"It’s much easier to study an author if you have a lot of their work available and in print": the importance of this fact is hugely underestimated. So underestimated that much of the literary world isn't even aware of it.
I've been writing about neglected books for almost two decades now, and no matter how good the books are or how well I've written about them, the reality is that it's all meant bupkis in terms of influencing the literary world: critics, academics, publishers, and readers have all, overwhelmingly ignored them. If you want to inject a writer's work into the discourse, it has to be in print.
I wrote this piece two years ago in response to an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by Apoorva Tadepalli titled “We Need to Read the Forgotten Geniuses, Not Rescue Them.”
Tadepalli writes that “Critics play a role in determining which books published today should be branded ‘instant classics,’ which authors are best described as ‘little-known’ and which books published in past decades or centuries merit re-examination.” But that presumes that the books are actually published -- or republished, in the case of re-examination.
Zora Neale Hurston isn't part of the canon today because Alice Walker wrote about her in 1975. She's part of the canon because the University of Illinois Press reissued Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1978 and Alice Walker's article and subsequent articles led to Virago Modern Classics picking it up in 1986 and Harper Perennial putting it in Waldenbooks all around America in 1990. Would Hurston be in the Library of America today without the initial commitment by the University of Illinois Press back in 1978?
There is an excellent book that asks just such what-if questions about some of the masterpieces of Latin American fiction of the 1960s--why did One Hundred Years of Solitude become a global classic when The Obscure Bird of Night (for example) was largely ignored?: Ascent to Glory by Alvaro Santana-Acuña. Timing, luck, and the decisions of publishers play a significant role in shaping what we consider literature -- like it or not.
A how-to book I published in 1988 with Harper & Row was selected by both the Book of the Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club. This was a huge factor in the book remaining in print for more than two decades and sending me royalty checks twice a year. And I can tell you that never once - not even among the snobbiest literati - did I hear of anyone turning up their nose at the book or at me for an association with BOMC and QPBC.
First: for the love of God, Naomi, do some spring cleaning!! Or at the very least buy a bookshelf that's exactly NYRB Classics size. (You might be able to appropriate a DVD tower rack for that -- I use mine for such storage)
Second: I wonder if we're going to see more independent little presses doing their own reprints of potential-classic books that have recently fallen into the public domain, and turning them into little art objects. I'm aware of one such project, Mandylion Press, and have read one of their weirdo Victorian reissues, the proto-Ozempic drama "One or Two" (https://mandylion.substack.com/p/mandylion-book-drop-2) -- they're doing a good job making the books look cute and distinctive, and the novels all seem to have been picked with great care! But I could imagine a more craven press churning out public domain books, giving them Moshfeghcore covers, and actively positioning them as totems for BookTok girlies.
This is so great and will probably influence the way I look at every book cover going forward!
I've read a lot of the New Directions books, but I still appreciate a layer of vetting on them first (like a New Yorker or Substack review)---someone I trust describing them in a way that reassures me they won't be boring. So many of them are just boring!
The one I'm interested in is Fitzcarraldo Editions. They're hard to pin down. The books are usually shorter, but sometimes they're really long. The Fernanda Melchor books just wouldn't have been published without them, and they're so good, but then they, like New Directions, are interested in publishing this autofiction stuff that I have no interest in.
I think that's what Blake Smith's Tablet article seemed to mostly be criticizing: not necessarily the middlebrowness of the NYRB, but the desire from New Directions or NYRB to take an old (or sometimes not even old) novel and explain how it's "actually autofiction" or "actually revolutionary" when a lot of time it was actually just not quite as well structured or characterized or voiced as something else. Smith's paranoia about why this is happening seems, like Falatko's paranoia about Stoner, kind of silly: it's just the way that these companies are marketing their books to a modern literary audience.
Stoner left me cold but I understood why people like it and I didn't think it was a psyop like Falatko did. My best friend is also a high school English teacher and recommended it to me, and then I read about it TWICE in the New Yorker so I had to check it out. I'd just rather read Pnin or White Noise, which, I know, I know, are not really tragedies like Stoner but are my favorite style of campus novel.
Last note---have you read Little Man, What Now? I love it. I think it's actually why I didn't like Berlin Alexanderplatz very much: I just kept thinking, this could be shorter and funnier, not brutal and uncomfortable and sad. LMWN is such an NYRB book; Berlin Alexanderplatz is such a New Directions book.
