fbpx

Reader Recommendations

Reader Recommendations

Neglected books recommended by visitors to this site.

Have a neglected favorite you’d like to have mentioned here? Please email me at [email protected].

A Collection of Reader Recommendations

A number of readers have written in the last months to offer their own recommendations of neglected books and authors, so I will take this chance to gather them up into a single post.

• These Lovers Fled Away, by Howard Spring

Allen Johnson, Jr. wrote, “I commend to you the pastoral novels of Howard Spring (These Lovers Fled Away is probably the best). Set in Cornwall England in the early 1900s and usually written in the first person, Spring’s novels convey with great clarity the beauties of Southwest England and the hearts and minds of those who watched those beauties being eroded by machines and war.”

He added, “My own novel, My Brother’s Story, was published by a small press that immediately went out of business. It came out as a young adult novel but is enjoyed by all ages. It is available as a free download author-read audio book at www.allenjohnsonjr.com.”

Howard Spring was one of the most successful middlebrow English novelists of the mid-20th century. A number of his stories have been adapted as successful television mini-series, most notably My Son, My Son and Fame is the Spur. Earlier this year, novelist Tim Stretton compared with A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book in his Acquired Taste blog and gave Spring a slight edge. A few minutes spent Googling Spring’s name soon turns up more than a few readers still enthusiastic for Spring’s gift for characterisation and story-telling.

• In Praise of Shadows, by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki

Painter Benjamin Varney, who also writes the Bonelab blog, recommended this slim volume by Tanizaki, best known for the novel The Makioka Sisters: “my understanding of the book is that it is the product of a life times’ work. that tanizaki is giving the world his poetic vision of japan distilled: finding vision of its own within a (vernacular) history of japanese spirit and values. to call it asthetics does not do it justice & it is resistent to most categories, it works best as an explication of a complex philosophy, as flawed and as personal as any. it’s a short book read it.”

In the book, Tanizaki meditates upon the blend of aesthetics and spirituality known as Wabi Sabi, an untranslatable term that treats the things of this world as “imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.” Zen gardens are perhaps the best known examples of this sensibility, but it pervades much of traditional Japanese culture, from the design of temples to the rituals of the tea ceremony. Tanizaki believed it was a culture that found “beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing another creates.”

Cover of 'The Vienna Girl'

• Vienna Girl and The Water Castle, by Ingeborg Lauterstein

Kathy wrote to recommend these two novels by Lauterstein: “It occurs to me that you might be interested in taking a look at ‘The Water Castle’ and ‘Vienna Girl’ two novels which follow a young Austrian girl through WWII–they have a strange magical realist cast and I found them absorbing and quite outside the normal type of stories of this period.”

Lauterstein, who was born in Austria and studied art with Oscar Kokoschka, emigrated to the U.S. and attended the legendary Black Mountain College. There, influenced by the poet Charles Olson and the novelist Caroline Gordon, she switched from art to fiction and began work on the two books. Marriage and family interrupted her work, and the books were not published until nearly thirty years later–The Water Castle in 1981 and Vienna Girl in 1986. Although both were praised in reviews–the New York Times’ reviewer called Vienna Girl “an engrossing story of people in radical transition” and wrote that Lauterstein “transcends pedestrian historical fiction and eschews simplification about the holocaust”–they quickly slipped out of print.

Lauterstein recently republished the books under her own imprint, along with a third novel, Shoreland, so all three are now easily available online.

• Winter in the Hills, by John Wain

From Texas, Mary Jo Powell wrote to describe her rediscovery of the works of John Wain: “I can’t remember what awoke my interest in John Wain but I have now read five of his books and am looking for others on the usual sites. As best I can tell his work is only available on used book sites these days. He is not an experimental writer but is concerned with how an individual opposes the forces of standardization in regular life. Hurry On Down–usually called the first Angry Young Man book– and his biography of Samuel Johnson are the books you are most likely to be able to find (in used book stores and sites) these days. I haven’t read the biography and I found HOD all right but much prefer the books in his Oxford trilogy [Where the Rivers Meet (1988); Comedies (1990); and Hungry Generations (1994)] and one set in Wales: Winter in the Hills. His protagonist is always randy and also looking for a way to eke out a living without giving up his soul. If you Google his name, you will be asked if you aren’t looking for John Wayne, although you will be offered some sites to the author.”

Wain, who died in 1995, has certainly fared less well than his contemporaries, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. Professor Krishna Kumar has turned his thesis on Wain’s novels into a website, and earlier this decade, an independent publishing house named after one of Wain’s novels, Smaller Sky, brought several of his books briefly back into print. Winter in the Hills, considered his best novel, is about an English linguist who travels to a remote Welsh village to study the language and gradually finds his way into a very tightly-knit community.


• Finnley Wren, by Philip Wylie

Joe Kenney asked, “Have you read anything by Philip Wylie? I’m halfway through his 1934 Finnley Wren, and I like it a lot. It’s very modern, sort of a Tristram Shandy/Swift/Ulysses sort of thing. Also, it has a definite Vonnegut feel.”

Wren is a rambling dialogue between a novelist named Philip Wylie and a character named Finnley Wren over the course of two nights in a Manhattan bar. Wylie called it “a novel in a few manner,” but had it been published forty years later, it would have been called “experimental fiction.” At the time of its publication, it did receive a fair amount of notice and acclaim, particularly for its innovations. Mary McCarthy wrote that “you will find coined words, technical words, archaic words heaped upon each other with fine prodigality.” An older reviewer, William Rose Benet, was less enthusiastic: “”Mr. Wylie can write. There is no doubt about that. After he gets through his sophomore year in letters, he may quite possibly do a novel ‘as is’ a novel.” It’s said that Wylie was so unhappy with the book’s reception that he abandoned experimentation in favor of more conventional novels and short stories.

As always, your suggestions are welcome and will be passed along for the consideration of other lovers of the worthy but little-known.

David Nix recommends B. H. Friedman’s “Yarborough”


David Nix wrote with an enthusiastic recommendation for B. H. Friedman’s 1964, Yarborough:

I first read, re-read, and re-re-read this book when I was in college, over 40 years ago. The story of a World War II era bridge prodigy spoke to me in a way that no other book ever has. The descriptions of drug experiences (marijuana and LSD) are vivid and accurate. A few years later I tracked down a copy through a book locator (remember them?), and have re-etc.-read it every couple of years ever since. For me, at least, it has never ceased to be fresh.

Friedman is a wonderful writer who never found popular acclaim. I guess his best-know novel was The Polygamist, which was a NYT Notable Book in its publication year. He was also an art writer in the abstract expressionist era — wrote the first full-length biography of Jackson Pollock [Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible–reissued by Da Capo Press in 1995.–Ed.], and a terrific novel about the museum world [Museum, one of the first three works published in 1974 by the Fiction Collective.–Ed.]

He is still around — must be in his mid-80s by now. I noticed a letter from him in the NYT Book Review a couple of months back, and Amazon tells me he published a new book last year.

Yarborough takes its title from the game of bridge. A “yarborough” is a “nothing hand” without face cards or value. Yarborough follows the life of Arthur Skelton, a bridge prodigy, who searches in vain for a system to give his life meaning. He experiments with many of the temptations available in the first half of the 20th century, finding none and dying suddenly in a car crash while still in his twenties. It was well-received by some of the more prominent papers, such as the New York Times, but most critics and readers outside Manhattan found it too esoteric. It continues to win and keep a small number of fervent supporters such as Mr. Nix.

Much the same fate was suffered by Friedman’s first novel, Circles, published in 1963. It also received positive reviews on the East Coast, but led one Midwestern critic to grouse, “If you deleted the martinis, the sex, the pot (marijuana), the sex, the cocktail parties, and the sex, there would be little left in this novel.” (Which reminds me of a famous line from “Blazing Saddles”).

