orchestral circus. For many reasons, my most important living writer is Alice Munro, for her apt, stylistic genius mostly restrained (she learned from her influences, two Williams, Maxwell and Trevor). She uses time virtuosically, shuffling tenses within a paragraph to distinguish a moment from a habit. Writers everywhere study her stories to figure out just where and how they go so deep. Munro matters, too, because of her sustained fascination with female life, as the playing field, the parliament, the place where life is lived and history made. Virginia Woolf said that men write about women, in certain colors and tempers of light. We had Leopold Bloom in the bathroom, but Woolf herself never took her fictional heroines into the bedroom or the bathroom, though she did wonder about the inner life of the char cleaning public stalls. Munro writes about sex, about bathrooms, about passion and class, and the ways they tease, trick and determine each other. I often read hoping to absorb influences. Of late, I've been studying happy endings. As much for life as for art.Mona Simpson is the author of five novels, including, most recently, My Hollywood. Watch her here, here, and here.
Ha Jin chooses V. S. Naipaul(02 of13)
I usually go by books, because no author can make every book of theirs a masterpiece. The contemporary writer who has influenced me most, I would say, is V. S. Naipaul, particularly his A Bend in the River. I do not share most of his political views, but his writings have taught me how to look at things and how to reflect on my own situation. His prose is honest, supple, and without frills. His works are highly uneven, but he has written greats books, such as A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. He will be remembered for those. Many young writers, especially those from a colonial background, regard him as a master, who has shown them how purely by the individual's effort and talent a writer can find their way in literature.Ha Jin has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. He is the author, most recently, of A Good Fall. Watch him here.
Mohammed Hanif chooses Hanif Kureishi(03 of13)
I came to Hanif Kureishi through a short story called "With Your Tongue Down My Throat," partly set in Karachi. I thought I recognized some of the characters. Then I watched My Beautiful Laundrette which I couldn't identify with but loved the title and its strange energy. Later I read a piece of reportage by him in which he wrote about two girls of Pakistani origin who performed, for a living, a lesbian act at Asian weddings and parties in Britain. I found a VHS of his subjects' performance at a Karachi video shop. For the first time I realized what a writer does; he writes. I read his novels, his stories and was always amazed by how unique his worldview was. He wrote My Son the Fanatic in the early nineties, which, in retrospect, sounds quite prophetic. After moving to London I read his interviews and I liked the fact that like my favorite Urdu writer Manto (who also wrote fiction as well as screenplays) Kureishi made it a point to be identified as a sinner rather than a saint. At Karachi airport I picked up a book by him titled Dreaming and Scheming. I thought the title just about summed up a writer's job. Whem my first novel was about to be published, a Karachi wit said the publishers must have mistaken you for that other Hanif. I wish.Mohammed Hanif's debut novel, The Case of Exploding Mangoes, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. His new novel will be released later this year. Watch him here.
David Bezmozgis chooses J. M. Coetzee(04 of13)
The most influential contemporary writer for me right now is J. M. Coetzee. I read his novel Summertime last year and have read Disgrace multiple times--along with most everything else he has written. I admire the intelligence, directness and economy of his prose and also his willingness to continue to experiment formally. I admire his professionalism and productivity. He publishes novels with steady regularity while also being an excellent literary critic. As for his influence on the work of other contemporary writers--I don't think he's spawned a school of followers in the way of DeLillo or Pynchon or the late David Foster Wallace. Maybe it's because his style is more restrained, subtle, even severe. I admit, he doesn't crack many jokes.David Bezmozgis is the author of Natasha and Other Stories. His first novel, The Free World, will be published in April.Watch him here.
Jim Lynch chooses Richard Price(05 of13)
How about Richard Price, the modern master of sociological crime fiction? He burst into the literary spotlight with Clockers (1992), a novel that so vividly captures the lives of cops and crackheads that you root for the troubled teen dealer every bit as much as the middle-aged detective. He backed that book up with two more daring urban novels and topped them with Lush Life (2008). Price is often praised for writing the best dialogue in America, but his biggest influence might be the way he creates palpable characters and scenes by riding along with cops and criminals. His immersion techniques inspire me and many others who build their novels with a mix of reportage and imagination. Price usually gets overlooked because he writes about crime and favors simple strong plot lines. But what he pulls off in scope and craft teaches literary writers about pace and realism and social observation. And he inspires screenwriters--HBO's The Wire was based, in part, on Clockers--to develop stronger character-driven cop dramas. Price also simply types some of the most spectacular sentences in fiction today. Crack open Lush Life, and you'll see what I mean.Jim Lynch is the author of the novels Border Songs and The Highest Tide.Watch him here.