Little Man, What Now? was very good. Loved it! Melville House republished that big Fallada thriller (Every Man Dies Alone) which is one my favorite books ever, and then I went looking for a bunch of other Fallada novels--LMWN was the best of the rest (I think it's also out now from Melville House).
Oh my god you are in for a treat. What an incredible book. Written only six months after the Nazi regime fell. Fallada remained in Germany for the whole war (Hitler was a fan of his), so he has a view into life in Hitler’s Germany that other dissident German authors (who mostly fled) don’t have.
Another rival of NYRB Classics is the book club of Archipelago Books. They only publish work in translation, and if you belong to the club you receive everything they publish. Like all book clubs, it’s catch-as-catch-can, but it has enabled me to discover some of the best books I’ve ever read:
The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker; Willemstad Frederick Hermans’ A Guardian Angel Recalls; the first novel by a pre-My Struggle Karl Knausgaard, A Time for Everything; José Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion; Scholastique Mukasonga’s Igifu; Cheon Myeong-Kwai’s Whale; and A Dream of Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu.
I don’t know if you pay attention to McNally Editions, but they’re setting themselves up as a direct competitor to NYRB, in my opinion. The books tend to be shorter, but very similar themes and writers.
Very enjoyable and thought provoking but, for what it’s worth, my preferred method to picking books is a random walk through bookstores, selling both new and used books. Especially in the case of new books, I visit bookstores with owners whose tastes I trust, and who I let lead me to new authors (at least new to me). I do see the point of a book club, but I guess I’m too skeptical of the motivations behind them. Anyway, I loved reading about your stack - I have at least five of those (not a brag - shame on me for collecting faster than reading) and when I finally retire from teaching at the end of May, I look forward to making more progress with digging into them.
I get the impression that the characterizations Dwight MacDonald and others make of BOMC readers are based solely on the BOMC books themselves. In her earlier book, Reading the Romance (1984), Radway offers a similar corrective to views of romance readers. She actually talks to the women who read the books to discover how they read them and how they think about them.
I recently read Butcher's Crossing, which I guess has also benefitted from Stoner's success in that it was made into a movie (which I've not seen). Butcher's Crossing starts a little slow; at first I found myself wondering why I'm reading what seemed to be a generic Western. But you soon find out what makes it stand out. It is an extraordinary work when it comes to its description of the buffalo hunt that is the center of the narrative. I was doubly impressed when I found out that the author's other two novels are Stoner, about a university professor, and Augustus, historical fiction. That's some range. The commentators whom you mention getting annoyed by Stoner's success seem to be merely another example of the bad-faith (Troll) mentality of "social media" discourse in these "cancel culture" days, whether we're talking about those critical of such culture or those held to be examples of it. Katharine Coldiron's article that you cite makes the ridiculous claim that Nella Larsen's Passing is "obscure"; she seems to think that simple quotas can measure whether not a publishing house is misogynist. Is Augustus as well-known as Graves' I, Claudius or Vidal's Julian? No. Maybe we need to be reading Williams more. I for one thought I, Claudius was a bit of a mess.
Purely coincidentally, I started reading another NYRB classic yesterday morning, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by Gerald Edwards. Liking it so far, although I can see why it wasn't that popular when it was first published. Oddly similar to Stoner in that it tells the story of an unremarkable life, although it's first person
I saw The Glenn Miller Orchestra play this weekend and it was interesting to see how a band that originally performed for a middle class and even blue-collar audience now appealed to an older and far more affluent public in one of those venues that’s maintained by a foundation through donations from wealthy local patrons. A book club like the NYRB’s or the New Directions New Classics Club appeals to an educated audience (even when sometimes publishing decidedly middlebrow titles) like the one I saw at the concert instead of the one catered to by the Book of the Month Club. It’s hard to conceive of a book club that would appeal to any other socioeconomic class these days. I know there’s niche publishers like Stark House that specialize in noir fiction reprints and send their club members a book each month and I imagine there’s other clubs that specialize in certain genres, but nothing as popular as the Book of the Month Club. It’s sad to see how books have been displaced from most people’s entertainment budget. Still, there is something to be said for how eclectic the NYRB Classics line can be, encompassing both middle and highbrow titles, by reprinting Jean-Patrick Manchette's taut noir novels or Simenon’s roman durs (I wonder why they no longer publish them, though) or reissuing books from authors as diverse as Pierre Drieu la Rochelle or Konstantin Paustovsky. Thanks to NYRB, I discovered Alfred Hayes, one definitely forgotten writer that deserved a second look. Interestingly, NYRB's rediscovery prompted an Argentinean publisher to translate Hayes' In Love, which sold quite well in Spanish a few years ago.
