Those Wonderful Literary Underdogs

Okay, I can’t resist. It’s list time again. (Lists rock.) I tend to gravitate toward the underdog, and that’s what the two following lists are about.

Back in 2010, readers responded to PWxyz’s request for the names of writers they thought were unjustly underrated.  Here are Craig Morgan Teicher’s favorite fifteen from among their suggestions, listed in alphabetical order. (The complete list of 60 writers that PWxyz readers submitted follows the list of fifteen.)

He suggests that we “give these writers their due–go buy their books, talk ‘em up to your friends and enemies, and make them the literary titans they deserve to be!”

I myself am already a big fan of several of these writers.

Here are the top 15 Underrated Writers According to PWxyz (in alphabetical order)

1. Donald Antrim
2. Jo Ann Beard
3. Anthony Doerr
4. Deborah Eisenberg
5. Stephen Elliott
6. Steve Erickson
7. Brian Evenson
8. Percival Everett
9. Mary Gaitskill
10. Tessa Hadley
11. Kelly Link
12. Sam Lipsyte
13. Lydia Millet
14. Christine Schutt
15. Matthew Sharpe

And here is a list of good books that the Pulitzer didn’t think were worthy last year, but we don’t have to go by Pulitzer’s standards, do we?

1. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
2. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
3. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
4. The Call by Yannick Murphy
5. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
6. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
7. The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
8. Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes by William Kennedy
9. We the Animals by Justin Torres
10. Open City by Teju Cole
11. Someday This Will Be Funny by Lynne Tillman
12. I Married You for Happiness by Lily Tuck
13. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
14. The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
15. Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet
16. A Moment in the Sun by John Sayles
17. My New American Life by Francine Prose
18. Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta
19. The Submission by Amy Waldman
20. Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson
21. Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
22. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale
23. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
24. Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell
25. Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman
26. The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo
27. The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

{via Publishers Weekly}

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