Hayden Carruth is one of this country's and this century's greatest poets, and has a greater and more diverse range than almost anyone else. He writes about love, old age, jazz (he's an aficionado), war, rural life, and he writes in a variety of voices, forms, and styles. Besides his 20-odd books of poetry, he has written a novel and a collection of very frank autobiographical essays called Reluctantly (because he wrote them reluctantly), in which he describes his Connecticut childhood, his mental illnesses and hospital stays, his three marriages and many affairs, his alcoholism, his suicide attempt, his arduous life and his struggles.
He is a poet of consummate skill, passion, and dedication to truth. Some of his best poems are written in the voices of his farmer-neighbors in rural Vermont, where he lived for many years. A good place to start reading his poetry is Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, 1996, which has many poems about aging and eroticism, i.e., about finding romantic love--yet again--in old age. Another good place to start is Reluctantly, for an account of an unusual and courageous life.

I haven't yet read Donald Antrim's novels, but a great place to begin for any reader would be his current (2006) memoir, The Afterlife. This is a tragicomic account of the author's relationship with his mother, who died recently. She was an alcoholic, an erratic, irresponsible and yet loving mother, to whom the author feels inextricably bound even after her death. In addition to drinking, often to the point of stupor, she designed dresses, and her creations, described in vivid and comic detail, tended to the surreal, with quite wild appendages attached to each outfit. Antrim is sympathetic yet merciless towards both himself and his mother, as well as to one or two of the men she lived with, who were as eccentric and as unpredictable as she was. This might have been a lugubrious or self-indulgent account, but instead, through the author's wit, style and insight, it is a moving testimony to an unfinished relationship that still haunts him.

Orhan Pamuk is the most important contemporary Turkish novelist, and the only one widely known to Western readers. His books are wonderful, mostly about Turkey or the former Ottoman Empire ambiguously located between East and West. Some are set in distant centuries; some are contemporary. His recent novels, My Name Is Red and the very new Snow, are thrilling but difficult. Readers may want to start with the delightful earlier novel, The White Castle (unrelated to hamburgers), which is about a case of switched identity in the early Renaissance. At once a mystery, cultural commentary, and an exploration of how we know who we are, and do we ever really know.