The other day, someone asked me to name my three favorite authors. Of all the tough questions that you can ask someone with the attention span of a flea… Well, I’ll take a crack at it anyway.
I would say that Kilgore Trout is right up there. I loved Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension almost as much as The Gospel from Outer Space.
Oolon Colluphid’s trilogy – Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes, and Well, That About Wraps It Up for God – contains some of the best theological reasoning anywhere in the cosmos.
Then, of course, there’s Dick Diver’s classic Attempt at a Uniform and Pragmatic Classification of the Neuroses and Psychoses, Based on an Examination of Fifteen Hundred Pre-Krapaelin and Post-Krapaelin Cases as they would be Diagnosed in the Terminology of the Different Contemprary Schools Together with a Chronology of Such Subdivisions of Opinion as Have Arisen Independently. Not nearly as boring as you might think!
But finding these guys is hard. Amazon.com brings up totally wrong names like Vonnegut, Adams and Fitzgerald. Fortunately, Grump pointed me to the Invisible Library. They’re all here, along with great writers like Bilbo Baggins, Agnes Nutter and Sherlock Holmes. Sadly, they don’t have a way to purchase any of the works. But at least I can find them now!
One of my favorite authors is James Morrow. I can never find his books where they should be. Some bookstores consider him a sci-fi writer. Some consider him fiction. Some consider him a religious writer. Some have whacked out special categories of writers where I would never guess he’d be stocked. I should feel lucky that I can always find him on Amazon, I guess!
Morrow is great.
can’t even find those on alibris
agnes nutter!!! i love her work. i hear she’s kind of a witch in person, tho.
Admit it, you are choosing your favorites based on the strangeness of their names. I’ve got to agree that Kilgore Trout would be in the top three based on this criteria.
Nuh-uh… I picked the fake authors from the real books I read.
Although, I did find out that Philip Jose Farmer wrote “Venus on the Half Shell” as “Kilgore Trout”…doh!
I’m still trying to find the novel from that fella from Leeevant… He was supposedly writing a novel about a bucnh of silly characters running around slaying things, shooting fireballs, and other nonsense. The word was that it was a damn fine piece of literature. Wonder why I can’t find it?