The life lived in the external or internal world of a writer

When promotional material for Cult Writers: 50 Nonconformist Novelists You Need to Know fell into my inbox, I couldn't resist comparing its contents against my own mental list of quirky writers and literary obsessions.

Written by Ian Haydn Smith and illustrated by Kristelle Rodeia, this volume covers a decent cross-section of slightly off-mainstream literature available to the English reading public. Some of the writers are better known for their poetry or essays, but all had authored at least one novel. (For those interested, the publisher's page reveals the full list of writers.)

Note: The contents of my digital review copy differ slightly from the public list (swapping out five entries). I truly hope Eve Babitz and Joan Didion made the final cut over Joseph Heller and James Joyce.

I've read 32 of them, and obsessed over several of them throughout various phases of my life (though only one served as namesake for a pet cat).

Women writers are relatively well represented (23 of the 50). Regarding language, 18 of them do not write in English. All but 12 writers are dead.

Only one author had I never heard of (Juan Rulfo).

Each entry is topped by the writer's name and dates, with a pithy descriptive label, like "Chronicler of the Weird" (Murakami) or "The Literary Outlaw" (Genet) or "The Experimenter" (Lessing). Some of these are repetitive, not particularly insightful, arguably not even accurate, but I'd be hard-pressed to come up with better options — that's a tough exercise.

The entry covers a combination of biography, publication history, and public reception — it sticks to objective fact rather than attempt to offer insight. There is little attention to any particular work, but in most cases a style is attributed to the author — "Southern Gothic" (McCullers) and poetic Confessionalism (Plath) — and their work is described in broad thematic strokes. Every entry is complemented by an illustration of the author (that's Bulgakov below, and can you guess who it is on the cover?), and some of them feature quotations.

The book is indexed (mostly people, institutions, publications, and prizes) and includes a list of key works for each writer.

But how do you define the cult status of a writer anyway? Without setting hard and fast criteria, Smith focuses on the fervour of their readership and their transgression of genre boundaries.

However, for all its focus on their work, this book is ultimately about the creators. Which raises another question: is a cult writer defined by the work they produce or the life they have lived? As you will glean from the portraits included here, the answer is: both. More specifically, it depends on the life lived in the external or internal world of a writer.

(Umm, what? I think I disagree.)

I would dispute the status of some of the writers included (and here my own biases will be laid bare).

One stumbling block for me is that I don't think it's enough to have authored a cult book to be considered a cult writer. To me, you're only a cult writer if, having experienced your work, I'm compelled to search out and devour everything you've ever written.

By my thinking, JRR Tolkien does not fit the bill. The world he created is massive and influential; Middle Earth inspires worship, but Tolkien does not. Besides, he is too obvious and too present in our culture to be a discovery — cult status is reserved for the special, beyond mainstream.

Pauline Réage authored but one book, The Story of O. She is, I think, unfairly labeled here as "the sado-masochist author," diminishing the sexual paradox of liberation in slavery that it explores and the controversial brand of feminism it inspires. While I think her novel is an important one and it enjoys elite status, the author, anonymous for years, remains essentially unknown.

Ken Kesey. Really?

And Ayn Rand. Does anyone read her seriously after high school?

But I was pleased to see Chris Kraus in this company (whose work I only recently discovered, and yes, I am compelled to explore more).

And then there are the inevitable oversights.

Smith justifies some of his choices in the introduction: "Thomas Pynchon stands in for other experimental writers such William Gaddis, Roberto Bolaño and David Foster Wallace." Even while they're all postmodernists, and often maximalists, they're quite different. I suspect Pynchon is less prevalent on college campuses today than the others. But maybe not. (Smith acknowledges, "Times are changing and so should this list.") Since the entries tend toward the biographical with only a minimal attempt to place these figures on the literary landscape and describe their significance and influence, the idea that one writer might stand for a group isn't strongly conveyed. (I would've chosen Bolaño to represent this group, because he resonates more strongly with this millennium's readers.)

Smith nods at a few other writers that didn't make the cut (I would have included Mark Z Danielewski over several of the others).

The one writer missing who, in my view, absolutely ought to be here: Clarice Lispector.

Despite my quibbles, I love lists, and I think Cult Writers makes for a great coffee table book. It has smallish dimensions but the illustrations are a lot of fun. It's not the kind of book you read cover to cover; you flip through and learn a random fact, reminisce over the copy of Cortázar your ex gave you, be inspired to finally read Train Dreams.

