fbpx

News

News about neglected books and notices of new additions to the site.

Messiah: A Neglected Book by Gore Vidal

In a review of Gore Vidal’s new memoir, Point to Point Navigation, in the New York Review of Books Larry McMurtry drops his nominee for unjust neglect:

One reason I wouldn’t mind taking my near-complete holdings of Gore Vidal away to a far place is that there maybe I could just enjoy reading the writer and not always be having to ponder the Personality. There’s not much wrong with the Personality: he’s usually on the right side, and eloquently so. But the best of the writing is much more telling than the Personality—or any Personality, is likely to be. I refer particularly to Julian, to Homage to Daniel Shays, and to the excellent Messiah, a book that’s not remotely had its due.

Messiah deals with the rise of the next great religion of Western civilization, and the collapse and destruction of Christianity. It takes the form of the memoirs of Eugene Luther, a former apostle of Cavism. Founded by one John Cave, a California Undertaker, Cavism holds that it is a good thing to die–a holy thing, in fact, preferable to living. After the experience of the Jonestown massacre, David Koresh, and the Heaven’s Gate cult, Vidal’s distopia seems less fantastic than it did when the book was first published in 1954.

Oh, yes, and note the sly jokes: John Cave (J. C.) and Eugene Luther (Vidal’s full name is Eugene Luther Gore Vidal).

What’s fantastic is to imagine Myra Breckenridge or Duluth written by Luther Vidal.

Richard Yates on Fellow Neglected Writers

Source: An Interview with Richard Yates by DeWitt Henry and Geoffrey Clark, Ploughshares, Winter 1972

Here, in an interview from 1972, Richard Yates, who was one of America’s better-known neglected writers during much of his career, nominates some candidates of his own for overdue recognition:

Q: Who among your contemporaries do you feel have been seriously neglected? What about the work of Edward Lewis Wallant?

A: A fine writer; and yes, seriously neglected today, though he was by no means overlooked or unappreciated when his books first came out. Wallant worked with tremendous energy and tremendous speed. He didn’t even start writing until he was over thirty; then he managed to produce four novels in five years before he died very suddenly of a stroke at the age of thirty-six, ten years ago. He and I were pretty good friends, though we used to argue a lot about working methods: I thought he ought to take more time over his books; he’d disagree. It was almost as if he knew he didn’t have much time. If he’d lived, God only knows how much good work he might have accomplished by now. Anyway, the four books are there, and I do believe they’ll last. [Editor’s note: Wallant’s four novels are The Pawnbroker, The Tennants of Moonbloom, reissued in 2003 by New York Review Classics, The Human Season, and The Children at the Gate.]

Q: What about the novels of Brian Moore?

A: Another very fine writer, also seriously neglected, though he’s very much alive today and still going strong. I just don’t understand why he hasn’t yet won a wider audience. Every good writer I know admires his work. I’ve always thought Judith Hearne is a masterpiece, and An Answer from Limbo comes pretty close. Even in his lesser books there are always fine things — great scenes, fine characterizations. And he’s such a steady producer, a real professional. He’s never yet allowed more than three years to go by without getting out a new book since he began, back in the Fifties.

Q: What about Evan S. Connell?

A: All I’ve read of his work so far is Mrs. Bridge, which I thought was beautiful, and a number of excellent short stories, but I know he’s produced a large body of fiction that’s much admired by people whose judgment I trust; so yes, sure, he too deserves to be much better known. Another excellent, underrated writer is Thomas Williams — or has he become well-established by now? If not, he ought to be. [Williams is best known for his 1975 National Book Award-winning novel, The Hair of Harold Roux

Q: Who do you consider some other good, neglected writers?

A: Read the four spendid books by Gina Berriault, if you can find them, and if you want to discover an absolutely first-class talent who has somehow been left almost entirely out of the mainstream. She hasn’t quit writing yet, either, and I hope she never will.

And read almost anything by R.V. Cassill, a brilliant and enormously productive man who’s been turning out novels and stories for twenty-five years or more, all the while building and sustaining a large influence on other writers as a teacher and critic. Oh, he’s always been well-known in what I guess you’d call literary circles, but he had to wait a long, long time before his most recent novel, Doctor Cobb’s Game, did bring him some widespread readership at last.

And George Garrett. I haven’t read very much of his work, but that’s at least partly because there’s so very much of it – and he too has remained largely unknown except among other writers. I guess his latest book [Latest in 1973, that is: The Death of the Fox, his long and ornate novel about Sir Walter Ralegh], like Cassill’s, did make something of a public splash at last, but that too was long overdue.