Friedman continues to write and publish in the new century. His 2006 book, Tripping: A Memoir of Timothy Leary & Co., was probably his most commercially successful since The Polygamist. His most recent novel, My Case Rests, was published just last year.

Brad Walker recommends two political comedies

Reader Brad Walker wrote to recommend two neglected novels, both political comedies: “Both are hilarious and utterly cynical,” he writes. “If you can enjoy Perdita Get Lost, you should have no trouble with these.”

• The Smoke-filled Boudoir, by Lawrence Williams, 1965.

“I really enjoyed this in junior high. Reread a few years ago and was struck by how slight it seemed. Well, there may not be much meat on them bones, but what’s there is cherce! (Too bad we’ve lost Ted Knight – he would’ve been perfect as the candidate.)” The Owosso-Argus Press called it “a hilarious novel of high jinks and low politics.” Lawrence Williams is probably best remembered for his 1972 novel, I, James McNeill Whistler, in which he carried on from a fragment left by Whistler and filled in the rest with a fictional autobiography.

• Let George Do It! by John Foster, 1957.

“More of a period piece than Boudoir, it hinges on campaign practices long superseded, but the mindset is eternal. (I saw the hero played by Sly Stallone with George done by his ‘Lords of Flatbush’ co-star Henry Winkler. Shows my age.)” Let George Do It! turns out to have impeccable street cred: “John Foster” was one of several noms de plume used by Foster Furcolo, two-term governor of Massachussetts. Furcolo later adapted the book for the stage as the comedy, “Ballots Up!,” using another alias, “Larry Sands.” “That’s what I was called when I did a little amateur boxing some years ago,” he told Time magazine when the play debuted at a Michigan summer stock theatre.

Thanks for the recommendations, Brad! They’ve got my vote (gnyuck, gnyuck, gnyuck)!

Meg Rosoff recommends Sylvester Stein’s “Second-Class Taxi”

Meg Rosoff, award-winning author of such novels as How I Live Now, What I Was, and The Bride’s Farewell, wrote to recommend Sylvester Stein’s novel of life in South Africa under apartheid, Second Class Taxi:
Cover

Published by Faber in 1958, it was banned in South Africa for twenty years. The audacity of a white man writing in the character of a dispossessed black South African only works because the voice is so hilarious and tragic and true; as editor of Drum Magazine, an important figure in the early days of the anti-apartheid movement and a supporting member of the ANC, Stein had a unique perspective on the absurd world he describes. It’s a wonderful book.

Banned in South Africa, out of print for most of the last fifty years, Second Class Taxi is now available “in a brilliant new staple-bound A4 format” from the one-title Nononsense Press. It tells the story of Staffnurse Phofolo, a “non-person” who lives in a drain-pipe, hangs out in illegal bars (shebeens), participates in protests, and generally lives outside officially-sanctioned society. While savaging the practices of the South African government, Stein maintained a sly, gently-mocking tone akin to Hasek’s in The Good Soldier Svejk. Stein left South Africa in the late 1950s when state censorship made editing the integrated magazine a near-suicidal endeavor, taking with him the manuscript of this novel.

Stein’s most recent book, Who Killed Mr. Drum? (2003), is still in print from Corvo Books.

Eight Recommendations from Sonesh Chainani

I’m always interested in getting suggestions from other readers, and when I do, it’s usually just a title or two. Sonesh Chainani, a closet English major in Miami, took a break from his busy schedule to provide a whopping eight-pack of his favorite neglected books. He gets an A+ in my book, because he came up with three titles that are wholly new to me. And I give myself a D- for letting my own busy schedule keep this post on hold for over a week.

Sonesh writes,

I now realize that the roots with obsession with neglected books goes back at least to college, where I wrote my thesis on Julio Cortazar’s 62: A Model Kit, which is mentioned on your site. (New Directions re-released it 2 months after I finished my thesis, but I had to buy an expensive copy from a used bookshop in England in order to read it and I was so fascinated and confused by it that I decided I should write my undergraduate thesis on it.) I remember my advisor telling me that Cortazar was well-respected but nobody read 62: A Model Kit, and I remember the feeling of excitement of opening the book and being hooked by the first paragraph and thinking I may have been one of only a very small group of English-speaking readers who had read this book, which was written, published, and then quietly disappeared.

So, without further ado, let’s leap into Sonesh’s list:

• All Heads Turn When the Hunt GoesBy, by John Farris, which was published by Playboy Press in 1977.

I would describe it as a “Southern gothic voodoo sexual horror novel” and though pacing of the book lags in places, the writing creeps up on you. The book opens with a brilliant over-the-top setpiece at a posh formal military wedding at a Southern estate where the groom goes absolutely unhinged with his sabre and darkest Africa takes its revenge on the antebellum south. There is a crumbling church, virginal decapitations, incestuous hysteria — I don’t know what else to say about the opening to the book except that it stuck with me for a while. The rest of the book doesn’t quite live up to the opening but it’s pretty damn good.

Farris is a prolific but very underrated and neglected writer — he wrote the novel The Fury which I haven’t read, but which is the basis of a minor but still enjoyable Brian DePalma movie starring Kirk Douglas, Amy Irving and John Cassavetes. The movie (and I imagine the book) is a funny mixture of the clinical and the lunatic.

• In Praise of Older Women, by Stephen Vizinczey

A beautiful book that only a European could have written. Despite the salacious title and deliberately misleading jacket copy, the book is actually both a beautifully constructed engaging first-person novel and an argument for the induction by young men of older (not old but older) women and against the championing of mutual virginity and teenage cluelessness and prudery when it comes to sex. A google search reveals that this book was also made into a movie but I know nothing abou it.

• Truth and Lies in Literature: Essays and Reviews, by Stephen Vizinczey

Truth and Lies, which I couldn’t stop reading, although a bit dated as literary criticism, is written in crystalline clear prose. Vizinczey’s prose is beautiful and limpid in both the novel above and this book and his reading of Melville’s “Billy Budd” as disturbing, fraudulent, politically indefensible literature is interesting. (I never liked “Billy Budd” myself but for different reasons.) He champions slightly more neglected or rather unfashionable French classic authors (e.g. Stendhal, Balzac) over the Russians it seems, which is not a very contemporary view, although he is clearly fond of some of the Russians as well. He also has definite and controversial views on various authors (he thoroughly whips on Malraux in one essay and in another praises Mailer for The Armies of the Night).

In both books that I read Vizinczey has a gift for not being mean, condescending or glib, even when his subject matter is difficult — love (for women, for literature) infuses everything he writes and it’s refreshing and enlightening to read him.

• Nine Hundred Grandmothers, by R.A. Lafferty

This is a strange and compelling short story collection. Comparisons have been made between Lafferty and Heinlein and Phillip Dick, but these “sci-fi” (I use that term loosely) short stories are really in a world of their own. They are very damn funny and strange — a bizarre combinations of jokes without punchlines and very disciplined writing. The quality of the stories varies but they are all worth reading. Neil Gaiman is a big fan of Lafferty and has said that he has been influenced by Lafferty, although I don’t think Gaiman’s writing is nearly as entertaining.

• Dance of the Dwarfs, by Geoffrey Household

I got this book from a friend who knew how much I liked another neglected book with a title involving those who are vertically challenged — Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget — and although I had low expectations, the book turned out to be fantastic. The main character is a courageous, stoic agricultural expert working out in remote Columbia near the jungles. Although the beginning of the book only hints at mystery, it quickly becomes a strange and captivating suspense novel that was actually quite terrifying (despite the hilarity of the title ). The book’s a slow burn and the view of remote South America through the perspective of a cerebral white man becoming slowly ensnared in its mysteries is a nice antidote to much of the mediocre Latin American fiction that passes for “magical realism” these days. Also, just for the record, I am 6 foot 2.

• Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, by Nikolai Leskov

This was a great little novella — truly deranged — despite the title, the main character is more Medea than Lady Macbeth. I’d like to read more of this Russian writer who I suspect is little read in the West.