I'd happily bestow this book on the right college student, possibly annotated to better mould their mind.

Whom would you include in a list of cult writers everybody needs to know?

Sex short circuits all imaginative exchange

C: Ann thought it was a great project, more perverse than just having an affair. She thinks it'd make a good book! When Dick calls shall we tell him we're considering publication?

S: No. The murder hasn't happened yet. Desire's still unconsummated. Let the media wait.

It didn't occur to me when I started writing letters a year and a half ago, unsent, that I was working within an already established art form. In fact, I didn't think of art or work at all. It was therapy.

What makes it a letter and not a diary entry is intention and direction. I needed to say something to someone in particular. At first it was the recovering heroin addict ex-boyfriend. But as those feelings resolved themselves, I wrote to some version of myself. Finally the letters became stories I tell my (mostly) imaginary lover.

This is not quite how I Love Dick unfolds, but Chris Kraus has done something similar, projecting an impassioned love affair on a man she barely knows.

So. Highly relatable.

Chris and Sylvère, together some ten years, are dining with Dick, an academic acquaintance of Sylvère's, and they go back to Dick's place and drink some more, by which time Chris is totally crushing on Dick, and when she confides in Sylvère the next day, they begin writing letters to Dick that they never send. They create ménage à trois where none existed, and explore its outcomes, without any basis other than Chris's love (imaginary or real?) for Dick.

My coworker noticed it on my desk — she's read it — asked me how I liked it, but when I said relatable, she gave me a funny look.

I mean the imaginary love affair part. I have no idea what else this book has in store. Oh god, they joke about a murder, maybe that goes somewhere. I hope she doesn't think I plan murders.

Have Chris and I spent this past week in turmoil just to turn our lives into a text?

(Yes!)

On the car ride home I started reading Research Into Marriage, then underlining, footnoting and annotating all the passages that could relate to me and you. It's an exercise both adolescent (me!) and academic (you!) ... my first art object, which I'll give you as a present.

I want to go back to the beginning and annotate this book as it relates to my own imaginary love affair. So badly. Every bit that makes this book so relatable. I will make an offering of it.

I'm about halfway through this book when I start rereading, pencil in hand. I had been swept away by this book as a model of what I could do with my own writing; I want to slow down to better understand it. On rereading, this book is not what I was experiencing at all. The text was merely, magically, a trigger for my own interior experience, but already it's not a story I recognize, it's telling a different story from the one I thought I was reading. Those lines of insight I thought would stay with me, the passages I wanted to mark when no pencil was in reach — I can't find them anymore.

There's a comment about Schoenberg and I remember the lovely novel I read last winter that I never got round to writing about.

I Love Dick. I Love Dick. I Love ... (I need to make this book my own.) I Love Marc. Making My Marc. Making My Mark. (That's not clever, it's cheesy.)

[How would he react to having his name changed? I don't think he'd like it, it's no longer the truth. Maybe he'd rather remain anonymous. Of course, him being imaginary, I don't even have to tell him, he'd never find out about this. I'll tell him. Of course I'll tell him. I tell him everything. That's almost the fucking point. Does he know that he's now an art experience? Maybe I've always subconsciously known that that's what he was meant to be, what we were meant to be. He has no agency of his own, only that which I bestow upon him. I create him.]

And then Chris went alone into her room and wrote a letter, thinking she would send it, about sex and love. She was all confused about wanting to have sex, sensing that at this point if she slept with Dick the whole thing would be over. THE — UNEXAMINED — LIFE — IS NOT — WORTH — LIVING flashed the titles of a Ken Kobland film against the backbeat of a carfuck 1950s song. "As soon as sex takes place, we fall," she wrote, thinking, knowing from experience, that sex short circuits all imaginative exchange. The two together get too scary. So she wrote some more about Henry James. Although she really wanted both. "Is there a way," she wrote in closing, "to dignify sex, make it as complicated as we are, to make it not grotesque?"

And this makes me sad because it becomes clear to me that she does not understand sex the way I do, it is complicated and not grotesque and it is entirely cerebral, my imaginary lover and I agree that creative juices and sexual juices flow into each other, the nature of exchange need not be verbal, it becomes something else.