Best prosaists for non-newfags

So if we pretend that this board isn't 90% newfags and you can actually get viable responses, what are unironically the best prose writers besides the edge-lord backbone of classics? Surprise me, anons.
inb4 >>self-contradictory

breece d'j pancake

Veejay Dubya had a good ear for this shit. She rated:

>Sterne
>Thomas Browne
>Lord Macaulay
>Walter Pater

They're all pretty good.

She was pretty good too.

Off the top of my head:

>Burroughs
>Woolf
>Nabokov

But Veejay had better taste than me

Meh

Poor man's hemingway

Borges liked Stevenson

you suggest someone

that's me

Burroughs rated Paul Bowles

gotcha. i think "besides the . . . backbone of classics" essentially eliminates everyone you suggested. not that they're bad (not really my taste, but i recognize their value), but they don't seem like the "surprise" picks op is looking for.

Absolutely he did. Begin with this small essay, The Lamplighter, and youll be hooked (if -you- can read)

fair point. it seems OP is setting up a wild goose chase.

>edge-lord backbone of classics
i don't understand this phrase. how can the classics be edgy?

i suspect the best prose writer ever is Nietzsche. i can't read German though.

M. F. K. Fisher. Auden called her the best stylist of the first part of the 20th c., but few read her here.
A. J. Liebling. Wrote on hucksters, boxing, food and politics early mid 20th c. Also New Yorkers' best ww2 correspondent. Perhaps begin with Mollie and Other War Pieces.
Wm Gass was until recently the best familiar essayist in English. I really like the collection Finding a Form.

Kys

Hamsun reaches lyrical heights in Pan that have yet to be rivaled in anything I've read.

Melville

Further proof that Dickens is underrated

Nabokov and Melville are the only English writers I've read who's prose can compete with poetry, there are other's who are great in translation like Moncrief's Proust or even Rilke. Shakespeare's best is in pentameter so like Milton he seems in between

Ur reatrd

Give me some reccs or an opinion then boy, I'm not looking to vaguely argue and post brainlet memes

Gaddis, Gass, Barthelme off the top of my head

Fys

>hasn't read barthelme, elizabeth smart, or gary lutz.

Correct