J. K. Rowling . Margaret Atwood.

Margret Weis. Author of the Dragonlance series.

Yamazaki Kore, author of Ancient Magus Bride.

Sex of the author is not an important classification for me, but I have kept a reading journal for years and can easily pick out some names.

Fair warning, up front: I hated The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern) and will never start another Connie Willis novel. So from that you may be able to gauge whether we have similar tastes.

I followed these authors for a while and admired their work, and then stopped when something really turned me off, and I won’t read them again:

• Kate Atkinson
• Tana French
• Jodi Picoult
• Jo Walton

I would definitely read further work by these authors:

• Jane Gardam – especially liked Old Filth
• Olga Grushin – high marks for The Line and The Dream Life of Sukhanov
• Elizabeth Hand – she writes some weird stuff, but I thought Mortal Love was stunning
• Jhumpa Lahiri – especially admired The Namesake and The Lowland
• Emily St. John Mandel – I liked all of her novels, especially Station Eleven

I might try these authors again one day, despite some disappointment:

• Alice Hoffman (I liked Second Nature a lot)
• Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things was impressive)
• Donna Tartt (The Secret History was excellent)

Oh, thanks so much! I can’t wait to look into some of these.
@Jeruba, I have had some of the “nope, not again” reactions to the same authors, I know what you mean, but I will definitely be downloading some of your recommendations!

I’m with @Jeruba on many in her list. Definitely do try Kate Atkinson if you haven’t read her, particularly the Jackson Brodie series that starts with Case Histories. Penelope Lively is very good from a slightly earlier time as is Barbara Pym.

Not a woman author but a book I really adored was A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.

I just read a lovely little novel by Paulette Jiles called New of the World set in post-Civil War Texas.

I have loved Barbara Pym forever!
I have recently discovered, by accident, a few newer ones that I have been delighted with. It gives me heart to know, in this changeable landscape of publishing, that there is still some high quality stuff appearing, new and fresh.

One of my favorite novels of all time, again written by a man, is Time and Again by Jack Finney. it became a cult novel, written in the 1970s about a time travel experiment back to the New York of the 1880s. The first 50 pages are a bit slow but then it is absolutely magical.

Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargossa Sea about Mr Rochester’s first “mad” wife is great.

Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping.

Sue Monk Kidd’s *The Invention of Wings” is great and deep; about the Grimke sisters from South Carolina who became two of the leading abolitionists.

And I just reread A Wrinkle in Time and it was really good.

…And its sequel, Time After Time. It has some notable flaws, but I forgave them all for the sake of the atmosphere.

Sequel to the Finney two posts above.

Yes, not as good, but still good.

I’d second @Jeruba‘s recommendation of Jhumpa Lahiri. I haven’t read all of her work (yet), but I’ve enjoyed everything I have read. (I also liked Amy Tan, and for much the same reason.)

J.K. Rowling also wrote under the nom de plume Robert Galbraith. I only read the first novel in her series about a disabled detective and his sidekick (a book club reading), and enjoyed it. But I wouldn’t call it “literature quality”, just “a good read”.

Since you ask for modern and fiction, it somewhat limits me: I just finished Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is certainly thought-provoking (and would probably provoke a lot of modern readers because of its casual racism, however well-meant it was intended). Still, an essential read that I’m glad I finally got to. And Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August was a masterful book about the beginning of World War I, but not a bit fictional. (It reads like fiction, though.)

Lit, by Mary Karr, was a memoir, not fiction, and one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. (Sort of dark humor sometimes, because the title does NOT refer to ‘literature’ but to her own alcoholism.)

And Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (also non-fiction) is a narrative that could probably only have been dug out by a woman who was as non-threatening and determined as she was.

Finally, I’d add Annie Proulx, for The Shipping News and That Old Ace in the Hole. She also wrote Brokeback Mountain, but I haven’t read that.

Looking at my Goodreads list (which is nowhere near complete) I am shocked to find almost no fiction by women. I have The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and Moo by Jane Smiley. I recall enjoying Carson McCullers many years ago. I also just read A Wrinkle in Time. It was enjoyable but thin.

Huh. Oddly, in music it’s flipped. A friend looking at my iTunes collection the other day asked half jokingly, “Do you have any music by men?”

Barbara Tuchman, Elizabeth Kolbert and Susan Orlean are favorites of mine but they write non-fiction.

Thanks so much for your recommendations, everybody. It’s a good place o start!

I really think that Meg Gardiner is an excellent writer.

Louise Erdrich. I liked The Master Butcher’s Sing Club.

Anything by Barbara Kingsolver, esp. The Poisonwood Bible