I'm such a sucker for the NYRB covers - my goodness, never mind all that 'don't judge a book by its cover' nonsense, these things are glorious.
Though I've considered the subscription option, I prefer the sitewide sales they do regularly, where you get 4 books for 40% off with free shipping, minimum $75. I'll end up with 5-6 books on an order and though it can be hit and miss, I've found so many great gems.
Also loved getting the marked down remainders from various Harvard Square bookshops when I lived in the area, a goldmine of unexpected pleasures.
Great piece! interesting to no one: I believe all those Georges Simenon NYRBs are now out of print, as Picador has got the rights and is now releasing new editions of the Maigret books to the tune of 5 or so every month. They're great books, I'd wager the demand for them now in the anglophone market is partially due to the NYRB releases. Picador has done the same thing with the Bolaño books formerly issued by New Directions. Canon formation in action I guess
ironically my favorite ND book I own is their 2020 edition of Michael Kohlhaas, a wonderful 19th c. German novel which reads very much like more fun version of a "New Directions" type book
i liked my year in the NYRB club and may end up resubscribing at some point. I didn't renew it this year because I had started to build up a backlog. My wife starts to get annoyed when the stack of books next to the bed expands to several stacks of books in the living room.
I would amplify your point on the gender split. When I signed up, I was hoping to get a bit more of a diverse selection (trying to counterprogram my instincts) and it ended up being a lot of books by white dudes.
Still, I liked most of the books. Friday was great. The Sweet Dove Died led me to buy an omnibus edition of Barbara Pym's novels.
"It’s much easier to study an author if you have a lot of their work available and in print": the importance of this fact is hugely underestimated. So underestimated that much of the literary world isn't even aware of it.
I've been writing about neglected books for almost two decades now, and no matter how good the books are or how well I've written about them, the reality is that it's all meant bupkis in terms of influencing the literary world: critics, academics, publishers, and readers have all, overwhelmingly ignored them. If you want to inject a writer's work into the discourse, it has to be in print.
I wrote this piece two years ago in response to an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by Apoorva Tadepalli titled “We Need to Read the Forgotten Geniuses, Not Rescue Them.”
https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=10205
Tadepalli writes that “Critics play a role in determining which books published today should be branded ‘instant classics,’ which authors are best described as ‘little-known’ and which books published in past decades or centuries merit re-examination.” But that presumes that the books are actually published -- or republished, in the case of re-examination.
Zora Neale Hurston isn't part of the canon today because Alice Walker wrote about her in 1975. She's part of the canon because the University of Illinois Press reissued Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1978 and Alice Walker's article and subsequent articles led to Virago Modern Classics picking it up in 1986 and Harper Perennial putting it in Waldenbooks all around America in 1990. Would Hurston be in the Library of America today without the initial commitment by the University of Illinois Press back in 1978?
There is an excellent book that asks just such what-if questions about some of the masterpieces of Latin American fiction of the 1960s--why did One Hundred Years of Solitude become a global classic when The Obscure Bird of Night (for example) was largely ignored?: Ascent to Glory by Alvaro Santana-Acuña. Timing, luck, and the decisions of publishers play a significant role in shaping what we consider literature -- like it or not.
Hell, Asturias got his Nobel on the back of Mulata and it hasn’t been in print in English in 40 years.
A how-to book I published in 1988 with Harper & Row was selected by both the Book of the Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club. This was a huge factor in the book remaining in print for more than two decades and sending me royalty checks twice a year. And I can tell you that never once - not even among the snobbiest literati - did I hear of anyone turning up their nose at the book or at me for an association with BOMC and QPBC.
First: for the love of God, Naomi, do some spring cleaning!! Or at the very least buy a bookshelf that's exactly NYRB Classics size. (You might be able to appropriate a DVD tower rack for that -- I use mine for such storage)
Second: I wonder if we're going to see more independent little presses doing their own reprints of potential-classic books that have recently fallen into the public domain, and turning them into little art objects. I'm aware of one such project, Mandylion Press, and have read one of their weirdo Victorian reissues, the proto-Ozempic drama "One or Two" (https://mandylion.substack.com/p/mandylion-book-drop-2) -- they're doing a good job making the books look cute and distinctive, and the novels all seem to have been picked with great care! But I could imagine a more craven press churning out public domain books, giving them Moshfeghcore covers, and actively positioning them as totems for BookTok girlies.