• A Melon for Ecstasy, by John Fortune and John Wells

Hilarious though inconsistent humorous epistolary novel about a quiet, repressed man who not only has a very serious physical hankering for trees but acts on it. This book was one-of-a-kind and I found myself laughing a lot out loud. The authors’ vocabularies are prodigious and well-used. I don’t really know what else to write about this book, except to note that the book opens with the following fictional Turkish proverb.

A woman for duty,
A boy for pleasure,
But a melon for ecstasy.
– Old Turkish proverb

• A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family, by Peter Dimock

A lean, stylized novel in the form of a single letter from Jarlath Lanham to his nephew and the son of his father’s ex-lover. The narrator’s focus on the rules of ancient rhetoric actually ties in quite well to the subject of the book: the Vietnam war and what allowed it to happen and to continue happening. This is a strange and intense novel, well worth reading although it is not an easy read.

• The Winners

I believe this was one of the first books put out by NYRB Classics. It’s a hilarious, disturbing novel that is part Kafka and part Groucho Marx, about a group of state lottery winners in Argentina who win passage on a mystery cruise ship for an unknown destination. What starts out with aimless gossip, intrigues and annoyance by the bored, confused passengers develops into something more sinister. Cortazar’s female characters are rich and well-developed, and although this is not my favorite book by him (that would have to go to his stories and 62), it is an exciting and brilliant first novel. This is a useful link to Cortazar’s bibliography and publishing history: www.subir.com/cortazar/.

Bruce Allen recommends the work of Francois Mauriac

Cover of 'A Mauriac Reader'Bruce Allen wrote recently to recommend the novels of François Mauriac:

I wonder how many readers remember François Mauriac (1885-1970), whose best novels (e.g., Thérèse Desqueyroux, Vipers’ Tangle, Woman of the Pharisees, A Kiss for the Leper, and at least a half dozen others) began appearing in English translations during the 1960os.

An un-apologetic Catholic apologist, Mauriac has always been marginalized as a writer of narrow sympathes and range. But at his best he’s an eloquent composer of stark tragedies of ancestral and faith-driven conflicts framed as allegories of sin, redemption, and retribution – often complicated by the unruly realities of sex and greed. No novelist ever understood, and engaged the seven deadly sins (and all the other un-numbered ones) as well as Mauriac. He ought to be revived every generation or so, and readers who’ve never sampled the brimstone pungency of his best work have missed out on one of the great 20th century bodies of work.

François MauriacFortunately for would-be readers, a good deal of Mauriac’s work is in print and easily available for purchase online. All of the above books are in print, as are several less-known works: The Frontenacs, The Mask of Innocence, and Young Man in Chains. Actually, A Kiss for the Leper is in print by virtue of its inclusion in A Mauriac Reader, which collects it and four other novels under one cover, with an introduction by Wallace Fowlie. Farrar, Straus and Giroux have heroically kept it in print for over forty years now.

Mauriac is often compared with Graham Greene: both Catholics, both dedicated to writing about modern and his struggle with sin. “I have tried to make the Catholic universe of evil palpable, tangible, odorous. If theologians provided an abstract idea of the sinner, I gave him flesh and blood,” Mauriac once remarked. Asked about the comparison, however, Greene drew a fine distinction between their works: “Mauriac’s sinners sin against God wheareas mine, however hard they try, can never quite manage to.” Mauriac also won, in 1952, the Nobel Prize for Literature, an honor that eluded Greene.

The Late Great Creature, by Brock Brower

R. W. Rasband writes with a strong recommendation for Brock Brower’s 1971 novel, The Late Great Creature: “In a time when both Stephen King and satirical comedy are so popular, I don’t understand why this novel isn’t more well known.”

In his review on Amazon.com, Rasband wrote of the novel:

The movie documentary “Stone Reader” is about great books that have been lost to public memory or somehow never gotten the attention they deserve. My nomination for a “great lost book” is Brock Brower’s The Late Great Creature, an amazing 1971 novel that needs to be resurrected for a certain-to-be large, appreciative audience. The title character is Simon Moro, the greatest horror Cover of first U.S. paperback edition of 'The Late Great Creature'movie star of the 1920’s and ’30’s (he’s like Lon Chaney Sr. to the nth degree.) We learn of his fall from fame, and his attempted comeback in the phantasmagorical year of 1968. In his prime he made “Ghoulgantua”, the most terrifying film ever made (about a combination Frankenstein’s monster/vampire.) He created the famous monster “Gila Man” (a sort of werewolf lizard) during the war. Later he was blacklisted for political reasons, went to Germany to make a legendary, unreleased horror movie about the Nazi concentration camps that was supressed by both West and East Germany, and gradually sank into obscurity. Then low-budget Hollywood came calling with an offer to make a cheap Roger Corman-style Edgar Allen Poe rip-off titled “Raven!”

The novel has an amazing storytelling virtuosity that suggests, as one critic put it, a younger Nabokov raised on creepy old horror movies. There are three narrators: Warner Williams, a terminally-slick magazine writer who provides the basic back story of Moro’s amazing career. There’s also Terry Cowan, the amoral, cynical director of “Raven!” And there’s Moro himself, who drops some pretty big surprises in his narration that make you question all that has gone before. Like Bela Lugosi, Moro struggled with demons (including drugs and poverty) but Moro developed some real heroism and hard-won insight. As he says, “Where there is no spine, there is no tingle.” He looks out at the corrupt America of the 1960’s and decides to shock it back to its moral senses by scaring the country to death during the publicity tour for his new movie. He does this in grotesque, hilarious ways that you have to read for yourself.

The book is wonderfully satrical about celebrity culture and is also a loving tribute to the horror genre. It’s stunningly verbally agile. There are lines that will stick in your head forever. It’s also got a thrillingly intricate plot, that as you unravel it through the three narrators, will amaze and delight you. In a way it reminds me of Michael Chabon’s “Wonder Boys” in its compassionate yet blisteringly funny and painstakingly accurate portrait of artistic losers run amok. I read this in high school and it remains one of my very favorite books. You should get hold of a copy immediately, any way you can.

Time magazine’s reviewer was equally enthusiastic when the book first came out:

If this were all Brower had done, The Late Great Creature would be only one of the funniest tours de force of the past few years. But he has done more. With few illusions of ever returning to the great days of Saturday matinee catharsis, he illustrates the salutary nature of terror—its ability to exorcise fears of evil and death. He also toys gracefully with the paradox that fiction is capable of more truth than journalism. The truth about Brock Brower, an experienced freelance journalist, is that he must now be reckoned with as an extraordinarily capable novelist.

As recounted in an article in Publisher’s Weekly back in 2005, however, such positive reviews and even a National Book Award nomination couldn’t get Brower the time of day or a publisher. It was nearly 30 years before he attempted fiction again. The result, Blue Dog, Green River, a somewhat mystical tale of Blue Dog, a one-time chicken thief, was published by the admirable David R. Godine Press and is still in print.

Some Recommendations from Maura Kelly

Maura Kelly, a prolific writer for journals ranging from The New York Times to The Daily Beast and Marie Claire, wrote the other day to give this site a thumbs up. Prodded for a few of her own neglected favorites, she offered the works of James Salter, including Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime, and his memoir, Burning the Days. After decades of genuine neglect–books long out of print, periodic mentions by admiring fellow writers–Salter’s star has finally risen and one might fairly call him America’s best-known neglected writer. All of his books are back in print; he’s been a featured writer in the New York Times, and clocks in with over 300,000 hits on Google. None of which helped pay the rent forty years ago, of course.

