The Unemployed Writer

I have a lot of words on good and bad writing and who is worth your time to read and who is not, but I thought I’d go ahead and offer up some lists for all you Googlers out there. First up, authors you must read.

Haruki Murakami - Contemporary world literature master of magical realism. Read: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Jonathan Lethem - Genre bender, sci-fi guru, and area expert on Brooklyn fictions. Read: Motherless Brooklyn
Paul Auster - Oddball, tightrope walking realism challenged auteur. Read: The New York Trilogy
Salmon Rushdie - Hyper literate genius with the pen to back it up. Read: Midnight’s Children
Chuck Palahniuk - Cult-pop literature extraordinair, master of the grotesque. Read: Survivor
Jorge Louis Borges - Father of Magical Realism, and master of the short form. Read: Collected Fictions
Christopher Moore - Modern day Swift. Satire and comedic mastermind. Read: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff
Michael Chabon - A story teller through and through via genre literature. Read: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Mikhail Bulgakov - Repressed soviet playwright. Greatest Russian writer of the last century. Read: The Master and Margarita
Franz Kafka - The one and only Kafka. Read: Everything he wrote
Sherman Alexie - A local writer and a really nice guy. Short form with magical touches. Read: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
David Sedaris - The contemporary master of memoir and essay formats. Funniest writer around. Read: Me Talk Pretty One Day
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Nobel prize winning magical realism novelist (of which there are few). Read: 100 Years of Solitude
Cory Doctorow - The next generation of Science Fiction, and he gives them away online. Read: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Neil Gaiman - Fantasy’s modern revolutionary. Resurrected Comic books and reinventing fantastic fiction

Every book on that list is worth your time and money, and every writer is worth even more of that time and money.