I'm admittedly sexist. Prove me wrong [View all]

....when it comes to reading that is!

Maybe it's the types of books I enjoy but I just can't find a good female author these days. Austen and Eliot and the Brontes are fine but I've done all that and sometimes I want to live at least in the 20th Century. My tastes tend to be polarized between at the least art-lit if not genuinely literary on one end, and silly escapism on the other. Can't abide airplane fiction or most book-of-the-month stuff from either sex.

So where is there a female Rushdie or Eco or Amis for erudition and multilayered complexity? Where is the distaff side to Heller or Irving or Roth for deep storytelling with keen wit? What about a Lady Pratchett or Rankin or Sharpe for wildly inventive silliness? Maybe even a Ms. Vonnegut or Waugh for that rare sweet spot that gets bits of both?

I've answered this question a few times for my other passion of "classical" music. There I can tell people where to find Farrenc or Bonis or even Eckhardt-Grammate for my own specialty (passive only, sad to say) of nigh-impossible piano aerobatics. I can remind them that the names Schumann and Mendelssohn did not only belong to men (and that the former's chamber music at least is better than her hubby's). I come up a blank for either serious or seriously funny writing.

There has to be some out there - help me find it please?