I’m looking for books in the vein of DeLillo/Wallace/McCarthy/Pynchon, but really anything of good quality. Preferably in the last 50-60 years, but with emphasis on the last decade or so, as I’m really not up to date on the most recent stuff.
Thanks 
Have you read Ian McEwan? He’s the first that comes to mind.
I’m going throught the just released paperback version of Jeffery Ford’s “The Empire of Ice Cream” Great collection of short stories.
Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke comes to mind, which is a 2007 book I think. Most of the books in the Pulitzer Prize list I found enjoyable, with a special mention to Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
As for older, enjoyable, literary fiction: my favorite literary book (at least within the last half-century) is John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, which I have no doubt you will like if you liked Pynchon.
Not a genre I read a lot in, but:
The Bastard of Istanbul, by Elif Shafak
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer
YA, but The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: The Pox Party, by MT Anderson
I’ve just started reading The Secret Detectives by Roberto Bolano - Have you heard of him? He’s a Chilean writer (recently deceased) with I think just two novels available in English, both of which have made a serious impact in literary fiction. He’s discussed in very reverential tones, superlatives all over the shop. Right now all I can say is the first 15 pages are pretty good - but I like reading all of the authors you mention in the OP and was drawn to Bolano for that reason. Maybe someone who’s finished the books will stop in and give you the full recommendation.
I’ve been on an Irish literature bender lately.
A few recommendations:
John McGahern. The Barracks, The Dark, and Amongst Women are beautifully written, if brutally depressing (well, he’s Irish - what do you expect?), novels. His last novel, By The Lake, is equally beautiful, and a bit of a turnaround for McGahern in that it’s not brutally depressing. All Will Be Well, his memoir, was published right around the time of his death in 2006.
Colm Toibin. The Master, a novelization of the life of Henry James, is his latest. Lovely. I’d also recommend The Heather Blazing.
John Banville. Like Toibin, he liked to fictionalize the lives of well-known historical figures. Doctor Copernicus: A Novel and Kepler, a Novel are about exactly who you’d think. The Untouchable is a fictionalization of the Philby/McLean/Burgess spy scandal.
Patrick McCabe. Perhaps best known in the United States for the Neil Jordan film adaptation of his novel The Butcher Boy. My favorite McCabe novel is The Dead School. If it doesn’t break your heart, you don’t have one. McCabe sets his novels, for the most part, in that time when Ireland was transitioning from a third-world country to a modern country. His other major them is madness. Plus, he’s really, really funny.
Have you tried Neal Stephenson? You might start with **Snow Crash **or Cryptonomicon - both have the ravenous-intellect-trying-to-process-more-than-the-narrative-flow-can-contain penchant for diversions that Wallace favors.
I would also recommend early **Nicholson Baker **- **The Mezzanine **is wonderful intellectual and divergent - it takes place in about 45 seconds as the protagonist ventures on an escalator after running a quick errand. Short and a sublime rendering of the mind during a bit of quotidian banality…
Do you like the intellectually rigorous narrative voice of those authors or their approach to story-telling? If every loose end needs to be chased down I woudl recommend other authors vs. those that have clear control of the story arc.
In terms of story mastery, **J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace **is pretty much the best work I have read in the past 15 years. Clear, technically brilliant as a work of writing and multi-layered-simple-yet-complex in its narrative. Nothing like those authors, but in terms of Big League Lit™ it is hard to name a better book that is also quite accessible…
Thanks for all the recommendations.
Maybe its just snobbery, but I’m having a really hard time in trying to convince myself to read many new books. Occasionally I’ll find/or be advised to read a particularly brilliant writer and then I’ll stick with him/her. I’ve got comfortable with Ozick and McCarthy and DeLillo, and its making me think all other new writing is rubbish. I hope, and also think, that I’m wrong.
I’ll give the Pulitzer Prize idea a go, Enterprise, because if you like The Sot-Weed Factor then we might have similar tastes. Thanks.
WordMan, I’ll have to give Coatzee’s Disgrace a go after hearing that level of praise. Those recommendations are always the best. Also, I really like the sound of The Mezzanine, I’ll be sure to get that as well.
As for whether or not I like the ‘intellectually rigorous narrative voice of those authors or their approach to story-telling’, I’d say the former. The style is important, I want to be in awe of his/her ability, the precision and poetry of their language. The story is secondary. Put simply, I’d rather read a well written novel with only a small emphasis on plot (i.e. most of Beckett, Moby Dick etc.) than something poorly written with an action-packed plot. In short, I’m looking for books written by those with a preternatural command of language, but, and this is an important but, with depth. I don’t just want linguistic trickery without heart, a la Barthelme (slightly unfair, I know) and what seems like the current crop of post-modernists (Wallace excluded!).