Michael Martone chooses William H. Gass(06 of13)
William H. Gass. For me his story, "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country," demonstrated several things. First, that prose could be sustained without narrative. Second, that character need not be beholding to psychological "depth." Third, that juxtaposition is all and that, yes, there is a world within a word. And fourth, that "Indiana" could be a subject. Published in the late fifties, this fiction, I think, was eclipsed for decades by the hegemony of narrative realistic neo-Chekhovian stories, so I am unsure how influential it was for other writers writing in the last half century. For me, I held it silently in my heart: a story that is not a story, prose that is poetry, action that is static, character that is fields of language, flat fields of Indiana that are depthless. Mr. Gass did not so much write a story as create a complex space, an interesting environment and invited me, the reader, into it to collaborate and contribute to its meaning. It is a frenetic performance where nothing happens. And that nothing was the everything I needed.Michael Martone is he author of Michael Martone and the forthcoming 4 for a Quarter.Watch him here.
Francine Prose chooses Philip Roth(07 of13)
Can I tweak the word influence? Let's say encouragement or energy. I don't sit down and say, Hey, I think I'll write a Philip Roth novel today. But I do think, The guy's been writing brilliant books with astonishingly beautiful sentences for all these years, it's inspirational. I can open his books at random and be sure I'll read something great. Likewise Stanley Elkin. The guy wrote as if he didn't give a shit about what anyone thought. No one else has written a tender sex scene with a bear that goes on for dozens of pages or a comic novel about a grief-stricken slob who takes terminally ill children to Disneyland. And obviousy Grace Paley, the first writer I read whose characters talked like people I knew. If I listed the writers working now, just the ones of my generation, who influence me this way, it would take up the rest of my 200 words. And as always, I'd forget the most important ones. They influence me every day. When I think of them, I think: Maybe I can do this, after all. I think I'll go back to my desk.Francine Prose is the author of many novels and short story collections. Her new book is My New American Life (April 2011). Watch her here.
Arthur Phillips chooses Martin Amis (and others)(08 of13)
Photo Credit: Barbi Anne ReedI'm afraid I smash into a lot of definition quibbles immediately, and wobble, stunned, disoriented. "Important": I can't think of what this word means in fiction except as "important to me." There's no other standard in literature that matters to me beyond the amount of pleasure I have enjoyed thanks to a particular writer. I can't be much happier than when I read the best of Martin Amis. "Contemporary": Dead but new work still published posthumously, ie DF Wallace? Alive, but not too productive, ie Kundera? "Fiction": Tom Stoppard is my choice for the best living writer of fiction, but I don't mean his one novel. "Influence on... others": Watching how the beneficial influence of my heroes is repressed, compressed, and expressed in my own work gives me not just pause but total paralysis at the thought of guessing how Coetzee or Munro might be affecting anyone else's work. I know that when I started writing, I was very conscious that writers about my age often cited Updike, DeLillo, Pynchon, and Roth as influences, and so I went to some trouble to read none of them for many years. I wouldn't dare say I know how anybody is influencing anyone.Arthur Phillips is the author of five novels, including the forthcoming The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (April 2011). Watch him here.
David Leavitt chooses Cynthia Ozick(09 of13)
Photo Credit: Tanya TribbleCynthia Ozick's influence on contemporary literature is incalculable--literally, since so many writers have felt it without realizing that they have felt it. Writers of the last century (James and Forster especially) live in her. Yet she is no sense "old-fashioned." On the contrary, her novels, stories, and essays form a road map of innovation. Her knowledge of the past--of history, religion, philosophy--is deeper than that of any living writer I can think of, yet she uses this knowledge not to pay homage to the past; she uses it to turn the past inside out. Consider The Puttermesser Papers, the heroine of which, a New York civil servant, crafts the first female golem in her living room. Or Foreign Bodies, for which James's The Ambassadors provides the blueprint, and which is as much a slap in James's face as a paean to his genius. Or "The Shawl"--the most ruthless, the most heartbreaking, and (I would argue) the greatest story ever written about the Holocaust. In an interview with Bill Moyers, Ozick described herself as "heart and soul a rationalist." This oxymoron defines her. Here is her description of the roof of the Duomo in Milan, from the story "At Fumicaro": "What looked, from the plaza below, like the frothiest lacework or egg-white spume here burst into solidity, weight, shadow and dazzlement: a derangement of plenitude tumbling from a bloated cornucopia." David Leavitt is the author of seven novels and four story collections, including, most recently, The Indian Clerk.
