Author Junkie

Mayer André Marcel Schwob, known as Marcel Schwob (23 August 1867 – 26 February 1905), was a French Symbolist writer best known for his short stories and his literary influence on authors such as Jorge Louis Borges and Roberto Bolano He has been called a "precursor of SurrealismIn addition to over a hundred short stories, he wrote journalistic articles, essays, biographies, literary reviews, and analysis, translations and plays. He was extremely well known and respected during his life and notably befriended a great number of intellectuals and artists of the time.

Jane Bowles wrote very little: just one novel – Two Serious Ladies; a play – In the Summer House and just over a dozen short stories, collected together with some notable letters. It was enough to establish a reputation as one of the twentieth century’s most original fiction writers.

English poet Rosemary Tonks was born in Gillingham, Kent. Her father, an engineer, died in Africa before Tonks’s birth and she was sent to boarding school as a young girl. In the late 1940s, Tonks married Michael Lightband, also an engineer. The couple lived in Calcutta, where Tonks had a paratyphoid fever, and Karachi, where she contracted polio that withered her right hand. Tonks taught herself to write and paint left-handed and wore a black glove on her right hand. After a stint in Paris, the couple returned to London in the mid-1950s, and Tonks began mixing with literary society. During this period, Tonks wrote two books of highly acclaimed poetry, Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967). Tonks claimed affiliation with French poets such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and her poetry was edgy, metropolitan, and laced with acerbic wit. Critic Cyril Connolly noted then that “Miss Tonks’s hard-faceted yet musical poems have unexpected power,” and she was generally considered one of the best female poets of her generation. Tonks also wrote six novels, including Opium Fogs (1963) and The Halt During the Chase (1972), and reviewed widely.

She had cried outside many gates of stillness where only her own voice had cried back to her, bouncing like the echo, little doubt, or like a ball, and sometimes she had heard that echo of which there had been no voice as there had been no shadow of her, and she had knocked at many doors which had not opened to her knocking, and some said that she was only the shadow and thus did not recognize herself, for the shadow knew not the substance although the substance knew the shadow, and some said that there had never been a lady but this lady who was lost and wandering through mountain storms where wandered also the sails of yachts white as that snow through which they wandered from pole to pole -- but how much more successful she had been in her failure than if only one door had opened to her knock. She had not been committed to one destiny. Who heard the knock of her dead heart? Success would have limited her as if with a golden compass had been drawn an arc omitting all but her path between two stars, but failure left many questions unanswered, or so it seemed to the old lawyer in that still house where he had been of two opinions, of two minds as to the door

Mary Francis Butts was a modernist writer whose work found recognition in important literary magazines of the time, as well as from some of her fellow modernists, T. S. Eliot, Hilda Dolittle, and Bryher. After her death, her works fell into obscurity until they began to be republished in the 1980s.

Marc Olden was an American author of mystery and suspense. He is perhaps best remembered for his mystery Poe Must Die, in which 19th-century American author Edgar Allan Poe appears as a protagonist. He was a prolific author, publishing forty books: two non-fiction and thirty-eight fiction. 

This is a short introduction to the Author Junkie Podcast. This podcast is where we reintroduce lesser-known authors and the books they have written. We hope to reintroduce these authors and their books to a modern audience.