Miranda July
We’ve taken July to task before as an actress and filmmaker.
As an author? Not much better.
July’s first book, a collection of stories packaged in No One Belongs Here More Than You, doesn’t contain any quotation marks around the characters’ dialogue. Okay, that’s a fine artistic choice.
But maybe it’s not fine, if we’re to believe what The New Yorker uncovered in a 2011 essay about July: “Her first book contains no quotation marks, because she didn’t understand how to attribute dialogue.”
Wait. Seriously?
Houston Press
Eggers is cool. Loved What Is the What (though the construction of the narrative was a bit off-putting) and liked A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Zeitoun. The People of Paper, published by Eggers’s McSweeney’s imprint, is an all-time favorite.
But then there’s The Circle, which could’ve been a 180-page novel and not 500-plus — it's kind of like Murakami’s 1Q84, where it takes hundreds of pages to explain one simple action. Meanwhile, the best part of Eggers’s loose adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s The Wild Things is the fur cover.
While he’s on the receiving end of mad hatred for his so-called arrogance about his deconstructed process, who gives a what about that? We don’t. In the end, it’s how the final project reads and Eggers is hit or miss rather than hit after hit.
Chuck Klosterman
The author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto is kind of the worst.
In a majority of Klosterman’s writings – Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains – there’s very little insight. Instead, what you get is a true elitist making fun of people, places and things that aren’t as “cool” as Klosterman.
Whether he’s spouting crackpot theories on pop culture in Esquire or declaring that everything about sports is pointless on Grantland.com, dude’s a dour downer.
Malcolm Gladwell
Gladwell turns seemingly complex ideas into digestible, thought-provoking bits that often leave readers bowing down to his “genius.”
It’s pseudoscience. And he’s sometimes flat-out wrong.
His breakout effort, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, harps on obvious trends that are cloaked underneath Gladwell’s needless over-intellectualism. The follow-up, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, is a desperate, formulaic attempt at cashing in on the success of The Tipping Point.
Bill Bryson
We lied at the top of this piece when claiming that we’ve read a book by all the authors on this list.
Despite multiple attempts, we can never get through even a few chapters of A Walk in the Woods by Bryson, who, for some weird reason, is looked upon as the country’s soothsayer for travel writing.
The “I’m an out-of-shape and balding old chum who can’t even cook a piece of toast, but golly will I try to put one foot in front of the other in these idyllic natural settings” shtick was tired before it was even invented.
Chuck Palahniuk
If your name is Chuck and you’re currently toiling on a novel at the Iowa Writers' Workshop or underneath a stair-nook inside of your home, you should probably stop writing. Forever.
Chuck Palahniuk isn’t as lame as Chuck Klosterman, but the author of Fight Club, Invisible Monsters and Choke is basically a hipster version of Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons).