Allan Gurganus chooses Alice Munro(10 of13)
Photo Credit: Roger HaileAlice Munro is alive, writing, and scaring me with all she is still learning, showing. How can tales so formally unpredictable seem, once inhabited, so intimately familiar? Munro's fascination with family disaster makes her our reliable broken-in life-guide. This writer enjoys such a mercurial sense of time--she can compress a century to a page. Using her provincial Canadian past, she often sets raw working-class striving against the cosseted numbness of those upper-middle-class. She can recall a girlhood Christmas job, gutting turkeys. Her next story will empathize with some Toronto society hostess. In this her scope of heart, in sheer narrative relish, she most resembles Chekhov. Munro characters are sexually forthright. Their sense of humor runs to whatever's mordant yet fond. Her stories' precise language can leap from bone-plain to purest lyrical meringue, straight up in a single sentence. Munro's prose feels as fact-based as tombstone inscriptions. Like those, each sentence gets cut deep enough to outlive a hundred winters. I've read Alice Munro's every published word. Each stiffens my resolve with new permission. Each makes me want to try all that Munro (and the Bible) demand of us. "Speak the truth in Love."Allan Gurganus is at work on The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church. The work is second in the Falls Trilogy that began with his Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Watch him here.
Christopher Miller chooses Lydia Davis(11 of13)
Is Lydia Davis the most important contemporary fiction writer? I don't know, but for me she serves as an artistic conscience, a constant reminder that where prose is concerned, nothing is more beautiful than clarity, honesty, accuracy. But she's barely a fiction writer at all nowadays, insofar as fiction assumes that what doesn't happen is more exciting than what does. When a writer ceases to believe that, when she takes to heart the dictum that truth is stranger than fiction, her unwillingness to fib can have stylistic consequences. Look at Davis's conjunctions. In Almost No Memory--her second collection and maybe her best--count six pieces where the first word of the second sentence is "But." If there is, as Wittgenstein insisted, such a thing as a "but"-feeling, no one gives readers that feeling more promptly or reliably than Davis. Half her sentences serve to correct or retract preceding sentences, because none of our sentences ever points true north. Davis zigzags towards the truth by tacking now to the northeast and now to the northwest. One of the many kinds of fun her books afford is the almost kinesthetic pleasure of zigzagging with her. Christopher Miller is the author of The Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank.
David Ebershoff chooses Edmund White(12 of13)
Is there any writer more important than the one you fall for at 15? For me, that was Edmund White. Sure there were others (the Brontes, Forster, Capote), but aren't you asking about writers alive today? Back then Edmund's novels gave me exactly what I was looking for: a reflection of myself on the page. Now, (many) years later, I can see his work in a larger sense. He's part of that very American tradition of writing honestly about the self. For Edmund, the truth is always beautiful. Of course he's a link in the daisy chain of gay American writers that includes Whitman, James, Williams, O'Hara, and Baldwin, but I also place him in that ferocious generation that has given us DeLillo, Morrison, Oates, Pynchon, and Roth--all born in the 1930s--whose influence we're still working under today. White was born on January 13, 1940, two weeks late to fit neatly into this theory but close enough. Next year Edmund will publish his tenth novel. It is the most honest look at the differences and similarities between gay and straight men I've ever read. I have to qualify all of this by telling you Edmund is now a friend of mine. Even so, history, I'm quite convinced, will be kind to Edmund White.David Ebershoff is the author of The 19th Wife and The Danish Girl. Watch him here.
Alan Cheuse chooses Saul Bellow(13 of13)
For me it is, was, Saul Bellow. I'd been romanced, lured by, and sometimes convinced myself that other writers of his generation--in my younger and more vulnerable years it was Mailer in particular--held the key to my workroom. But over the long haul Bellow's fiction, short and long, set my heart--and sometimes my hair--on fire. I realize now that I tuned my instrument to Bellow's scale and heard in my mind the perfect pitch of his sentences and walked in my imagination the patterns of his plots. Bellow's sentences, brilliant in how they evoke emotion even as they offer precise description of the world within and around his protagonists, shimmer before me as a standard of standards. How he deployed his sentences to make up his plots--such as in, say, the short novel Seize the Day or in the unfolding of the initiation drama in a great story like "Something to Remember Me By"--raised my eyes toward the highest art, in the presence of which you learn that language joined to memory and experience makes a tone, a mood, a soulful rendering of life's enduring difficulties and turmoil and fleeting pleasures, the most beautiful music of all.Alan Cheuse serves as the book commentator for NPR's evening news-magazine "All Things Considered" and has a new novel--Song of Slaves in the Desert--coming out in March.Watch him here.
Support HuffPost
At HuffPost, we believe that everyone needs high-quality journalism, but we understand that not everyone can afford to pay for expensive news subscriptions. That is why we are committed to providing deeply reported, carefully fact-checked news that is freely accessible to everyone.
Whether you come to HuffPost for updates on the 2024 presidential race, hard-hitting investigations into critical issues facing our country today, or trending stories that make you laugh, we appreciate you. The truth is, news costs money to produce, and we are proud that we have never put our stories behind an expensive paywall.
Would you join us to help keep our stories free for all? Your contribution of as little as $2 will go a long way.
Can't afford to donate? Support HuffPost by creating a free account and log in while you read.
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.