> it is sad that we don't seem to have authors who write fantastic prose anymore To spin this around a little: we don't talk about authors in the past whose pr

> it is sad that we don't seem to have authors who write fantastic prose anymore To spin this around a little: we don't talk about authors in the past whose prose isn't worth going back to. Shakespeare had many contemporaries, but you might be hard pressed to name more than a couple. Good prose can be challenging, and people don't want to be challenged all the time. I admire Pynchon's writing in Gravity's Rainbow - I don't want every book I read to be like that. Or to put it another way: there are many novels from the 19th century that were massively popular at the time, but totally forgotten about now. They were novels that were pretty average in terms of prose, but had stories that were relevant to people at the time, and gripped them. I doubt if in a hundred years people will still be reading the Da Vinci Code - but I can guarantee books like Infinite Jest, The Satanic Verses, Nights at the Circus, and the like will be attracting critical attention.