She also mentioned John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction, which sparked a fair amount of controversy when it first appeared back in 1978. In th John Gardner in 1978book, Gardner attempts to hold the high ground against contemporaries such as Bellow, Mailer, and the fearsome nouveau romans of Robbe-Grillet and others. He argues that,true art “clarifies life, establishes models of human action, casts nets toward the future, carefully judges our right and wrong directions, celebrates and mourns.” Whether his criticism was valid or not, it certainly helped make the book perhaps the best-selling work of literary criticism of its time. In a thoughtful piece for the Atlantic, published back in 2005, the novelist Mary Gordon argues–convincingly, I think–that Gardner was pretty much dead wrong. King Lear, for example, is certainly a work of true art, but one could hardly say that he’s a model of human action. A striking example of human action, yes. A model to be emulated, though? I side with Gordon’s much more straight-forward approach: that it’s the raising of “intriguing and unanswerable questions” that marks great fiction.

Gardner’s own novels, particularly Nickel Mountain and October Light, had a certain cult classic status among college students back in the 1970s, although I suspect the sales had as much to do with the fine cover art by Paul Bacon, which was a distinctive blend of the Gothic and the psychedelic that promised something much different from the grim tales of life in upstate New York one found inside the covers. I suspect that, in the long run, Gardner’s Grendel, a fierce retelling of the Beowulf tale from the perspective of the monster–a somewhat experimental piece more like shudder Barth’s Chimera than Middlemarch, that will maintain his artistic reputation.

Brooks Peters recommends The Gilded Hearse, by Charles Gorham

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Gilded Hearse'Brooks Peters, who writes one of the most consistently interesting blogs around (www.brookspeters.com), passed along a plug for Charles Gorham’s novel, The Gilded Hearse, which sounds like a terrific guilty pleasure:

It’s not exactly unknown but seems to have been overlooked lately. Perhaps “forgotten” is a better word since I can’t imagine too many people putting it on their top ten lists. It’s a rather scathing look at the publishing business just before the early beginnings of World War Two. Set in Manhattan in 1938 (but published in 1948), it details a traumatic day in the life of a book exec named Richard Eliot who battles his own demons while depicting his circle of friends and business associates in a very unflattering light. The day is set against the backdrop of the Munich compromise which is not too subtly broadcast throughout the text whenever someone happens to turn on a radio.

The firm, Hutchinson’s, could be several well-known publishing houses of the era, complete with the white-shoe editors, the burly, brusque, hard-drinking salesmen and the neurotic, ambitious “suits” who handle the brash marketing side. None too subtle (the writing style is sort of a cross between Grace Metalious and A. J. Cronin) , it is nonetheless very revealing of past attitudes and mores, as well as a fascinating relic of a time when the publishing world was just beginning to turn corporate.

Gorham nails the ambiance of New York in the late 30s, the jazz bars, the sleazy saloons, the drunken book-signings in overly perfumed department stores, the overt anti-Semitism within polite society (in contrast to the genocide on the horizon in Germany), the sad, listless Village bohemians, and throws in a few hilariously drawn “fags” and “fairies” and one appalling lesbian stereotype to give the story some typical pulp grit and edge. One effeminate book editor named Graham Fatt, who swishes amid his Oriental art, keeps “a large jar of KY” in his purple-hued bathroom.

There’s also plenty of sex between heterosexuals, abortions, lecherous cads, adulterous wives fornicating on trains. One character admits she went “to bed” with a colleague, then corrects herself by saying “to berth.”

Cover of 'Make Me an Offer'The Gilded Hearse was also published several times as Make Me an Offer. Time magazine’s reviewer took a great big haughty sniff when the book first came out:

As an indictment of the book business, The Gilded Hearse is neither good burlesque nor significant exposure. Few readers will be surprised to learn that book salesmen often haven’t read the books they sell, that salesgirls in bookstores are often dumb, that book publishers are increasingly less concerned with literature than with bestsellers. Those with the kind of taste that Gorham deplores will be quickest to see that The Gilded Hearse is just superficial enough, spiced with just enough bedroom business, to make it a likely Hutchinson book.

Brooks sums up just why what Time dismissed as trash seems like a bit of tarnished gold today:

… I thought I’d share the title with you in case any of your readers are eager to take a trip back in time to an era when the book business was a relatively insular world, dominated by a lost generation of self-hating alcoholics and men on the make. All in all, a fun, if purely nostalgic, read.

“He Lived for Money, Women, and Power” trumpets the cover of one paperback reissue of The Gilded Hearse. Toss in drinking, classism, and bigotry to boot–ah, the good ol’ days.

Brooks also recommends another Gorham novel and promises a future post on his own site about Gorham’s life and works.

Gorham also wrote the early gay-themed novel McCaffery, about a lusty male hustler, which is equally graphic. I’m a big fan of his lurid style. It’s pulp fiction with a trenchant eye for detail and nuance, and an insider’s perspective. Gorham’s life story itself reads like one of his novels. I’ve been in touch with Gorham’s daughter Deborah, a noted scholar, about doing a piece on him for my blog, but have been wrapped up in too many things recently to give it my full attention. I hope to get it done soon.

The Changing Face of New England, by Betty Flanders Thomson

Jack Ayer, professor of law emeritus at the University of California Davis and author of the Underbelly blog, writes to recommend Betty Flanders Thomson’s 1958 book, The Changing Face of New England. In a recent post on cellarholes–the remnants of long-abandoned New England farmhouses–he includes a long quote from Thomson’s book. An even longer excerpt can be found in the online archives of American Heritage magazine.

Nearly twenty years after her New England book, Thomson published a study of the landscapes of the Midwest, Shaping of America’s Heartland. Both titles are now long out of print, unfortunately, as they are highly regarded for their quality of writing and science. Indeed, Connecticut College still remembers Thomson with an annual award for its best student in botany.

Robert Chandler recommends the works of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Robert Chandler, translator of Andrey Platonov’s Happy Moscow, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate write to recommend “[A]nother great, and still more recently discovered, writer from the 1920s and 30s: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky”:

I included one of his stories, ‘Quadraturin’, in my Penguin Classics anthology Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics). There is also a small anthology of his work published by GLAS: Seven Stories.

And NYRB Classics are bringing out another volume [Memories of the Future] in the next few months.

His work is translated by Joanne Turnbull, and her translations are very, very good indeed. [Turnbull won the 2007 Rossica Translation Prize for Seven Stories.–Ed.]

There is a bit about him at the Complete Review.

You can read his short story, “Quadraturin” online at the Glas website (http://www.glas.msk.su/krzhizhanovsky.html) and another, “Yellow Coal”, at OpenDemocracy.net. You can also read about Krzhizhanovsky on Wikipedia and Ellis Sharp’s blog.

D. G. Myers recommends Perry Miller’s “The Raven and the Whale”

Regular visitor Texas A&M professor D. G. Myers recently posted a thoughtful and appreciative review of Perry Miller’s 1956 book, The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene. He compares it to Louis Menand’s Puliter Prize-winning 2002 book on James, Holmes, and Pierce, The Metaphysical Club, writing that, “The result is a human comedy, a collection of lively anecdote and a war-memorial to men who cared passionately about raising up from scratch what Miller calls “an independent, a completely native and unique, literature” in America.”

Myers also rightly notes that not all neglected books are ones that fade from the spotlight, like Yates’ Revolutionary Road. Some are, in his words, “books that are even more likely to be neglected, because they were not widely bought and read to begin with.” Such books have certainly become more and more my focus as this site matures.