And Seymour Epstein — ever heard of him? I have read all of his work to date — five novels and a book of stories, all expertly crafted and immensely readable – yet he too seems to have been largely ignored so far.

But hell, this list could go on and on. This country’s loaded with good, badly neglected writers. Fred Chappell. Calvin Kentfield. Herbert Wilner. Helen Hudson. Edward Hoagland. George Cuomo. Arthur J. Roth — those are only a few.

My God, if I’d produced as much good work as most of those people, with as little reward, I’d really feel qualified to rant and rail against the Literary Establishment.

Sightings: Neglected Books in Scotland

We spent the last couple of weeks in Scotland — a few days in Edinburgh and a week or so in the Highlands. Although not part of the agenda, neglected books cropped up on several occasions.

In a small bookshop near Edinburgh University, I found a few titles new to me:

• The Seizure of Power, by Czeslaw Milosz

The Nobel Prize-winning poet’s first novel, about the Soviet-orchestrated establishment of a Communist government in Poland at the end of World War Two.

• My Sinful Earth, by William Gerhardie

A copy from the 1947 “Uniform Edition” of Gerhardie’s works. One could hardly consider Gerhardie neglected in 1947 if he had a uniform edition of his works being published. However, among neglected authors Gerhardie is one of the hardiest perennials, coming back into critical bloom (and print) every decade or so. In an essay collected in Power of Delight, John Bayley writes that:

[Evelyn Waugh’s] favorite William Gerhardie novel was to be Jazz and Jasper. This almost forgotten work appeared in 1927, two years earlier than Vile Bodies. Its author wanted to call it Doom, a title not adopted until the 1974 edition. In 1947 it made a brief appearance as My Sinful Earth, and the 1928 American edition was called Eve’s Apples [in fact, it was Eva’s Apples — Ed.], the American publisher having decided, no doubt wisely, that the word “jazz” had been “worn threadbare” in crossing the Atlantic.

• The Tragedy of the Korosko, by Arthur Conan Doyle

A short novel about the capture and rescue of a group of Western tourists by Muslim extremists. A remarkably contemporary book, reissued in 2003 as a Hesperus Classic.

• The Life of Samuel Belet, C.F. Ramuz

An autobiographical novel. Ramuz is considered by many the greatest Swiss writer of the 20th century. His best-known book in English is When the Mountain Fell, which was a Book-of-the-Month club selection in 1947. Time magazine wrote of the novel, “U.S. readers will get here what few other recent books have given them — a genuine literary experience.”

Then, in the bookcase of the small house we rented in the Highlands, I came across a few more. Amongst the best-selling thrillers and romances one usually sees in such holiday rentals, I found some unexpected titles:

• Assassins, by Nicholas Mosley

An early novel by this great English experimental writer, about the abduction of a diplomat’s daughter in the midst of a crucial summit meeting.

• The Conspiracy and Other Stories, by Jaan Kross

A collection of mostly autobiographical short stories by an Estonian writer recommended by Doris Lessing and others.

• So Many Loves, by Leo Walmsley

The autobiography of a novelist best known for his books about life on the north Yorkshire coast. From the excerpts I read, it seemed a lively and entertaining tale, ranging from his apprenticeship on a fishing boat to travels through Africa.

• The Ballad and the Source, by Rosamond Lehmann

In this 1944 novel, Lehmann tells the story of Sibyl Jardine — her unhappy marriage, her flight from it, her life as a single mother, and the descent of her daughter into mental illness.

Underappreciated Literature: from WNYC’s “Leonard Lopate Show”

Source: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/underappreciated.html

During July and August 2006, WNYC’s “Leonard Lopate Show” devotes time to a series of features on “authors that are little-known in America, authors that mysteriously fell out of fashion, and authors who never gained wide recognition in the first place.” Authors discussed include:

The programs can be heard or downloaded in MP3 format at the link above.

Eland Books added to Publishers page

Just added to the Publishers page:

Eland Books, on the web at www.travelbooks.co.uk

Owned and run by travel writers John Hatt, Rose Baring, and Barnaby Rogerson, Eland “specializes in keeping the classics of travel literature in print.” Although its list has well under a hundred titles, Eland easily takes the first place award when it comes to bringing long-lost travel books of particular excellence back to print. And the quality and diversity of its titles is remarkable: Norman Lewis’ A Dragon Apparent, excerpted here; Leonard Woolf’s novel of Sri Lanka, The Village in the Jungle; and the intriguingly-titled A Cure for Serpents, Alberto di Pirajno’s memoir of life in Ethiopia and Libya (during the periods of Mussolini-led colonisation).

