László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel prize today, was a night watchman for a herd of cows while writing his first novel. I liked Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance; reading them it was pretty obvious that he would win a Nobel, not more than 10-20 people alive today write at that level.
Henrik Karlssonsubstack.comHenrik Karlsson (@henrikkarlsson)
he was who I wanted to be when I grew up. He’s one of the great nonfiction writers of our time, a genius of reportage and the profile, someone who could take any curious whim and turn it into a compelling book.
Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.”
At forty-seven, Kurt Vonnegut published Slaughterhouse-Five. He had been a struggling writer, a car salesman, a PR man at General Electric, and a failed playwright. He had seen war firsthand, lived through firebombs, raised six children (four of them adopted after his sister's death), and produced a shelf of novels that garnered little attention.... See more