Two Recommendations from Kevin Michael Derby

Kevin Michael Derby, about the only person, it seems to have noticed my post about the works of historian Kenneth S. Davis, wrote with two recommendations for books worthy of rediscovery:

• The Age of the French Revolution, by Claude Manceron, consisting of the following five volumes:

        • Volume 1: Twilight of the Old Order, 1774-1778

        • Volume 2: The Wind from America, 1778-1781

        • Volume 3: Their Gracious Pleasure, 1782-1785

        • Volume 4: Toward the Brink, 1785-1787

        • Volume 5: Blood of the Bastille, 1787-1789

“Manceron was a unique historian who decided to chart the French Revolution through a hundred lives of key individuals. This leads to a vivid and often over the top narrative which offers little in the way of analysis and often proved incoherent in the way of descriptions. Manceron is all over the place and his narrative reminds me of Eliot’s “heap of shattered images.” Now he takes us to Rome for a papal election. Next stop is outside Philadelphia where General Washington retreats from Howe’s redcoats. Now to Versailles where Marie Antoinette is dancing. Meanwhile in the country, Robespierre studies law. Manceron makes no secret of his biases. He is a fan of the revolution and even dedicates volumes to modern day leftists like Allende and Mitterrand. Manceron also felt the need to jump out from behind the curtains and interrupt his narration with odd asides and comments, often shaking his fist at the leaders of the Church and other reactionaries. Still other times, he smugly asserts that the lead players of the Revolution were more heroic and had more dynamic adventurers than nomads and explorers. Manceron promised there would be at least ten volumes. He died after writing five, just as the Bastille was captured. While I can not claim to know more about why the Revolution occurred, I know the lead characters and their various motivations better having read the five volumes. These books really deserved better than to be forgotten despite the flaws. They make the French Revolution accessible.”

• Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne: Misadventures of an English General in the Revolution, by Francis J. Huddleston.

“Perhaps the strangest biography that I have ever read. While attempting to offer a life of the losing commander of the battle of Saratoga and a celebrated playwright of his times, Huddleston makes a number of asides including all of the following: there are too many scholars attempting to prove Shakespeare did not write his plays; whether or not actresses should take to the stage in skimpy night attire; what happened to French soldiers after the Great War; why they should not sell snacks on trains despite the declining quality of full meals served on trains; how horses from Spain are overrated by gamblers and equestrians alike; why the Prince of Wales both then and now-both George IV and the future Duke of Windsor-needed to find better mentors; why the British needed to adapt khaki uniforms sometime in the 1870s or 1880s; thoughts on what an Irish military museum should include; speculations on the exact nature of the Gulf stream; advice that if you are going to recite a limerick at the table with old friends and the first line is sexually suggestive, make sure the second line is too otherwise it will be a severe letdown for your companions; yelling “Are we downhearted?” is not a good way to convince your boss that your team does not have low morale; and many more comments, all of which have nothing to do with the life of General Burgoyne.”

Thanks for the recommendations, Kevin–I’ve already sent off for the first of Manceron’s volumes and am looking forward to reading it.

As always, readers are encouraged to provide their own recommendations–especially when they’re as interesting as these.

Jane White

Cover of UK paperback edition of 'Quarry'Brooks Peters wrote with a recommendation of Quarry, a 1967 novel by Jane White. As Brooks describes Quarry,

It’s a British novel from 1960s about three adolescent boys who kidnap a boy and keep him in a cave in a quarry. It’s been compared to Lord of the Flies. It got great reviews when it came out. I’ve just finished it and thought it was extremely well done. But a real enigma. I can’t figure out what it is really about except perhaps the breakdown of society.

Richard Freeman, in the Saturday Review, wrote that Quarry,

… is an allegory with a variety of more or less cosmic overtones. The action takes place not in a normal, pastoral English summer, but in an arid wasteland during a fierce heat wave. Images of darkness and light are strewn about and the cave is philosophically associated with the one in Plato’s Republic. The victim, especially, is given much symbolic weight to bear as a universal scapegoat…. [U]ltimately, the book is about the complex symbiosis between prosecutor and prey. If Quarry is less richly imagined than Lord of the Flies and lacks its verbal distinction, it is nevertheless an extraordinarily assured first novel, and is even superior to Golding’s in its control of allegory, the bare bones of which are less frequently allowed to obtrude.

Other reviewers compared White favorably with Iris Murdoch. Her second novel, Proxy, received mostly positive reviews in the U.K. but was uniformly panned in the U.S.. From what I can determine, White went on to publish six more novels:

She also published a memoir, Norfolk Child, in 1973. Despite the fact that reviewers of her later works offered such praise as “Miss Young writes well of marriages and the forces that mold them”; “a haunting, macabre quality reminiscent of Iris Murdoch”; and “an abundant mixture of lyrical and symbolic”, White seems to have disappeared from the publishing scene entirely after 1976. I haven’t had a chance to sample White’s work, but on the surface at least, she appears to be a worthy candidate for reconsideration.

————————-
Added 22 November 2009

Jane White, autho of QuarryBrooks Peters added the following biographical information, along with a photo of Jane White, from the dust jacket of Quarry:

“Jane White was born in Cambridge in 1934, and her family moved soon afterwards to a remote farmhouse in Norfolk. Her father is an historian and University Lecturer at Downing College, Cambridge. Jane White was educated at home by a governess until the age of nine, then at a Convent boarding school. At eighteen she won a State Scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge. She read for an honours Degree in English and graduated with an upper second Degree. She worked as an assistant in a large public library for nine months prior to Cambridge and took various vacation jobs as a waitress — also as general help in a Maternity Hospital.

She was employed for five years with the B.B.C. World Service as a News Clerk in the News Information Department. In 1961 she married a lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, London University. She has one small son, and lives at Godalming Surrey.

Jane White has written plays, poetry, verse dramas for as long as she can remember. Her first novel was completed at the age of nine. She is much interested in acting, and took part in various amateur productions at Cambridge, once venturing as far as the Edinburgh ‘Fringe’.

Her interests include theatre-going, films, both good and bad, music of all kinds, and reading.”

Thanks, Brooks!

The Horrors of Love, by Jean Dutuord

Rabbi David Wolpe writes to recommend a favorite title that’s now long out of print and largely forgotten: Jean Dutourd’s 1963 novel, Les Horreurs de l’amour, released in English in 1967 as The Horrors of Love. This description of the book and its plot comes from Time magazine’s original review:

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Horrors of Love'The Horrors of Love is an often ridiculous, sometimes funny tale of a middle-aged member of the French Chamber of Deputies who becomes tragically involved with his young mistress. At first glance, the story seems to be as obviously and simply French as a pair of lovers sneaking off to a bedsitter in the Square St.-Lambert. Yet it is not only the Gallic spirit that intrigues Dutourd, but the human spirit as well.

The rambling story unfolds in a dialogue between Dutourd and a friend. As they stroll in Paris, they discuss the unhappy case of Edouard Roberti, the 52-year-old Deputy who has been sent to prison for killing his mistress’ brother. It is apparent that Roberti, a respectable, loving father and husband, was all too ordinary — not so much evil as weak, not so much stupid as pitifully vain. By way of examining how it was that such a commonplace, decent man could become trapped in a senseless and sordid mess, Dutourd’s dialogue ranges through all sorts of philosophical detours. Courage and cowardice, honor and honesty, art, letters, manners, politics and morals become way stations as the two friends chat and argue.

This is not the first mention of The Horrors of Love in these pages. In the Los Angeles Times’ 1999 feature, Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium, John Lukacs called it a “stunning exception” to the overall decline of the novel. Lukacs wrote,

One oddity about it is that it is written in the second-person singular; it is a long dialogue between two super-intelligent Frenchmen (both sides of Dutourd’s own character) walking through Paris, ambling in and out restaurants, reconstructing the pride and fall of a Parisian politician who gradually falls in love with his younger mistress and ends up in jail. It is a delicious and profound work of art, from beginning to end. Andre Maurois likened it to Proust; but in some ways it is better than Proust, sprightlier and more imaginative. The language itself is superb.

And in nosing around the Net, I found a third strong thumbs-up from the fine novelist, Diane Johnson, in an issue of Archipelago from a few years back:

My first choice would be Jean Dutourd’s The Horrors of Love, which is translated into English and was published in the sixties. It is an incredible tour de force — a dialogue running to more than 600 pages, between two men who are walking through Paris, talking about the fate of a politician friend of theirs who was brought down by an erotic entanglement. Urbane, wise, humane, funny, even suspenseful — this is a worthy successor, as someone said, to Proust. Dutourd is the greatest living French novelist, and the only witty one since Proust; and before that? Voltaire? Laclos?

