SF Signal article on Underrated Authors and my own picks

SF Signal has an interesting Mind Meld piece today where industry people give their selections as to which authors, living and dead alike, deserve more praise. So without (consciously) cribbing off of theirs, here are a few that I'd add to that list, even if some might be barely genre at all:

Edward Whittemore (Quin's Shanghai Circus; The Jerusalem Quartet) - American author never sold more than 10K first edition copies of any of his releases and yet 13 years after his death in 1995, his work still resonates with those fortunate few who have sought out his work. Of course, since there are some in the genre who laud him quite a bit, perhaps this is more of a selection for the casual reader to consider.

Richard Parks (short fiction writer) - While I know he's won a few awards for his short stories, I just don't hear his name mentioned often enough. I loved his 2007 collection Worshiping Small Gods, thinking it was the best single-author collection that I read last year and I believe he deserves a bit more consideration.

Milorad Pavić (The Dictionary of the Khazars; other novels) -This Serbian author never tells the same tale twice, nor does he have his books appear in the same format either, as he utilizes various formats (dictionary, tarot cards, etc.) to make the book itself part of the story. Very inventive, but yet gets barely any mentions these days in genre circles.

Han Shaogong (A Dictionary of Macqiao) - Chinese writer who, like Pavić, uses a dictionary/encyclopedia format to tell of a place in which one's very understanding of time and place in rural China depended upon how words were used. Very moving story told within and behind these "entries."

Angélica Gorodischer (Kalpa Imperial) - Argentine writer whose imagined empire contains such a depth of human emotion that it took another writer with a similar range of interests/stories, Ursula Le Guin, to translate this moving series of tales into English so at least a few more people could read it.

Juan Rulfo (Pedro Páramo y El llano en llamas) - Mexican writer of the 1950s whose hallucinogenic first novel contained the germ of the realismo mágico style that became so popular in Latin America and then later in other parts of the world in the 1960s and 1970s. But yet Rulfo never gets the acclaim that a García Márquez or a Fuentes receives.

For once, I'll stop at an even number and let people comment on these and/or add their own to this list. After all, the more an author's name is spoken, the less likely his/her works will fade permanently into obscurity.