Nobody mentioned Margaret Atwood yet! The Handmaid’s Tale is excellent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid’s_Tale
Also Mary Shelley for Frankenstein !
It is a good book (I’m too much of a chicken to watch much of the show).
It is very immersive and a difficult read, but masterful storytelling.
I honestly think it should be required reading.
I tried reading The Handmaid’s Tale several years ago and struggled to get into it, I felt like it kept jumping around but it wasn’t immediately obvious right away. I think I ended up giving up about 25% the way through which I’ve never done with any book. I’d seen the show too which I thought would have helped. Maybe I’ll give it another go sometime.
Yeah, I want to say the first half was pretty difficult reading. Very experiential and kinda postmodern. It’s almost like being in shock.
It’s also pretty difficult emotionally.
Amazing that it was written so long ago. I only made it about halfish into the first season of the show.
On alive authors, I think Nina Allan and Niviaq Korneliussen are worth a try.
Ursula le Guin is a great SF writer
Probably Agatha Christie
Many great authors mentioned. I’ll add: Marilynne Robinson is magic. Harper Lee. Zora Neale Hurston!!! I’ll also add Charlotte Bronte bc Jane Eyre is such a great read.
Astrid Lindgren, her books are translated to 95 different languages and sold over 160 million copies. Probably the worlds most beloved children’s book author.
I don’t read books that often, so I don’t know if she’s necessarily the best but I’d have to say Cornelia Funke. Inkheart, while I have yet to actually finish it, is the only normal book that I remember actually liking. It’s currently the only book I own a copy of that isn’t a manga.
I really liked her Dragon Rider as a kid
Ursula K LeGuin?
That’s what first popped into my head and ofc it is the top answer hah
/thread
Sorry, but read “Walk To The end Of The World” by Suzy McKee Charnas,
Fiction
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Ursula K. LeGuin
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Octavia Butler
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Margaret Atwood
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Tui T. Sutherland (J Fic)
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Suzanne Collins (YA)
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Lois Lowry (YA)
Non-Fiction
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Naomi Klein
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Margaret Atwood (Massey Lecture)
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Angela Y. Davis
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Tanya Talaga
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bell hooks
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Robin Wall Kimmerer
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I don’t have ‘best female author of all time’ but I do have favorite writers some of which happen to be female. I don’t usually split them by their sex (nor by their height, distaste for bananas, or whatever) as for me they’re all in the same ‘people who have a great time staining paper with ink making me a happy reader’ league but here it is, in absolutely no order beside the first two, as there is them and then there is all the others:
- Virginia Woolf (the only reason I would love to be able to travel in time is to meet her),
- Jane Austen,
- Edit: (how could I forget) Emily Dickinson!
- Sylvia Plath,
- Shirley Jackson (if you have not already, go read The Haunting of Hill House, it’s considered a classic for reasons),
- la marquise de Sévigné (she wrote letters and they make for a great read, no idea if it’s available in English),
- Margaret Atwood (imho she deserves a Nobel Prize, next to Woolf and Austen),
- Mary Shelley (like mentioned by others already, she well deserves to be read and would still have a lot to teach to some contemporary authors too, imho).
- I love reading Lizza Tuttle. Her horror short stories are different.
- In the same vein, I also quite like Mélanie Fazzi (who is also a translator of some of Tuttle’s stories, btw). But I can’t find that much more female writers in that specific genre (a lot more males do come to my mind).
Being French, I realize I have not listed that many French female writers I would consider a favorite. But they are a few I would consider excellent read nonetheless:
- La comtesse de Ségur (one of my childhood companion next to, say, Verne and Doyle),
- Simone de Beauvoir,
- (very) few pages of Marguerite Duras,
- Fred Vargas.
- To which I would also add Pauline Réage, because I think her ‘Histoire d’O’ is well worth reading for anyone into erotica.
- At one time, I also quite liked Joëlle Wintrebert (scifi) but I have not felt like reading her for a very long time so I could not tell.
My first picks have already been mentioned, but I think these women have also been influential
Flannery O’ Connor, Shirley Jackson, Emily Dickinson
Off the top of my head Andre Norton is completely overlooked in this thread. Like… what?
Mercedes lackey.
Cj Cherryh.
Katherine Kurtz.
Obviously, Mary Shelley. Created the most famous character of all time and the entire genre of science fiction while still a teenager.
I’m a fan of Tanith Lee. She started weird fantasy and Neil Gaiman stole all his best ideas and most of his writing style from her.
Karen Slaughter writes detective novels that make Jack Reacher look like a school boy.
Tana French is Slaughter’s Irsih cousin.
Joanna Russ was an out Lesbian back in the 1970s. “The Female Man” is still cutting edge.
I’m curious about your Lee/gaiman idea. I can’t see it at all and Don’t Bite the Sun is my fav ever.
In “Death’s Master” the Demon Prince refers to the Lord of Delusions as “uncousin.”
In the ‘Sandman’ comics there are a lot of little cut-away stories, just like the tale of the teardrop necklace in “Night’s Master.”
Ah! I’ve not read Sandman so utterly unaware
They put out the whole comic series in four big printed volumes after the TV show came out. The entire run of the comic.
Get them from your local library; they are worth a read, and if you get them from the library he doesn’t get any more money.
There’s also always piracy arrrrr.
But yes support your local library.
I meant printed volumes.
Don’t steal books form the library.
I meant digital volumes. I agree, support your library, do not steal from it.
Haven’t read either of these two authors, but by “cut away stories” do you mean stories within the story? If so there is a long tradition of that, going back to the 1001 Arabian Nights, post modern authors life John Barth, etc.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to talk about the authors’ styles if you haven’t actually read them.
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Thus proving my point.
No love for Jane Austen? Some of her works are all time classic. They could probably compete with top 10 literature work of 17th-18th century.
Another author that’s under appreciated would be Gertrude Stein.
Yeah, Jane Austen’s easily one of the top 20 English novelists of all time, and one of my personal favorites. She gets kind of a mixed appreciation these days bc the movies made from her novels usually focus on the romance (often in a way that would have scandalized her) and skimp on her commentary about human nature and society’s pressures. And plus her prose is just gorgeous and that is difficult to adapt to film. Probably the best adaptation is the BBC 1980 Pride and Prejudice miniseries ( wikipedia , tubi ) which was adapted by Fay Weldon, who was a novelist in her own right. That miniseries turns a lot of Austen’s prose into dialogue, which is beautiful to hear in that context, though as a consequence the series is a little slow for a wide modern audience. Really you have to read the books themselves.
She’s also incredibly funny (and sometimes savage) which also gets lost in many adaptations, since it’s in her commentary and not necessarily in the dialog.
She was not a woman of many words; for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas.
Ursula LeGuin
Margaret Atwood
Diana Wynne Jones
and for personal preference, Robin McKinley