Jean DutourdPraise such as this makes me want to hang my head in shame for not having read it yet, even after skipping past used copies in bookstore stacks perhaps a hundred times over the year (I think it was a Literary Guild selection, so there are plenty of cheap used copies out there in the U.S.).

Dutuord, who’s managed to put out nearly a book a year since 1946, is still living and, I assume, writing. His 1950 satirical fantasy, A Dog’s Head, was reissued by the University of Chicago Press as part of its Phoenix Fiction series in 1998 and is still in print. His other novel of that year, Au bon beurre, scenes de la vie sous lâ Occupation, translated as The Best Butter has been called the best French novel to come out of World War Two.

Looking for reader recommendations: Great city novels

I am in the process of watching the fifth and last season of the remarkable HBO series, The Wire. For me, it’s one of the best things ever done in the medium, and knowing there are no more to follow leaves me looking for a great big messy jaded city novel to sink myself into. Others have already made this comparison, but The Wire was really like a novel in David Simon’s willingness to take time to let the story unfold through detours into minor and major characters, to move up and down the social strata, to delve into intrigues high and low.

But what can one novels compare to The Wire? I can think of a few: Bleak House, at least in its span of social class and its unforgettable opening description of London; some of Zola’s Paris novels, such as Money. Mark Smith’s loose baggy monster Chicago novel, The Death of the Detective. I recently devoured a pretty good novel, William L. White’s What People Said, with a similar range but in the far tamer setting of several Kansas towns of the early 20th century.

But I’m putting out a call to other readers: can you offer some other suggestions? There must be a few more juicy word-packed book that can compete with the likes of The Wire.

Small World, by Carol Deschere

The fact that Carol Deschere Berendt, mother of John Berendt, author of the best-selling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The City of Falling Angels, once published a novel, Small World, under her maiden name, would not in itself qualify the book for mention here.

But, as Syracure Post-Standard writer Laura T. Ryan noted two years ago in her blog, Karen DeCrow, a pioneering feminist and one-time president of the National Organization for Women, was passed along a copy back in the late 1970s. DeCrow was so moved by the book that, “… she typed up a 5-page letter and sent it to everyone she knew in the publishing world, hoping to get it re-released.” Ryan quotes from the letter:

Twelve years before publication of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963), Carol Deschere wrote a novel which could have spurred the feminist revolution, had enough women read it. In Small World, a simply written and simply plotted novel, Deschere tells us the story of a bright, educated, and cultured woman who leads the life of a middle-class housewife. Her husband is kind and generous, her children are intelligent and obedient, her home is stylish and comfortable.

Her world, however, is so small that it revolves totally around food, clothing, furniture, and an occasional outreach of interest to music, art, and literature. The novel takes place during one of the critical periods in American history: World War II had just ended, the alliances of nations in the world were dramatically shifting, capitalism as an economic system was being seriously questioned for the first time in a century, and the seeds of the Cold War period were being developed in the United States. Yet Kay Hiller, the hero of the novel, does not deal with these issues, despite the fact that she is both bright and intellectual….

… For women who dream of art, music, literature, and affairs of state there are few alternatives — lovers, suicide, or worst of all, resignation. With the broadening of the small world for women, hopefully novels about Emma (Bovary), about Kay, will become historical documents.

As Berendt himself describes the book in an interview on Barnes & Noble’s website,

The story concerns a family of four living in upstate New York. It’s charming and beautifully written. Carol Deschere, the author, happens to be my mother, and the family depicted in her novel closely resembles our own. The book sold about 2,000 copies and, although my mother never wrote another book, Small World was a life-changing experience for me, because in addition to making me enormously proud of her, it showed me for the first time how real life could be transformed into words and stories and published in a book for all to read. It also planted the first seed in my mind that I might become a writer one day.

Deschere died last year at the age of 92. Small World remains out of print–in fact, a quick search of AddAll.com located a grand total of three copies, at $48, $200, and almost $1,000, respectively. Two reviewers on Amazon remembered it fondly enough to post 5-star reviews of the book, so Karen DeCrow is not alone in hoping that this book may someday find its way to republication.

An Appreciation of “The Fortunes of Richard Mahony,” by Henry Handel Richardson

Tony Spors writes in with a personal appreciation of the Australian novelist Henry Handel Richardson (nom de plume of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson)

“How I do hate the ordinary sleek biography. I’d have every wart and every pimple emphasized, every murky trait or petty meanness brought out. The great writers are great enough to bear it.” These are the words of Henry Handel Richardson, a woman writer from Australia who lived from 1870 to 1946. Yes, woman writer, for like George Eliot, she wrote under a male pseudonym.

Mrs. Richardson applied this principle of exact unrelenting truth she stated above to her own fiction. Her masterpiece, completed in 1929, is The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, a trilogy of novels, which tells the story of a family living in the gold fields of frontier Australia, immigrated from Ireland, having to cope with the devastating effects of the young doctor father’s severe mental and physical deterioration from syphilis. I’ve read It is based quite closely on Mrs. Richardson’s own childhood.

I read this trilogy of novels about at the same time in my life as I was reading the great Russian novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. The trilogy, being over 900 pages, is related to these Russian novels in size. But more importantly The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, is similar to these Russian novels in its penetrating psychological realism Not often will you find a novel written almost eighty years ago that deals this honestly with no sugar coating or sentimentality with the severe mental illness of a young doctor head of a family. You can feel for the young mother and her children having to face the growing ostracism by her neighbors caused by her husband’s bizarre behavior. Of course, the doctor’s patients drop away after several of his episodes, and the family is reduced to poverty.

But not only is this family’s story courageous. Henry Handel Richardson is a writer of the very top rank. Although here in the United States she is little known beyond the movie of her novel The Getting of Wisdom which was made by Bruce Beresford in 1978, in Australia Henry Handel Richardson is considered a classic novelist. Sentence for sentence, the writing holds your interest as only the best novels do. Here is a writer in English we can read without the filter of translation.

Later in my reading life, I discovered Patrick White, another writer from Australia, whom I consider probably the greatest novelist ever to write. I can’t help but think he must have read Henry Handel Richardson in his youth. If you like one of these writers, you will probably like the other.

Since The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney is divided into three separate novels, I would recommend a reader start with the first volume, Australia Felix, and see if you are not hooked as I was into reading the other two volumes, The Way Home and Ultima Thule.

If you’re happy to deal with raw text instead of a physical book, you can find Australia Felix, The Getting of Wisdom, and her first novel, Maurice Guest on Project Gutenberg. Or you could wait for the release of Monash University’s authoritative publication of her complete works. And if you’re really patient, you can wait until film director Bruce Beresford finds backers for his mini-series based on Richard Mahony. — Ed.

Doug Anderson Recommends Some Neglected Titles

Doug Anderson of the Blue Guitar Press writes to offer a few suggestions for books well worth rediscovering:

· The Junior Bachelor Society by John A. Williams

Williams has a tendency to go overboard racially (in my opinion); that is Black = oppressed and Good vs White = oppressor and Bad, but sometimes he overcomes this tendency and knocks it out of the park. A couple more titles come to mind: Mothersill and the Foxes and Captain Blackman. Thudermouth Press, recognizing a neglected writer, brought out a few of his novels in the 80s, including his one critical success, The Man Who Cried I Am. He still didn’t catch any kind of popular or critical wave. With !Click Song a racial bitterness sets in though not more so than many another Post War African American writer.

