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NYRB Classics continues to set the standard for publishing long-lost treasures. Its latest release is of particular note: The Post-Office Girl is the first English translation (by Joel Rotenberg) of Rausch der Verwandlung (trans: “The Ecstasy of Transformation”). This novel was found among Zweig’s papers after he and his wife committed suicide in Brazil during World War Two and only published in the original German in 1982.

The novel tells the story of Christine Hoflehner, a postal clerk in a small Austrian town: 25, but already on her way to become a career fonctionnaire:

Her hand with its pale fingers will raise and lower the same rattly wicket thousands upon thousands of times more, will toss hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of letters onto the cancelling desk with the same swiveling motion, will slam the blackened brass canceller onto hundreds of thousands or millions of stamps with the same brief thump.

Then, out of the blue, she gets an invitation to join a wealthy aunt in Switzerland. She’s exposed to money, glamor, fashion, society … and then sent back home. As an old tune from World War One put it, “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm, After They’ve Seen Paree?” Well, as Zweig shows with his typically bitterly realistic touch, you can’t … but neither can Christine just leap over the walls of income, expenses, class boundaries, social mores. You’ll have to buy a copy of the book yourself to find out how it ends. And you probably don’t even need the publisher’s cheap-shot description of the novel as “Cinderella meets Bonnie and Clyde” to entice you, if you’re a fellow lover of fine neglected books.

Source: “Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books”, the Village Voice, 13 May 2008

In an attempt to get folks thinking about something other than best-sellers for their summer reading lists, the Village Voice polled sixteen writers to name their favorite obscure book. At least one suggestion is utterly cryptic: of Jim Dodge’s Fup, which has been in print forever and had its steady stream of fans, Colum McCann writes, “The less said about it, the better.”

On the other hand, Jennifer Egan got me interested in Harold Q. Masur’s detective novels from the 1940s and 1950s with these opening lines from You Can’t Live Forever:

It started with a summons, a brunette, and a Turk.

The summons was in my pocket, the brunette was in trouble, and the Turk was dead.

Egan writes, “In his savvy, stylish novels of the ’40s and ’50s, Masur manages to wink continuously at the detective genre even as he revels in it.”

Novelist Donna Tartt offers Blood in the Parlor, by Dorothy Dunbar, commenting that, “Each of the 12 stories is an account of a 19th-century murder told with a light, macabre sense of humor. I’d love to see it back in print with illustrations by Edward Gorey.” Ed Park names an early novel by Harry Stephen Keeler, whose goofily bizarre mysteries have been rediscovered lately and who now has his own society of fans. Jonathan Ames nominates The Lunatic at Large, one of several of the prolific Scots comic writer J. Storer Clouston you can read or download online from Project Gutenberg. Between this article and this site, we may be able to put a dent in the sales from Oprah’s book club.

Released by Focus Films in March 2008, “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day” brings to the big screen the novel of the same name by Winifred Watson, one of a generation of British women writers sometimes referred to as “the middlebrows”.

The film probably owes its existence to the fine work of Persephone Books, which reissued the book in 2000 and has devoted itself to rediscovering writers such as Watson, E. M. Delafield, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and others. And thanks to the film, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day has sold over 23,000 copies, by far the press’ best seller to date.

Watson lacks a Wikipedia entry so far, but you can read her Independent obituary online at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/winifred-watson-640426.html.

Debuting June 2008: Faber Finds, the biggest venture into republication of neglected books since the start of NYRB Classics. In the words of the publisher, the aim of the series “is to restore to print for future generations a wealth of lost classics.”

With an initial list of 100 titles, Faber Finds will already be well on its way to keeping pace with NYRB Classics. The first set includes a few books that appear on a number of lists on this site–Keith Douglas’ Alamein to Zem Zem, which Faber reissued back in 1992 and Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, for example–but some other previously unmentioned ones, such as A Sword for Mr. Fitton, the first of a series of novels along the lines of the Patrick O’Brien’s popular Jack Aubrey stories, and Miss Willmott of Warley Place, a biography of one of the first woman landscape gardeners that currently fetches over $100 in first edition.

Faber promises that the list “will grow and embrace fiction, thrillers, sci-fi, memoirs, biographies, history, poetry, travel books, popular science and books for younger readers.” The publisher also invites readers “to let us know what you’d like to see back in print” by emailing suggestions to [email protected]. You can even enter a prize drawing for a free copy of P. H. Newby’s Something to Answer For, which won the very first Booker Prize back in 1969.

A most welcome addition to the bookshelves.

A site visitor tipped me off to a series of reissues of neglected and long out of print science fiction classics from the University of Nebraska Press, which already deserves credit for keeping many of the works of the fine American novelist Wright Morris in print.

Titled the Bison Frontiers of Imagination, the series includes over 50 titles now. Each title includes an introduction or afterword by a worthy science fiction writer or critic such as John Varley, an original cover painting, and, in some cases, original illustrations as well. In keeping with the press’ long-standing practice, the reissues are high-quality trade paperback editions.

