I was looking through my books read this year and I realized almost 90% of the authors I've read have been male, and I'd like to change that. I typically read literary fiction and classics but am open to most genres if they're well written. Some of my favorite authors are:
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Kazuo Ishiguro
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John Irving
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Graham Greene
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Cormac McCarthy
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John Williams
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Haruki Murakami
Female authors I've read recently and enjoyed include:
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Toni Morrison
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Virginia Woolf
And that's pretty much it. I also read This is How You Lose the Time War but that was probably my least favorite book I've read this year. I've also enjoyed the works of people like Martha Wells, Ann Leckie, and Becky Chambers, but all of them I read longer ago.
by locallygrownmusic
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* Donna Tartt
* Hanya Yanigahara
* Emily St John Mandel (although i didnt care for sea of tranquility)
* Claire Keegan
Anything by Lidia Yuknavitch.
Anything by Shirley Jackson.
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood.
The Vegetarian by Han Kang.
The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark.
Emily St John Mandel, Isabel Allende, Grace Curtis, Susanna Clarke and Octavia Butler are some you might enjoy
Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, the Bronte sisters, Alice Walker, Alice Munro, Edith Wharton
Emily St John Mandel, Gabrielle Zevin, Daphne du Maurier, Leigh Bardugo
If you’re open to very long books, I really really love [The Hands of the Emperor](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/af2bba9c-8f41-4a3e-b87a-8532a44ccb67) by Victoria Goddard. It’s a beautifully written slice of life book about the personal secretary to the emperor of the world, with a heavy focus on platonic relationships.
Oryx and crake or the handmaids tale by Margaret Atwood
Anything by Arundhati Roy!
Authors:
Jean Hanff Korelitz
Liz Moore
Attica Locke
Anita Nair
Madhuri Vijay
Jane Austen
Alice Hoffman
Ann Patchett
Selina Siak Chin Yoke
Jetta Carlton
Han Kang – Human acts and The Vegetarian
Ogawa Yoko – The Memory Police
Anything by Elena Ferrante and Elsa Morante
Edith Wharton; Jane Austen: All the Bronte sisters – especially the novels Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights; George Elliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Shirley Jackson, Clarice Lispector, Isabel Allende, Margaret Atwood; Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Marilynne Robinson
Eudora Welty Willa Cather, Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson
Some great authors I haven’t seen mentioned yet, I may be getting a little loose in the genre definition:
Min Jin Lee (specifically Pachinko)
Bernardine Evaristo (specifically Girl, Woman, Other)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Zadie Smith
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (nothing to do with the Tom Cruise film). Been my favourite book for more than 20 years.
I would say it’s for literary folks and those who enjoy interesting ways of playing with style. Stories within stories, sections of different languages, interruptions within the narrative. The second half isn’t as great as the first but I still just adore it.
I love Barbara Kingsolver, enjoyed Demon Copperhead recently and if you’ve read David Copperfield it gives you an extra layer.
Anything by Tiffany McDaniel. Betty is a phenomenal book, very well written. Heartbreaking and intense.
Rachel Kushner for The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba
Hilary Mantel for actually everything she wrote but especially Wolf Hall and A Place of Greater Safety
Angela Carter for The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (I also liked The Magic Toyshop but it’s got a very disappointing ending)
Okay, based on that you liked and disliked (I also disliked This is How You Lose the Time War, which I thought was more of an experiment in prose fiction) here are a few books by women that I loved.
* Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley
* Silas Marner (1861) by George Eliot (pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans)
* To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee
* The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin
* The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood
* Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
* Doomsday Book (1992) by Connie Willis
* The Stone Diaries (1993) by Carol Shields
* Parable of the Sower (1993) by Octavia E. Butler
* The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014) by Claire North
Flannery O’Connor, Kate Chopin, Mary Shelley, not a personal favorite but Joan Didion
Monica Ali: Brick Lane
Anna Burns: Milkman
Rachel Cusk: Outline
Louise Erdrich: the Round House
Bernardine Evaristo: Mr Loverman, Girl Woman Other, etc
Mrs Gaskell: North and South
Yaa Gyasi: Homegoing
Arundhati Roy: the Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Carol Shields: Unless, Mary Swann
Rose Tremain: the Road Home, the Gustav Sonata etc
Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes
Breasts and Eggs – Mieko Kawakami
Transcendent Kingdom or Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara
I recommend Olga Tokarczuk and Jesmyn Ward. I also read Forgottenness by Tanja Maljartschuk and Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck recently and thought they were both great.