· William Hickling Prescott’s History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella and History of the Reign of Philip the Second

I would like to see a university press or some adventurous small press reprint William Hickling Prescott’s History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella and History of the Reign of Philip the Second published in the mid 19th century by Lippencott & Co – three volumes under each title. These are general histories and yes, written by the quintessential white male of old. Even so, anyone looking for perspective on a world-dominant America can’t go wrong reading about Europe’s first powerful empire after the fall of Rome. Prescott is always readable, informative and, blush blush, that horrible word: entertaining.

· The Tinieblas Trilogy”by R.M. Koster

Koster wrote these wild wonderful novels (The Prince, The Dissertation, Mandragon) about his fictional Central America in the 1970s and then reality gobbled them up and turned them into non-fiction in the 1980s. Even so they are great books. Full of life and expert writing they enthrall and delight. They might not be forgotten but they are way, way under appreciated.

· An unclassifiable novel: What the Maid Saw: Eight Psychic Tales, by Yasutaka Tsutsui, translated by Adam Kabat, published by Kodansha Intl in 1990

Say I could only use the word “riveting” once, for one book that I have read in my life until now; I would use it for this novel: riveting. [Tsutsui has several other books available in English translation, including the memorably-titled Salmonella Men from Planet Porno. — Ed.]

Doug adds a last recommendation taken from one of this site’s Sources:

I note that you site Anthony Burgess as a source for overlooked novels. How about Burgess himself? Does anyone read his M/F at all? I found it larky and generous and full of mischief – but – seemingly, very unread.

I assumed that Burgess is now solidly fixed in the ranks of writers critically recognized and perennially in print, but a quick search on a few of my own favorites among his many novels — the Enderby tetralogy, Napoleon Symphony, and ABBA ABBA — reveals that most are, in fact, available only as second-hand copies.

Twenty Suggestions from Will Schofield

In his email tipping me off to Paul Dry Books, Will Schofield mentioned that Mr. Dry asked him to do three things to prove he was qualified for an internship with Dry’s publishing house. One of these was to prepare a list of twenty out-of-print books. Well, Will not only got the job but has now worked there for over seven years. I asked him if he’d be willing to share his list, and he kindly forwarded it, along with updates on each book’s status today.

As Will writes,

When you read these paragraphs, remember that they are the enthusiasms of a nervous and dorky 23-year-old college drop-out who was frittering his life away: living in the cultural wasteland of Northeast Philadelphia, catering, selling tambourines, drinking, and going into massive debt buying rare books and records. I still stand by the list. Most of the works mentioned remain (and probably will remain) neglected.

Perhaps this post will help gently nudge one or two titles back into the limelight.

• Products of the Perfected Civilization by Chamfort, translated & introduced by W. S. Merwin.

Published by North Point Press in 1984. French aphorist and philosopher with no works currently available in English.

[2007 update: the Merwin book seems to still be out of print, but Douglas Parmee’s selection and translation is available from Short Books: Chamfort: Relections on Life, Love and Society Together with Anecdotes and Little Philosophical Dialogues.]

 

• Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel (1877-1933, France).

Eccentric genius millionaire who composed the majority of his works using a strict system of word associations and puns (as detailed in How I Wrote Certain of My Books). This particular book is incredibly scarce, the few copies that occasionally surface going for at least $50. It’s considered his best book (and the translation is very respected). Published by John Calder and University of California in the seventies. Roussel’s admirers include John Ashbery, Foucault (who wrote his first book on Roussel, titled Death and the Labyrinth, now out of print), Duchamp, Apollinaire, Blanchot, Calvino, Gide, Proust, Cortazar, and Queneau.

[2007 update: Still out of print.]
 

• Difficult Death by Rene Crevel (1900-1935, France).

A beautiful autobiographical novel by one of the original surrealists, Rene Crevel (he was gay and they were generally a homophobic bunch), written in 1926. Ezra Pound has said of Crevel: “He will be read more and more as the wind carries away the ashes of the ‘great names’ that preceded him.” I’m inclined to agree. It was last published by North Point Press in 1986. I’ve come across only one copy on all out of print book searches in the past six months!

[2007 update: this is still out of print, but you can now easily find the book on Addall.com. The excellent press Archipelago Books recently published Crevel’s My Body & I.]
 

• Mood Indigo (Grove 1968, tran. John Sturrock) or Froth on the Daydream (Quartet, trans. by Stanley Chapman) by Boris Vian (died in 1959).

Vian is a cult figure in France and should be in America. Also out of print is his collection of jazz writings, Round About Close to Midnight. Never in paperback, the excellent Blues for a Black Cat: The Selected writings of Boris Vian was published in the early 90s by University of Nebraska. He is an amazing, idiosyncratic writer. Raymond Queneau even called Mood Indigo, “The greatest love novel of our time.”

[2007 update: Tam Tam Books is bringing out translations of Vian’s books. They published Brian Harper’s new translation of L’ecume des Jours as Foam of the Daze (great title), as well as translations of I Spit on Your Graves, Autumn in Peking, and The Dead All Have the Same Skin (forthcoming). Dalkey Archive reprinted Heartsnatcher recently. Nebraska did publish a paperback version of Blues for a Black Cat.]

 

• Killachter Meadow — six stories by Aidan Higgins (Grove Press 1960).

I just came across this very scarce book by Irish writer Higgins. It seems that many of his books are out of print. From the back cover: “In the title story, he tells of a macabre family of sisters living a desolate life on a ruined estate in South Africa, spilling their melancholy and venom on one another, until the eldest slips matter-of-factly into the river to die.” Sounds good to me.

[2007 update: Still out of print]

 

• Journals by Denton Welch (published by Allison and Busby in the 1980s).

An incredible British writer. Exact Change books has recently reprinted his first novel . Welch was paralyzed in a motorcycle accident at the age of 18. He started writing after the accident and didn’t stop until his death at 31. He was apparently an amazing and prolific poet as well, but the poems have only been published in an out of print volume called Dumb Instrument (Enitharmon Press, edition of 1000) which was a mere 58 pages long.

[2007 update: still out of print.]

 

• Film as a Subversive Art by Amos Vogel.

The absolute bible for followers of international avant-garde/interesting cinema. Should be used in every college film course, but remains inexplicably scarce. My copy seems to be inscribed to Martin Scorcese.

[2007 update: D.A.P./C.T. Editions brought this back into print in 2005]

 

• Gathering Evidence by Thomas Bernhard.

The Austrian writer’s autobiography is currently unavailable, I have no idea why. Also, it seems that his very first novel, Frost, has never been translated into English. A huge gap therefore exists between the very early work On the Mountain (published only much later when Bernhard was famous, I think) and his Gargoyles. Bernhard also wrote a couple of novellas around this time (1965-70) for which he was awarded numerous prizes. It looks like University of Chicago will be publishing these soon.

[2007 update: Random House seems to keep this sporadically in print with their “value publishing” imprint. It deserves better. Knopf brought out Frost in a translation by Michael Hoffman. Chicago did indeed release Bernhard’s Three Novellas, but not until 2003, and it seems to have not made it into paperback.]

 

• The Ship by Hans Henny Jahnn (1894-1959).

Considered by many scholars to be one of the greatest German writers of the century, Jahnn has been completely overlooked by America and Britain. His novel, Das Holzschiff, was translated by Catherine Hutter as The Ship and published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1961. It is the first, and only translated, part of a trilogy. The book is bleak, beautiful, and incredibly strange. More people should at least know it exists. There is one other volume in English called Thirteen Uncanny Stories, from about 1984, which might still be available. This book contains extracts from his longer works. I shall spend my life trying to raise the profile of this forgotten writer.

[2007 update: I haven’t done a very good job raising his profile. At least there is now one critical work available in English, Thomas Freeman’s The Case of Hans Henny Jahnn: Criticism and the Literary Outsider. The French have rediscovered him already. I should also mention that Jahnn was gay; that fact, coupled with his violent imagery, seems to have scared the hell out of critics for years.]