Some of the titles will be familiar to fans of neglected books: Charles Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao, M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, and David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus all appear on more than one list on this site. Perhaps not all of the titles are of equal literary and historical merit (I remembered cringing at the wooden characters and cliches when I read When Worlds Collide back in 8th grade), but this worthy university press earns a standing ovation for its commitment to these pioneering works of speculative and science fiction.

Will Schofield brought to my attention Paul Dry Books, a publisher of some fine books that may wavered in and out of neglect for decades, including one of my favorites, John Collier’s His Monkey Wife, a funny, tender, and fantastic book, a bit like “Curious George” written by Jane Austen. Thanks, Will. I’ve added a link to the Publishers page.

In his preface to the Spring 2007 issue of the Antioch Review, editor Robert Fogarty issues this challenge:

The reader who sends the best and most persuasive list of “neglected” books will get a free one-year subscription to the Review. You must include a paragraph stating your reasons and it must arrive here by December 31, 2007.

Send your lists to:

Neglected Books Contest
c/o The Antioch Review
P.O. Box 148
Yellow Springs, OH 45387

Good luck!

In the Spring 2007 issue of the Antioch Review, noveliest and critic Alan Cheuse speculates on “what variety of fiction might have a chance to survive what Norman Mailer in a recent interview dubbed ‘the thirty-years-out rule,’ by which he means that the test of a contemporary writer’s work begins at about thirty years after his death when we can see whether his work is still in print.”

As evidence of the evanescence of contemporary fame, Cheuse cites Mrs. Fanny Trollope’s list of good American writers of the early 1830s in her Domestic Manners of the Americans. Among the best, in her opinion: Timothy Flint. “There is a vigor and freshness in his writing that is exactly in accordance with what one looks for, in the literature of a new country….”

Timothy [who?] Flint doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry, although you can find his Columbia Encyclopedia entry on Timothy Flint doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry, although you can find his Answers.com. It turns out that Flint was a clergyman whose biography of Daniel Boone, The First White Man of the West (subtitled Life and Exploits of Col. Dan’l. Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky; Interspersed with Incidents in the Early Annals of the Country) can be found online at Project Gutenberg.

Cheuse goes on to offer “a group of test cases” of the durability of contemporary fame:

• John O’Hara

“At the height of his powers, O’Hara was writing stories thick and fast for the New Yorker, when that distinguished magazine stood at the pinnacle of contemporary fiction publishing. A snapshot of that moment — which lasted, actually, for nearly twenty years (from 1930 to 1949) — would show a fiction writer with a devoted audience destined to stay around for a long time…. Not even Geoffrey Wolff’s intelligent biography of O’Hara [The Art of burning Bridges: A Life of John O’Hara] has done much to bring him back into the American canon.”

• Lawrence Durrell

“Another writer whose day was seen as one that would last into infinity…. Justine, the first volume of his “Alexandria Quartet,” first published in the United States in 1961, turned all our heads toward his future and ours, which we saw as intertwined. Like some creature trapped in a bog, the book slowly sank out of sight. Has anyone recently tried rereading Justine?”

• Marguerite Young

“… Young’s two-volume novel [Miss Macintosh, My Darling]… was highly praised at the time of publication in the New York Times Book Review, among others, by novelist William Goyen (his own quickly faded reputation now nearing the death-plus-thirty-year mark), by Anaïs Nin (who only last month reached the death-plusthirty-year mark), by the, fortunately, still vital Kurt Vonnegut and, when the novel appeared in a reprint edition in 1993, by the astute Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda. Even so, she is not read much today.”

• John Fowles

“… whose reputation had languished even within his own lifetime (due in some part to the accident of a debilitating stroke) and now in the wake of his recent demise comes into question. Last year I reread The Magus and found that it cheered my soul (in a shivery sort of way). Let’s all reread Daniel Martin, the novel we all took to be a work of genius when it first appeared, and meet next year and compare notes. Is Fowles a writer for the millennium? Or is he just another flash in the pan whose novelty we mistook for brilliance?”

In Cheuse’s view, these examples raise “the larger question of exactly what is, if we can determine anything in human studies with any exactitude, a classic? Classic. A classic writer is a writer of the first rank. A classic work is outstanding work of the first order. Classic works are those works that endure over time, over generations, over centuries.”

He offers a few books he considers “valuable, which few others seem to care enough about to read and reread”:

• James Salter’s brilliant novel Light Years
• The Israeli novelist Amos Oz’s The Same Sea
• Joan Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays
• some of the stories of Elizabeth Tallent

“But we can never be sure…. Reputations rise and fall, and rise again.”

He concludes with the example of the novelist Mary Lee Settle who died in Charlottesville, Virginia on September 28, 2005. “She did some work that will last,” George Garrett said.

“Yes,” agrees Cheuse. “That’s the best tribute one writer can give to another. But the thirty year clock is ticking — twenty-eight years to go — and despite all our best predictions chances are her work will, alas, end up like her ashes, cast on the Rivanna River, on a rainy early autumn afternoon, disappearing into the flow.”