Doris Lessing added to Sources

In Time Bites, a 2004 collection of book reviews and essays — her first published collection of criticism — Doris Lessing discusses a good number of neglected books: by my count,easily a third of the titles covered qualify.

A list of these books and excerpts from her comments can now be found at the following new Sources page:

Doris Lessing

Lessing has often been a champion for lesser-known writers and their works. If one were to cull through the rest of Lessing’s criticism, I’m sure several dozen more titles could be collected.

 

Neglected book mentioned in Mental Floss magazine

In his article, “Judging a Book By Its Cover: 12 Book Designers Who Changed the Publishing Industry Forever,” in the May/June 2006 issue of Mental Floss magazine, Jason Tselentis recognizes a neglected book by Zelda Popkin, whose Time Off for Murder was recommended by Fay Blake in Writer’s Choice.

Tselentis singles out Popkin’s No Crime for a Lady not for its content but for its cover by designer Gerald Gregg. Of Gregg’s work, Tselentis writes,

When designer Chip Kidd cited many 1940s and 1950s paperbacks as influences to his work, he was no doubt referring to those of Dell Publishing. Founded in 1921 by a 27-year-old named George Delacourte, Dell gained success thanks to its racy and alluring paperback covers…. Having airbrushed hundreds of these using secretaries and cartographers as models, Gregg called his style, “a cominbation of graphic design and stylized realism.”

…. Usually scandalous, his covers resembled the film noir of that time period. Popkin’s mystery stories starred Mary Carner, one of the first female private eyes in detective novels; her character is rumored to have been the inspiration for Angela Lansbury’s character Jessica Fletcher on “Murder, She Wrote.”

New List added to Sources: Robert Nedelkoff

A new list of neglected books added to Sources: Robert Nedelkoff.

Archivist Robert Nedelkoff, who’s written on neglected books for McSweeney’s and other magazines offered an even dozen recommendations to the Editor not long after this site opened.

Among these is Operators And Things by Barbara O’Brien, of which he writes,

When I came across an Ace paperback edition of this book, published in the early 1960s, I at first thought I was reading one of Philip K. Dick’s greatest achievements. It opens with a solemn introduction by a psychiatrist explaining that this is the story of a young woman who not only has managed to cure herself of schizophrenia, but has written well of the experience. The next chapter reads like a breezy magazine article about mental illness. Then we’re plunged into the story: a woman, apparently in her late 20s, wakes up to find three people standing by her bed: an old man, a boy, and a weird-looking, long-haired man. She is a “Thing,” an automaton, like most everyone else on earth. The old man has been her “Operator” – one of the handful of people who “own” and control everyone else on earth. He is handing her over to the control of the long-haired man, who has decided a) to make her aware of her status as a Thing and b) to have her walk away from her job and get on a Greyhound bus – the only way to go for a smart Operator, because the drivers are all Operators themselves and are contractually obligated not to interfere with the chattelship of Things. Then the book gets really unpredictable….

Valancourt Books added to Publishers

Just added to the Publishers page:

The Valancourt Books, www.valancourtbooks.com.

Founded by James D. Jenkins, Valancourt Books is named after the hero of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe’s classic Gothic novel, and specializes in quality reprints of rare 18th and 19th century literature. It has launched three series:

  • Gothic Classics, which “exhumes great novels from the 18th and 19th centuries and endeavours to make them accessible to a new generation of readers.” “We strive,” writes the publisher, “to select the most important and entertaining books, and to reprint them in the most attractive and affordable editions possible. Each volume is newly designed, with stylish cover art, and each includes a new introduction and notes to put the work in context for 21st century readers.”

  • Irish Classics, which kicked off with a reissue of Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass (1890), “Stoker’s first novel and his only book set in his native Ireland.” According to the publisher, “Future volumes in the series will feature works by Charles Maturin, Regina Maria Roche, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and others.”

  • Valancourt Classics, “which reprints the truly great books of the 18th and 19th centuries which for whatever reason have fallen out of print or been otherwise forgotten by the literary establishment. Each book in this series features an in depth introduction and extensive notes and appendices for modern readers, students, and scholars.” The first two books in this series are Ann Radcliffe’s Gaston de Blondeville (1826) and The Magic Ring (1825) by Baron de la Motte Fouqué.