Since I didn’t see them mentioned here, I just wanted to add Joyce Carol Oates and Gillian Flynn to the list.
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I read a few books by Virginia Woolf many years ago. “To the lighthouse” had a number of memorable passages.
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I feel remiss in having left out Angela Carter! I admit Nights at the Circus didn’t do very much for me, but The Bloody Chamber is excellent.
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Speaking of riffs on fairytales, I can’t believe I forgot Naomi Novik.
I love her fairytale stores (Spinning Silver and Uprooted), and her Golden Enclave series is fun (and has a really interesting magic system). I bounced off the long Napoleonic-wars-with-dragons series.
She is a great world-builder, very much worth reading.
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I have numerous lady author favorites including Marjorie Kinan Rawlings, Susan Wittig Albert, Catherine Coulter and of course Emily Short are just to name a few.
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I’m five books into this series and loving it. It’s the only Novik I’ve read, but I’ll definitely be checking out some of her other work as well!
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Seconding a lot of these, especially Jemisin (have only read the Broken Earth trilogy so far, but it’s amazing), Addison (I adore all her books), and Leckie (the Imperial Radch trilogy have been my favorite books ever since I first read them about 10 years ago, and I’ve loved her ensuing books as well).
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It’s still only her debut novel so I can’t speak in “favorite author”-terms, but I immensely enjoyed The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn, which I read about a month ago. Makes me eager and curious to read whatever she comes up with next.
Three children from the fin de siècle period grow up during and live through the enormous changes and challenges of the first half of the 20th century, regularly turning back to seek solace in their self-built theatre on the beach. Which they constructed from the bones of a beached whale when they were small children.
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Ann Leckie is giving a reading online from her upcoming (June 6?) book Translation State tonight. 8 pm US Eastern, but if you sign up it’ll be available as a recording for a while (a couple weeks? dunno). That might be an interesting way to check out her work.
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Someone just popped in my mind today: Katherine Kurtz, author of the Deryni novels. My grandma got me into them; they’re a fantasy series with strong ties to Catholicism, and angels serving as the source of most magical power.
I tried looking up more book series I liked because I don’t really remember authors well and couldn’t remember if they were men or women.
The Box Car Kids is a series I read a ton as a kid, like more than fifteen books I think, and it’s by Gertrude Chandler Warner.
I recently went to a bookstore to purchase The Dollhouse Murders because I heard a lot of people say it was one of their childhood favorites. It was great! It’s by Betty Wen Wright.
Someone mentioned Ellen Raskin earlier but The Westing Game enthralled me when I read it.
I found Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca really disturbing because it resembled some of my real-life experiences way too closely (fortunately not the death part!) but it’s really stuck with me.
Two of my favorite poets are Edna St. Vincent Millay and Christina Rosetti, and of course Dickinson. I’ve put ‘Euclid alone has look on beauty bare’ in its entirety on my geometry syllabus before, and Rosetti’s ‘Goblin Market and other tales’ Dover thrift edition is the only poetry book I’ve bought for myself. And I have ‘If I can keep one heart from breaking I shall not live in vain’ framed in my classroom.
I really love Millay’s Renascence. If you haven’t read it, it’s spectacular. I really like this excerpt:
Summary
Ah, awful weight! Infinity
Pressed down upon the finite Me!
My anguished spirit, like a bird,
Beating against my lips I heard;
Yet lay the weight so close about
There was no room for it without.
And so beneath the weight lay I
And suffered death, but could not die.
And two short stories I like are The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and A Pair of Silk Stockings by Kate Chopin.
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In terms of recent reading, it’ll need to be Tamsyn Muir. She’s mastered a very distinctive tone in her writing that, in the hands of any other author, would break me out of the story. But she makes it compelling—which is good, because these are books that really need a second or third reading for everything to fit together! (“Something is revealed at the end that recontextualizes everything you’ve seen so far” seems to be her favorite literary device.)
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I never did hear how you liked Piranesi. I’m afraid you may not have like it since you were so quiet about it.
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Oh, as I try to think back through books I’ve read in the past year, I should also include Leigh Bardugo. The basic premise of Six of Crows is exactly my style (classic-style heist in a fantasy world), and she’s mastered the delicate balance between “building an elaborate world that feels like a real place” and “keeping the worldbuilding from getting in the way of the story”.
Similarly, the balance between “building three-dimensional characters who feel like people rather than archetypes” and “keeping the characterization from getting in the way of the story”. I’m told her earlier works don’t manage this balance as well so I haven’t read those.
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Has anyone mentioned Nnedi Okorafor yet? 
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Oh yes I did! Very much.
I was going to put it on the other Reading-thread but it must have slipped my mind.
Not even a handful of characters, but they carry the story. I was touched by how the main character cares for “the Previous Ones”.
Very mysterious and disorienting. The all-encompassing presence of the setting makes it almost a character in its own right.
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In addition to everyone mentioned, I would like to add Melissa Scott to the list. She writes mostly feminist/queer characters (the books are not necessarily so), and her Roads of Heaven series is brilliant for a number of reasons, the world building being chief among them (magical spaceships!)
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I forgot “The Stars are Legion” by Kameron Hurley (not mentioned upthread, has she?). Very cool space opera with body horror themes. Another of her books, “The Geek Feminist Revolution” is an anthology of articles, also worth checking out.
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I just started Pompeii by Mary Beard. Her SPQR is amazing.
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