 

• Juan de Mairena by Antonio Machado (trans. Ben Belitt, Univ. of California 1963).

The book is subtitled “Epigrams, Maxims, Memoranda and Memoirs of an Apocryphal Professor. With an Appendix of Poems from the Apocryphal Songbooks.” All of the prose works by Machado, “Spain’s finest modern poet,” are long gone or untranslated.

[2007 update: still Out of print]

 

• Villy Sorenson

Considered one of Denmark’s greatest contemporary writers. He writes short stories exclusively. The few I’ve read are fragmented, disturbing, and often hilarious. His first collection of stories — translated as Strange Stories and also as Tiger in the Kitchen — has been out of print since 1957. His other collections in English, Harmless Tales (Norvik Press Series, 1991) and Tutelary Tales (Nebraska 1988), are out of print also.

[2007 update: still nothing in print]

 

• Building Poe Biography by John Carl Miller.

From a book review by Marguerite Young, 1977: “John Henry Ingram, a clerk in the savings bank department of the London General Post Office, spent a lifetime saving Poe from the slanders of Griswold (Reverend, shabby poet and author of a malicious Poe biography). Working in his after hours when the bank was closed, Ingram authored biographies of this long-neglected genius as well as literary biographies of Oliver Madox Brown, Elizabeth Browning, Robert Burns, Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Chatterton. Each of these biographies was magnetized, almost without exception (as John Carl Miller points out), by an author who had associated with Poe or had been a child-prodigy poet or had died at an early age or had left a reputation that needed redemption from slander. Miller did his work at the University of Virginia in the Ingram’s Poe Collection, which contains enough material for two additional volumes. The present fascinating work of literary detection contains letters that, along with Miller’s analytical comments, are here published for the first time. They bring into sharper focus many of the mysteries surrounding the poet’s life and death.” I have not tracked down a copy of this yet. I don’t know if these letters have been published again elsewhere, or to what extent the author comments on them.

[2007 update: I still don’t know if these letters are published elsewhere. Young wrote about this book and the Feikema book below in her collection Inviting the Muses, published by Dalkey Archive.]

 

• A Night of Serious Drinking by René Daumal.

Ex-surrealist, Sanskrit scholar, poet, philosopher, and a pupil of Gurdjieff, Daumal is best known to English-speaking readers as the author of the short novel Mount Analogue, which has been reprinted many times. Roger Shattuck has called the book “… a rare and mysterious account, superbly translated, of what today would be called a ‘trip.’ Daumal mixes satire, fantasy, and allegory (plus a subject index!) into a fiction that runs a mere 130 pages instead of the 700 a contemporary American novelist would need.” Someone named Gerard Joulie wrote: “Basing its inspiration on the Rabelesian metamorphosis of drink, A Night of Serious Drinking has no other project than to engage its readers in conversation… Daumal presents an oasis, an instrument for distinguishing the essential quality of research, a manual on how to think…”

[2007 update: back in print from Tusk Overlook. They have also reprinted his Mount Analogue (reportedly a big inspiration for Jodorowsky’s movie “Holy Mountain”) and Le Contre Ciel. Nebraska Press brought out his You’ve Always Been Wrong (Exact Change cancelled a planned paperback edition due to a low number of preorders). It looks like his City Lights collection, The Powers of the Word, may be out-of-print at the moment, hopefully not for long.]

 

• The Death of Lysanda by Yitzhak Orpaz (trans. from the Hebrew by Richard Flint (Cape Editions, 1970).

“Naphtali Noi, publishers’ proofreader, scholar and recluse, lives in a rooftop room absorbed in his stuffed animals and his vision of the calm and beautiful Lysanda. With the appearance of Batia, the corpulent motherly figure who infiltrates his monastic seclusion, Noi’s image is banished, his peace destroyed. Written in taut and vivid prose, this story contains within its compact framework a volume of ideas, images and implications.” Haven’t read this one either, but this is from the first page: “Underneath this advertisement was a news item about a man who killed his wife and told his interrogators: ‘I had a headache and couldn’t sleep all night. I got up in the morning and wandered around the yard. I saw a big rock. I picked it up and dropped it on my wife’s head.’ The wife’s name was Eve. I was taken by the clear, restrained, almost classical style of the paragraph.”

[2007 update: Still out of print.]

 

• A Dark Stranger (and others) by Julien Gracq (New Directions, 1951).

Great French writer, whose four novels were all translated at some point. Two are still available from Columbia University Press. His first novel, The Castle of Argol, was last printed in a huge hardcover edition by Lapis Press (now defunct). This novel is stunning and unavailable at the moment. I have never seen a copy of A Dark Stranger (and others), and there is only one listed on Addall.

[2007 update: still out of print, but Turtle Point is bringing out translations of his non-fiction works, and Pushkin Press brought out a beautiful compact edition of Chateau D’Argol. A Dark Stranger is still very hard to find. See my post at ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com for a scan of the amazing cover image.]

 

• O the Chimneys by Nelly Sachs (1967, FSG).

A good friend of Paul Celan (their correspondence was recently published) and an incredible poet herself. She won the Nobel Peace Prize. Her poetry has remained unavailable for too long. I think FSG did two volumes.

[2007 update: Green Integer is finally restoring her to print (Collected Poems I and Collected Poems II in November 2007.]

 

• The Golden Bowl by Feike Feikema (aka Frederick Manfred).

Published by Grosset Dunlap/St. Paul Webb in 1944. It may be the only edition. Marguerite Young wrote: “another lyric performance, a dexterous biography of the elemental forces which threaten a various pioneering population, among them, an albino. Much of the novel reads like a folk ballad, the meditative passages being underscored like the refrains of a song.” A description by an online bookseller: “Set in the dust bowl in the dark years of the 30s. Story of Maury Grant, wanderer, hobo, pilgrim in search of a faith, and of his contempt for a land which brought him to bitterness and confusion.” I’ve never seen or read the book.

[2007, nothing in print. I think Larry McMurtry has written about Manfred.][Editor’s note: as Frederick Manfred, he wrote a number of novels about life on the Plains before and after contact with white men. Of these “Buckskin Man Tales”, Conquering Horse is in print from the University of Nebraska Press.]

 

• The Quest by Elisabeth Langgasser (1899-1950, Germany).

I recently found out about this book and tracked down a copy. This women’s literary career was cut short by the Nazis, who banned the publication of her work for 10 years, from 1936 to 1946 (she was half Jewish). From 1946 until her death five years later, she published seven books of prose and poetry, most of them considered her major works. The Quest, her last novel, is the only one translated into English (Knopf, 1953). The jacket says it delves into the spiritual devastation of the Germans after the war.

[2007 update: nothing in print]

 

• The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joao Guimaraes Rosa (1956, 1963 Knopf).

Jorge Amado says in his preface, “The English-reading public will make the acquaintance of one of the greatest books our literature has produced, brutal, tender, cordial, savage, vast as Brazil itself.” This books goes for $100 to $200 these days and, again, for inexplicable reasons, has never been reprinted. The same goes for Rosa’s other books. I’ve heard it towers over Marquez from at least one person.

[2007 update: There must be serious rights issues with this book, because it has a cult following, and now sells for $300 online, but has never been reprinted.]

 

• A Life Full of Holes by Driss ben Hamad Charhadi (1964, Grove).

This book was dictated to and translated by Paul Bowles. Charhadi, aka Larbi Layachi, could not read or write, but possesses an extraordinary gift for telling stories. This cycle of stories tells of the author’s teenage years, spent living on the streets of Morocco, working crappy jobs, trying to sell pot, and sometimes stealing to survive. An intense and wonderful book which has been out of print for years.

[2007, still no reprint. Rain Taxi wrote about it back in 2001 as a great lost book. Again, there must be serious rights issues, because the book is way too good to have stayed out of print for so many years. Thank you to Ian Nagoski for handing the book to me at the exact right moment, when my own life was obviously full of holes.]