BBC Radio 4’s program, Open Book, recently launched a contest to rediscover “forgotten treasures of the literary world – books that have been overlooked or become inexplicably out of vogue.” The winner will be dramatized on Radio 4 sometime during 2010. You can find out more at the website they’ve set up: “Neglected Classics”.
To get their audiences’ thoughts cranking, Open Book is devoting two programs to discussions with leading U. K. authors on some of their own candidates for this prize. The first, broadcast last Sunday (18 October), can be heard online now at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n6z0d. The second will be broadcast on Sunday the 25th. The ten books proposed on the two programs can be found now at the “Neglected Classics” page.
Several U. K. papers and magazines have noted the contest and invited their own readers to propose candidates in their comments threads. The Times covered it in their 17 October book section with an article by Adam Sherwin and commentary by Erica Wagner. Wagner proposes several favorites of her own, including P. V. Glob’s The Bog People
Thanks for passing that along. I’m a big fan of good audio books.
Just wanted to let you know that my company are actually in the process of producing an audio book version of Rasselas. Anyone interested should be able to get it from Audible – we’re hoping to get it up there before the 8th November announcement of the winner but not sure if we’ll make it.
Rasselas and A Hero Of Our Time make my favourite book list. That said, I’d argue that if a book is in print, it isn’t lost (yet).
It strikes me as remarkable that Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas made this shortlist of neglected books. 80 or 90 or a hundred years ago, it was on the required-reading list of virtually every good high school in the United States (and Britain too, I’d suppose). And Lermontov’s A Hero Of Our Time is still probably read by almost every Russian secondary-school student – although, granted, it never has been a particularly big seller in English translation.