So thanks again, and please keep recommending.
If you’d be okay with reading a book written by a dame, you might want to check out A.S. Byatt’s Possession, or perhaps something by her sister, Margaret Drabble.
If you want fierce intellect, go with Stephenson…try Cryptonomicon. He’s known for being smarter than you 
in his writing, covering a wide-range of fascinating topics that, eventually, have some relationship to the central narrative, but the narratives themselves can peter out. He’s all about the journey vs. the destination, which sounds more than okay to you…
Also, if you haven’t read **Nabokov **- well, get on it! He’s smarter than you (again: ;)) and a far better writer than you will ever be, and he will make sure that you know it. On every page. But you still have to read him - because he is THAT good. Drives me crazy, but I keep coming back…try **Lolita **if you haven’t dove into that. Truly brilliant book and a master class in the craft…
Thanks, I was hoping someone would say Byatt. I’ve been told to read her before, and I needed more of a push. I’ll give her a go.
Well, maybe :). I’m not too fond of Ozick, or Pynchon for that matter (he’s way too cute with the references, and I get annoyed easily). I had a brief run through the Pulitzer list, and I can wholeheartedly recommend (past thirty years only!):
Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Edward Jones: The Known World
Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex
Richard Ford: Independence Day
Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Toni Morison: Beloved
John Kennedy Toole: A Confederacy of Dunces
If it turns out you like Ford, you have lots of reading still to do!
I second mightily twickster’s rec of Possession. I found it intellectually rigorous and elegant, and is by FAR my favorite Byatt (and possibly my favorite literary fiction book).
I just read, and was blown away by, Jhumpa Lahiri’s work (Interpreter of Maladies, short stories, and The Namesake, a novel). It’s not really like the authors you name, and it is heavy on exploration of the themes of American immigration and assimilation, and the lack thereof, in the Indian community (I don’t know whether you are likely to enjoy that sort of thing; part of the reason her work blew me away is that I have some experience with immigration/assimilation through my own family), but I do find her prose elegant and in service of a heart.
Allegra Goodman’s Intuition may be a bit mainstream to qualify as literary fiction (there’s a fairly fast-moving plot involving misconduct in science), but I love it because it actually talks about science intelligently and has interesting and complex characterization.
A friend highly recommended Lorrie Moore’s short stories (Birds of America). I did not like these as much as Lahiri, but YMMV.
I’m really quite wary of Nabokov. I’ve just started reading Lolita and I’m yet to be convinced. Despite having read more about him than by him, I just don’t think he’s that great. He’s a highly gifted prose stylist, sure, but that doesn’t cut it, as Isaac Babel said, “He can write, but he’s got nothing to say.” Then again I haven’t read enough of him to know for sure. Also - and this should have nothing to do with his literary merit - I can’t help disliking him for some of the things he says outside of his writing. He shows contempt towards writers dear to me: Faulkner, Chekhov, Cervantes to name just a few. While I doubt he’s fit to shine their shoes, Pale Fire and Lolita will surely be worth a read.
Seconded.
The only one I’ve read is A Confederacy of Dunces, which was excellent. Eugenides I’ve been considering, and with your recommendation and twicksters seconding, that’s getting added to the list for sure. Thanks again
To be clear: he is contentious and deceptive. I agree with your frustration about his comments on other writers; I disagree with him. Also, his stuff is deceptively superficial because he is such an accomplished prose stylist. He gets you going with the “ooh, shiny!” aspects of his prose - and with Lolita, if anything, you think he is dangling a reprehensible subject in front of us, just to make you feel that much MORE yucky about reading it because (it is assumed) you like his prose. But the more you dig, the more you realize that there is substance there and he uses his approach to prose as a provocation. Pale Fire, with its unreliable narrator and *tour de force *structure of literary criticism and epic poem, captures this. Nabokov’s work is all about the tension he can inject into the situtation and still make you respect him as a writer and thinker…damn it.
And I love Jhumpa Lahiri…
…I’ll recommend one for ya… POMPEY by Jonathan Meades.
I have to read every sentence twice!!:smack: Is very interesting.
However, my favourites have to be… Saul Bellow and Joseph Conrad paint their words with beauty… others I enjoy are Martin Amis, Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, Cormac McCarthy and Michael Ondaatje.