Last year and through spring I started a series here at Liberty Island and at my “Mad Tab” personal blog highlighting the novelists and non-fiction culture/history writers who I regarded as “essential” for myself and recommend to the writers with whom I collaborate.
Here are the writers I’ve featured thus far and a fun video presenting one of the coolest ideas from the last one listed:
Come join us next Tuesday for the first installment in this new series — the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides — and then check out new posts in the coming weeks and months on:
Paul Johnson
Robert Anton Wilson
Tevi Troy
Lewis Carroll
Aleister Crowley
Neil Gaiman
Frank S. Meyer
John Dee
Barry Rubin
Leszek Kolakowski
James C. Bennett and Michael Lotus
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Raymond Chandler
Allan Bloom
William Strauss and Neil Howe
Thomas Sowell
William F. Buckley, Jr.
Gary Lachmann
Virginia Woolf
Reinaldo Arenas
Michael Walsh
Edward Jay Epstein
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
William Shakespeare
Rudyard Kipling
Frederick Douglass
Niccolo Machiavelli
Ray Kurzweil
G. K. Chesterton
C.S. Lewis
J.R.R. Tolkien
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Sun Tzu
Goethe
Kay Redfield Jamison
Theodore Dalrymple
Richard Brookhiser
Michael Barrier
Saul Bellow
Grant Morrison
Tom Wolfe
John Waters
(More authors to be added as I feel like it.)
I’ll be explaining in brief why each writer’s work strikes me as useful for counterculture conservative creatives and how they have influenced my worldview. This is not a complete list yet, rather just some key favorites off the top of my head. More will be added and links inserted as each receives an entry.
Which other authors should be included as essential study for today’s aspiring authors? Submit a 200-700 word blog post or 701-1600 word essay to [email protected]
David M. Swindle took over in 2021 as Liberty Island Media Group's new owner, Publisher, and Editor-In-Chief. He joined LI in May of 2015, initially as West Coast Editor. He previously worked as associate editor of PJ Media from 2011-2015 where he grew the PJ Lifestyle vertical, and associate editor of FrontPageMag from 2009-2011 where he developed the media criticism site NewsReal Blog as its managing editor.
David double-majored in English (creative writing emphasis) and Political Science, graduating from Ball State University in 2006. After years of feeling torn between creative work and political activism, David now embraces the late Andrew Breitbart’s aphorism that “Politics is downstream from culture.”
As a novel editor David will consider books of just about any genre or type (he hands off romance, young adult, legal, and military titles to those better equipped on the team). His current areas of strongest interest include science fiction, fantasy, thriller/suspense, hard-boiled detective and crime, horror, westerns, historical, alternate history, speculative, cultural satire, literary, and religious fiction. He also reviews nonfiction submissions on politics, arts, media, faith, and counterculture.
David's articles have been published at such publications as The Daily Wire, The Washington Examiner, The Investigative Project on Terrorism, The Algemeiner, The American Spectator, The Daily Caller, The California Courier, Campus Watch, Rebel Media, Big Hollywood, and The Indianapolis Star. He currently lives in Burbank, California. Follow him on Twitter @DaveSwindle.
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