http://www.literature-map.com/

Just type in a favourite author name and it will give you a list of similar genre authors eg. Type in Stephen King and you will get the likes of Peter Straub etc.

Pretty cool. If you liked Literature Map, you probably will also like Yasiv - it's based on Amazon suggestions/also bought/whatever thingy.

Oh, I like that much more, thanks and +1 for you! :)

Thank you.
Earlier I used google. :)

I'd say it's a highly flawed tool. I tried "Tolkien" just to see what it would show, and we get Ann Rice, Tom Clancy and Stephenie Meyer (the fuck?), but not William Morris, Lloyd Alexander or Ursula Le Guin? Thanks, but I think I'll do fine without such help.

Might be nice for me to mess around with some sf authors, as I'm not terribly versed in the genre. But there are some curious results, i.e. (on my very first 2 searches) Tolstoy winds up nearby on a Heller search, but Heller isn't anywhere to be found near Tolstoy.

Off topic: here are some 1909 recordings of Tolstoy by Edison.

So... they're recommending people who liked Tolkien to read Clancy ? WTF ???

It doesn't make sense at all unless all the tool takes in to account is they are all authors from the fiction genre.

I've been aware of this for a while, but it's very flawed, as others have noted. Still, it can be useful to find a surprise author you've never heard of (but it's quite likely they won't be very similar to the one you use in the search field).

I typed in Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and the results seem a little better . But it still mentions a lot of authors that have nothing to do with him, like Bradbury, Heinlein and Rand . At least they mentioned Dunsany...

These type of tools are usually based upon popularity, not some intrinsic content based algorithm. That would have been extraordinary though if that existed.