This is so great and will probably influence the way I look at every book cover going forward!
I've read a lot of the New Directions books, but I still appreciate a layer of vetting on them first (like a New Yorker or Substack review)---someone I trust describing them in a way that reassures me they won't be boring. So many of them are just boring!
The one I'm interested in is Fitzcarraldo Editions. They're hard to pin down. The books are usually shorter, but sometimes they're really long. The Fernanda Melchor books just wouldn't have been published without them, and they're so good, but then they, like New Directions, are interested in publishing this autofiction stuff that I have no interest in.
I think that's what Blake Smith's Tablet article seemed to mostly be criticizing: not necessarily the middlebrowness of the NYRB, but the desire from New Directions or NYRB to take an old (or sometimes not even old) novel and explain how it's "actually autofiction" or "actually revolutionary" when a lot of time it was actually just not quite as well structured or characterized or voiced as something else. Smith's paranoia about why this is happening seems, like Falatko's paranoia about Stoner, kind of silly: it's just the way that these companies are marketing their books to a modern literary audience.
Stoner left me cold but I understood why people like it and I didn't think it was a psyop like Falatko did. My best friend is also a high school English teacher and recommended it to me, and then I read about it TWICE in the New Yorker so I had to check it out. I'd just rather read Pnin or White Noise, which, I know, I know, are not really tragedies like Stoner but are my favorite style of campus novel.
Last note---have you read Little Man, What Now? I love it. I think it's actually why I didn't like Berlin Alexanderplatz very much: I just kept thinking, this could be shorter and funnier, not brutal and uncomfortable and sad. LMWN is such an NYRB book; Berlin Alexanderplatz is such a New Directions book.
Little Man, What Now? was very good. Loved it! Melville House republished that big Fallada thriller (Every Man Dies Alone) which is one my favorite books ever, and then I went looking for a bunch of other Fallada novels--LMWN was the best of the rest (I think it's also out now from Melville House).
Great reminder that he had other famous books! I'm going to check out EMDA now.
Oh my god you are in for a treat. What an incredible book. Written only six months after the Nazi regime fell. Fallada remained in Germany for the whole war (Hitler was a fan of his), so he has a view into life in Hitler’s Germany that other dissident German authors (who mostly fled) don’t have.
“I played a part in Stonermania” is such a good flex.
I don’t subscribe to NYRB, but I do buy another one pretty much every time I walk into Powells. So I should probably go ahead and subscribe.
Three cheers for NYTB!
UNIVERSAL BASEBALL ASSOC. is soooo good--at least according to 21yo me in late '80s, with fantasy baseball still 10 years in my future.
Finding FAT CITY at the Center for Fiction was a highlight of a good day.
STONER may need to be moved up the list.
Adore the review of "brutish" Angel, imagine dying in your canopy bed with 1,000 cats while dramatically stating your own name... love you Angel
Another rival of NYRB Classics is the book club of Archipelago Books. They only publish work in translation, and if you belong to the club you receive everything they publish. Like all book clubs, it’s catch-as-catch-can, but it has enabled me to discover some of the best books I’ve ever read:
The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker; Willemstad Frederick Hermans’ A Guardian Angel Recalls; the first novel by a pre-My Struggle Karl Knausgaard, A Time for Everything; José Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion; Scholastique Mukasonga’s Igifu; Cheon Myeong-Kwai’s Whale; and A Dream of Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu.
I don’t know if you pay attention to McNally Editions, but they’re setting themselves up as a direct competitor to NYRB, in my opinion. The books tend to be shorter, but very similar themes and writers.
I have not read as many of their books as I should. Thanks for the rec!
Thank you for the recommendation. I hadn’t heard of this press, but they’re on my radar now . . .
Very enjoyable and thought provoking but, for what it’s worth, my preferred method to picking books is a random walk through bookstores, selling both new and used books. Especially in the case of new books, I visit bookstores with owners whose tastes I trust, and who I let lead me to new authors (at least new to me). I do see the point of a book club, but I guess I’m too skeptical of the motivations behind them. Anyway, I loved reading about your stack - I have at least five of those (not a brag - shame on me for collecting faster than reading) and when I finally retire from teaching at the end of May, I look forward to making more progress with digging into them.
I get the impression that the characterizations Dwight MacDonald and others make of BOMC readers are based solely on the BOMC books themselves. In her earlier book, Reading the Romance (1984), Radway offers a similar corrective to views of romance readers. She actually talks to the women who read the books to discover how they read them and how they think about them.
