Writers who are alive, like really alive, not like Stephine Meyer alive

Since I woke up with crazy dreams still still slowly draining out of me and there was a big dead picture of Salinger, I thought: who is still around, it's just a taste but-

Here is who is still awesome:

Joyce Carol Oates, since she has written ten million things that are more important that anything on E! (alright except that dreamboat Joel McHale), we have to start somewhere so then lets start you off with "where are you going, where have you been?". As you read it, the inside of your head will untangle, and everything that you were asking yourself about life and fear and future selves will suddenly make itself known and then you'll be outside smoking a cigarette and people will ask you questions to make conversation and you won't be able to respond because you keep wondering if that guy walked funny because he was hiding hooves in his shoes. And that's just a fucking short story, imagine what the novels are like.

I give her five sexy hats out of five.

Also better than Dan Brown and that weiner who cried the whole time he poorly wrote the Ruins,

Dennis Lehane, what's that America is full of? Guns, drugs, madness, poverty, poetry, creepy hot sex, indistinguishable lines between what is a crime in desperation and what isn't? (Facetious) No way. (Sarcasm) Look just read anything out of Coronado, in particularly "Until Gwen" and lets just see how you feel afterward. If you feel nothing, then you are dead inside, and you should look in a mirror for a reflection to make sure that you aren't actually dead.

D.L. gets four sexy hats because Clint Eastwood turned Mystic River into a whiny, black-and-white mockery of what it actually is.

Kim Addonizio, is my favorite poet running around alive. Her stuff is smart, tough, disturbingly sexy, and always, always overwhelmingly affective. She also never falls into being pompous or crass or shock-for-the-sake-of-shock. I would stand her stuff up against anybody's and truly see if anybody can punch you in that tiny stomach that lives in your heart harder than her. She also pulls off some of the harder technical sides of poetry with out becoming stale or rigid, check out her sonnet "First Poem for You" if you think I'm wrong.

She get four and a half sexy hats, one half taken off because I always have to look up her name to spell it right.

Grant Morrison, isn't a writer, he's a witch. If you are so inclined and willing to look into trap doors on the dark side of your brain then you will notice that Morrison's cool, funny, exciting, and blazingly creative stories (sometimes with resurrected comic book material that died in the seventies)is also subtly worming new thought concepts into your head. What if a writer created a universe then created a character from our universe to be sent into theirs? Does that make the universe real because you believe it to be real? You can lay down now if you want. When you are ready, when you know who you are, read The Invisibles all the way through, it will mess with you.

There are no sexy hats, because they are just constructs in your mind's eye that pop up when you scan your eyes over a set of sound sets(letters) linked together to spell (like a witch) things into the think flesh that hides in your skull. C'est pas une pipe.

Alan Moore, fuck you, you don't take comic books seriously, fuck you. Alright, that's harsh, but think about it, everybody discredits comics. So if it is completely discredited, guess who flocks there? That's right the freakshows of talent that can't get away with it anywhere else. Do not buy into the crap movies they turn his stuff into, you are missing out on what might be an actual Shakespeare level talent. The Watchmen is the most creative, provocative, ballsy, and beautifully crafted story of all time. It is the best book of the last thirty five years, if not the century. (Editor's note: That's real Brazen Pomposity, folks.)

He gets three sexy hats because he needs to write another novel and because Promethea did kind of suck.

Two Old Dudes who don't need Pissants like me giving them props

Gabriel "The Hitman" Garcia Marquez and Ray "Fucking" Bradbury, if you don't know who they are you need to ask yourself, "do I have to think to breathe?" because you probably do. Read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Something Wicked This way Comes", everthing is going to be alright.

They both get Five Sexy Hats out of Five because they both look very manly in trench coats.

There will be more writers ass-kissed here in the Lunchbox, this is just the beginning. See now I don't feel so bad about the last column.