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Off the top of my head....

Marion Zimmer Bradley
Terry Goodkind
Ian Irvine
Maggie Furey

And this is where my brain leaks out my ears and I can't remember 95% of the books I own..

Neil Gaiman has been one of my favorites for a while.  His peer Charles de Lint is another favorite of mine.  I've also really loved Orson Scott Card's fiction, but his nonficition can only be described as pompous and arrogant.  I'm very loyal to Michael A. Stackpole and Terry Brooks.  Greg Keyes has recently become another favorite of mine.

Classically, I can't get enough of Hemmingway's writing style.  The man was perfect.

I'm a huge fan of Terry Brooks, Lynn Flewelling and Sara Douglass.

-alan

My favourite writer is Kim Newman who also writes as Jack Yeovil.  Really liked a lot of old Raymond E Feist and big fan of the Wild Cards books.

Also, I've recently gotten into Chuck Palahniuk and Jonathan Ames.

I enjoyed the Kingdom for Sale books, probably because it was a set amount of books. His others seem to go on and on and on.... Could just be me though.

i've got some of the Sara Douglass books as well.

I'm also a big fan of Sherlock Holmes stories - not just the originals but the Laurie R King stories. 

And Greg Rucka whose novels are fantastic.  His DC comics less so these days.

Actually, he's probably going to continue the Landover novels.  The Shannara books are fairly ongoing.  His Word/Void trilogy is set in modern day and is limited, and those are the best novels he's done.  What he's doing now, though, is essentially linking the Word/Void books to Shannara with some new books that look very promising indeed.

DAMNIT!

I liked them in that number of books.

Course, I'm on the 9th Terry Goodkind book at the moment and he shows no sign of stopping either...

Thank god I gave up on Robert Jordan...

Yeah, but each of the Word/Void books are standalone stories, and they're great reads.  I'm a contemporary fantasy addict, and those are some of my favorites.

So basically we'll be adding another bookcase to the house.

8 so far and counting.

I remember when the Shannara books were this one off trilogy.

Wow.  Either you're old, or I'm really young.

Greg Rucka is a great writer.  His "Batman: No Man's Land" is one of my all-time favorite novels.

It's beyond me how we haven't had that book made into a movie yet.

-alan

The Sword of Shannara...no offence but a bigger pile of tosh I have yet to read.



Favourite authors - based on a body of work rather than a single favourite novel:-

Iain M Banks
Gene Wolfe
Dan Simmons
George RR Martin

There are loads more but I would most want to write like these guys. Intelligent, thought provoking and still a damned good read.

Steve Aylett
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Jeff Noon
Richard Morgan
William Gibson

  A bunch, in no particular order:

Ed Mcbain-When I was growing up I wanted desperately to be an Isola PD Homicide cop.  Insanely detailed, bleak as all hell and some of the funniest books I've ever read, Mcbain's 87th Precinct books are essential reading for anyone who watches HOMICIDE, THE WIRE or THE SHIELD.

Mark Billingham-Battered, crumpled crime novels about a battered, crumpled DI.  Tom Thorne is as pissed off as the 8th Precinct cops but just glowers a lot.  These are horrible books, filled with graveyard humour and mistakes that cost people lives.  Love 'em.

Paul Cornell-Cornell's DOCTOR WHO work is good, his original SF is better.  SOMETHING MORE is a story about what happens after the world ends whilst BRITISH SUMMERTIME folds Judas, time travel, the evils of greed and the city of Bath into one huge story.  Big science fiction with joined up ideas.

Allen Steele-When I wasn't wanting to be an Isola PD Homicide cop, I was wanting to be an astronaut.  Allen Steele's books are about normal people who just happen to live and work in space.  I'm increasingly aware that we may not be back on the moon this century and if this is the closest I get, it'll just about do.

:)

Al

Think we own a copy of SOMETHING MORE .....

  It's good but falls apart a bit at the end (Make a great one shot RPG scenario though).  BRITISH SUMMERTIME is great, genuine example of an author growing and getting more comfortable with themselves on the page.