I recently read Butcher's Crossing, which I guess has also benefitted from Stoner's success in that it was made into a movie (which I've not seen). Butcher's Crossing starts a little slow; at first I found myself wondering why I'm reading what seemed to be a generic Western. But you soon find out what makes it stand out. It is an extraordinary work when it comes to its description of the buffalo hunt that is the center of the narrative. I was doubly impressed when I found out that the author's other two novels are Stoner, about a university professor, and Augustus, historical fiction. That's some range. The commentators whom you mention getting annoyed by Stoner's success seem to be merely another example of the bad-faith (Troll) mentality of "social media" discourse in these "cancel culture" days, whether we're talking about those critical of such culture or those held to be examples of it. Katharine Coldiron's article that you cite makes the ridiculous claim that Nella Larsen's Passing is "obscure"; she seems to think that simple quotas can measure whether not a publishing house is misogynist. Is Augustus as well-known as Graves' I, Claudius or Vidal's Julian? No. Maybe we need to be reading Williams more. I for one thought I, Claudius was a bit of a mess.
Purely coincidentally, I started reading another NYRB classic yesterday morning, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by Gerald Edwards. Liking it so far, although I can see why it wasn't that popular when it was first published. Oddly similar to Stoner in that it tells the story of an unremarkable life, although it's first person
I saw The Glenn Miller Orchestra play this weekend and it was interesting to see how a band that originally performed for a middle class and even blue-collar audience now appealed to an older and far more affluent public in one of those venues that’s maintained by a foundation through donations from wealthy local patrons. A book club like the NYRB’s or the New Directions New Classics Club appeals to an educated audience (even when sometimes publishing decidedly middlebrow titles) like the one I saw at the concert instead of the one catered to by the Book of the Month Club. It’s hard to conceive of a book club that would appeal to any other socioeconomic class these days. I know there’s niche publishers like Stark House that specialize in noir fiction reprints and send their club members a book each month and I imagine there’s other clubs that specialize in certain genres, but nothing as popular as the Book of the Month Club. It’s sad to see how books have been displaced from most people’s entertainment budget. Still, there is something to be said for how eclectic the NYRB Classics line can be, encompassing both middle and highbrow titles, by reprinting Jean-Patrick Manchette's taut noir novels or Simenon’s roman durs (I wonder why they no longer publish them, though) or reissuing books from authors as diverse as Pierre Drieu la Rochelle or Konstantin Paustovsky. Thanks to NYRB, I discovered Alfred Hayes, one definitely forgotten writer that deserved a second look. Interestingly, NYRB's rediscovery prompted an Argentinean publisher to translate Hayes' In Love, which sold quite well in Spanish a few years ago.
There’s some copyright malarkey with the Simenon books. The Simenon NYRBs are out of print and highly collectible.
I'm such a sucker for the NYRB covers - my goodness, never mind all that 'don't judge a book by its cover' nonsense, these things are glorious.
Though I've considered the subscription option, I prefer the sitewide sales they do regularly, where you get 4 books for 40% off with free shipping, minimum $75. I'll end up with 5-6 books on an order and though it can be hit and miss, I've found so many great gems.
Also loved getting the marked down remainders from various Harvard Square bookshops when I lived in the area, a goldmine of unexpected pleasures.
Great piece! interesting to no one: I believe all those Georges Simenon NYRBs are now out of print, as Picador has got the rights and is now releasing new editions of the Maigret books to the tune of 5 or so every month. They're great books, I'd wager the demand for them now in the anglophone market is partially due to the NYRB releases. Picador has done the same thing with the Bolaño books formerly issued by New Directions. Canon formation in action I guess
ironically my favorite ND book I own is their 2020 edition of Michael Kohlhaas, a wonderful 19th c. German novel which reads very much like more fun version of a "New Directions" type book
i liked my year in the NYRB club and may end up resubscribing at some point. I didn't renew it this year because I had started to build up a backlog. My wife starts to get annoyed when the stack of books next to the bed expands to several stacks of books in the living room.
I would amplify your point on the gender split. When I signed up, I was hoping to get a bit more of a diverse selection (trying to counterprogram my instincts) and it ended up being a lot of books by white dudes.
Still, I liked most of the books. Friday was great. The Sweet Dove Died led me to buy an omnibus edition of Barbara Pym's novels.
I know. I feel like my wife will also eventually rebel at my book buying habits.
Barbara Pym is delightful. I’m glad she’s getting a bit of a renaissance.