The New Yorker is publishing this summer stories by twenty authors under age 40. The anointed ones were asked, in interviews, a series of questions, including: "Who are your favorite authors over forty?" As their answers indicate, the question is a little ambiguous. Does Homer count or not? Karen Russellseems to have thought that maybe he doesn't, as her list ended with "whole cemeteries of the well-over-forty deceased ones." Nevertheless, Homer was named by two others. By my count, the twenty young writers named 112 different "older" writers as "favorites." Here, for your perusal, with links to the Wikipedia articles, are the ones named more than once, with the number of "votes" in parenthesis.
Marilynne Robinson (6)Mary Gaitskill (5)
Edward P. Jones (5)
Toni Morrison (4)
Lydia Davis (4)
Deborah Eisenberg (4)
Philip Roth (3)
J.M. Coetzee (3)
Lorrie Moore (3)
Denis Johnson (3)
Jonathan Franzen (3)
Padgett Powell (2)
Roberto Bolano (2)
Jeffrey Eugenides (2)
Joy Williams (2)
Stuart Dybek (2)
Alice Munro (2)
Don DeLillo (2)
Jim Shepard (2)
Homer (2)
Bruno Schulz (2)
Peter Carey (2)
Kazuo Ishiguro (2)
V.S. Naipaul (2)
Colm Toibin (2)
George Saunders (2)
Saul Bellow (2)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2).
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