“Or, again, maybe not. Perhaps her wonderful love story Charley Bland will come back to haunt the lives of deep-hearted Americans in, say, thirty or forty years. And her joyful novel of quandary and religious faith, Celebration, will find a home in the minds of future citizens trying to live with the large and awful questions of destiny and vocation.”

Cheuse also reprints the complete list of titles from David Madden and Peggy Bach’s Rediscoveries II, obviously cut-and-pasted from this site.

The New York Review of Books devotes a long article in the 31May 2007 issue to Tom Stoppard’s play trilogy, which just finished playing on Broadway.

One of key sources Stoppard acknowledges in his forward to the plays is Edward Hallett Carr’s The Romantic Exiles, which Francis Steegmuller recommended in Writer’s Choice. Serif Publishing just reissued the book, which pops back into print every 20 years or so.

If you’re interested in getting a taste of The Coast of Utopia but don’t have a theater company near you willing to undertake a nine-hour production, The Romantic Exiles is a good substitute. Like the plays, it tells the story of the life in exile, mostly in France and England, of a group of Russian political thinkers, artists, writers, lunatics, and their wives, children, maids, and mistresses. These were people who liked to “live loud and live large,” as a character in one of my kids’ first computer games said.

Carr does a wonderful job of blending first-person accounts from diaries, letters, and memoirs with the perspective of a professional historian and the dry wit of a decidedly un-romantic skeptic. Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, Ivan Turgenev, and other characters carom off political theories, art, literature, financial problems, and romantic entanglements with passion and energy, committed to a “stubborn refusal to compromise with reality.”

from John Berryman’s afterword to the Signet Classics edition of Theodore Dreiser’s The Titan:

Thank the Lord for second-class novels, or what would we read after the age of twenty-one, and how insufferable would be a criticism that devoted itself solely to first-class novels (the fifty-two or eight-six there are).

and from Zadie Smith’s wonderful essay, “Fail Better,” which appeared in the Guardian on 13 January 2007, but is no longer available online:

If it’s true that first-rate novels are rare, it’s also true that what we call the literary canon is really the history of the second-rate, the legacy of honourable failures. Any writer should be proud to join that list just as any reader should count themselves lucky to read them. The literature we love amounts to the fractured shards of an attempt, not the monument of fulfilment. The art is in the attempt….

Few of the books featured on this site qualify as first-rate or first-class, by Smith’s or Berryman’s standards, so it’s good to know that there are such eloquent justifications for reading them.

Just added to the Sources lists on this site: “Reputations revisited”, which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement’s 75th anniversary issue.

The TLS asked a number of writers and academics to name the writers and books from the past seventy-five years they considered most overrated and underrated. This feature is remembered now for two reasons: first, the revival of the reputation and works of the English novelist Barbara Pym; second, for Vladimir Nabokov’s odd choice of H. G. Wells’ lesser novel, The Passionate Friends, which one Wells biographer described as, “by anybody’s standards … a solemn and boring book.”

In his blog, Things I’d Rather Be Doing, “reformed” critic John Kenyon interviews Mark Moskowitz, director of The Stone Reader, and founder of the Lost Books Club. Despite the appearance of its website, he says, the club is still at work:

It took us more than two years to get tax-deductible status for the non-profit (the two are not synonymous) so we can now accept donations, which are needed. It takes about $10,000 per book. We have a list of about a dozen we’d like to help bring back, with hundreds more waiting to be read and thought about (each week we get suggestions).

Moskowitz mentions that the club has William Wilson’s The LBJ Brigade, one of the earliest novels about the Vietnam War, awaiting a deal with the right publisher. He also offers several more suggestions to the list of neglected books discussed in The Stone Reader:

• Heckletooth 3, by David Shetzline, out of print since first published in 1969, a tale of a Forest Service ranger whose accidental poaching of an elk turns into a rebellion against society in general and leads to a manhunt and then a forest fire.
• Silk and Cyanide, Leo Marks’ irreverent memoir of code-breaking during World War II.
• Robert Spitz’s Barefoot in Babylon authoritative and engrossing account of the organisation of the landmark Woodstock Music Festival in 1969.

Source: Syracuse University Library News

On Friday, December 1, 2006, Nicholas Birns will give a talk entitled “When Neglected Books Are Revived: The Cases of William Godwin and Dawn Powell” at the E. S. Bird Library at Syracuse University.

Using William Godwin’s 1793 novel Caleb Williams and the novels of the 20th-century American novelist Dawn Powell as test cases, this talk will explore what it means for a book to be lost and to be revived, the different ways that revived books are received in academia and in the general literary culture, and the nature of revivals themselves as cultural phenomena. The talk will close by drawing lessons from these cases for considering “revivals of neglected books.”

Birns is on the faculty of Eugene Lang College, The New School, in New York City.

For roughly a year between April 2004 and early 2005, The New Republic magazine published “Lost & Found,” a feature in which writers discussed books and other cultural artifacts they considered to be at risk of being neglected.

You can find the full list of titles covered and comments from the articles at:

“Lost & Found” from The New Republic