Great Heaps of LOST books

[Nate D]

I have a copy of that one awaiting me, which I should really investigate further and get back about. I hadn't really found any reviews at the original time of my looking.

[Nathan "N.R."]

"Interview with Miguel. Part 1: On Literature in Portuguese, Translated and Untranslated"
https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com...

This one is a real delight! And so much he says is so familiar to us Wielders Of The UNearthING SPADE!!!!

Part two next week.

[Caroline]

Yes, it's a wonderful interview. I look forward to exploring his blog, even though he's stopped putting up new posts.

[Nathan "N.R."]

Caroline wrote: "Yes, it's a wonderful interview. I look forward to exploring his blog, even though he's stopped putting up new posts."

The other link to follow up on there is the interview with Tim Parks. I aim to do so. Here's that link ::
http://bombmagazine.org/article/05934...
I don't know how much BURIED stuff is there to unEARth, but Tom LeClair recommends Park's book blogging.

[Nathan "N.R."]

A HUGE heap of BURIED stuff just dropped this week, if you've not yet heard ::

The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

You'll already know Orthofer from The Complete Review/Literary Saloon weblog thing.

[Thomas]

This book might have some things worth looking at, if anyone comes across it: Lost Classics: Writers on Books Loved and Lost, Overlooked, Under-read, Unavailable, Stolen, Extinct, or Otherwise Out of Commission
There's copies going for 50c on amazon.

[Nathan "N.R."]

Thomas wrote: "This book might have some things worth looking at, if anyone comes across it: ."

These kinds of things are fun for seeing to what degree folks understand things like Lost, Overlooked, Under-read, Unavailable, Etc, BURIED. Like, one person thinks FMF's The Good Soldier needs resuscitating. But Joanna Scott gets it right with Paul Metcalf's Genoa. Lots of thing in here that I only know about due to the good graces of The Intrepid gr'r.

[Neglectedbooks]

You can find the full list of titles from Lost Classics: Writers on Books Loved and Lost, Overlooked, Under-read, Unavailable, Stolen, Extinct, or Otherwise Out of Commission on the Neglected Books Page:

http://neglectedbooks.com/?page_id=68

[D.N.]

Nathan, I would like to mention to you that I still belong to, and read bulletins from, your Buried Books group. I am amazed by how many of these rare treasures you and your fellow searchers find, and I read with great pleasure the often erudite reviews they inspire. But an odd thing seems to have happened. I will go to Amazon when one of your recommendations appeals to me, and when it is available I read the sample pages they provide. And, inexplicably, I find the pages uninteresting. They seem bland, lacking grace, devoid of savage brilliance. Even when I can see that they are well-designed, put together with a real sense of rhythm, exhibit genuine skill and offer insights into significant events—they bore me. I turn away in puzzlement. How can this be so? I do not believe my reaction can be appropriate. I am sure these are excellent novels. Out of curiosity I took out some of the books from my own library, books that I have collected over the years and read, long ago, with great interest. One is The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat, a novel I found as a young man wandering through India. It so impressed me that there are echoes of it in my own first novel. But now all I see are pages filled with dead words. The same is true of Ice, by Anna Kavan, which I read in Australia in my late 30s. I loved the iciness of her prose and the secretive, coiled repetitions entangled in the work. Yet that mystery, that elegant strangeness, seems gone. All I see are alphabetical emblems wandering across pages. Thickets of words. All rather dehydrated.

I am not writing to complain, exactly. But I am greatly puzzled. Can it be that after sufficient time with sufficient books one becomes, simply, blasé? I find this hard to believe. I am much older, I am sure, than the others in your group—I am approaching 80 summers, a locution that should date me—but I am still fascinated by the way an artist can use the mechanics of language to transcend the limitations of words. At least, the idea fascinates me, even if I cannot find examples. But this foul turn of events, this rather sudden inability to feel the thrill of discovery—am I the only victim? How do others feel, here in this group?

[Nathan "N.R."]

D.N. wrote: "Can it be that after sufficient time with sufficient books one becomes, simply, blasé?"

All I can say is you make sense and I've been heading in this direction myself I think. Plenty of great and good enough stuff but not always that mind=blowing kind of thing one finds frequently when first setting out to discover what can really be done with the written word.

[Zadignose]

As a gambler I'd just say you're running bad. Plus experiencing burnout, which can happen at any phase in one's reading (gambling) life. Take a break, try something different, or don't read for a while, then get back in the game until you pick a winner.

[blckshrt]

Hi DN, that's a very interesting topic.. I also have had short periods of that. It could be what Zadignose is saying. But it also can be that as a writer and filmmaker you see through what is 'being tried to be done'. In the end there are technical aspects and if you mostly see that, the magic and fascination disappears i think. For me it helps to read something totally new and experimental to me or switch over to another medium (visual art, music, film) in which i still can find something I haven't seen before and that also is fascinating to me. What also helps me is to read/watch something more 'real' so like an interesting biography, documentary, philosophy or essay. Well, i'm not sure if this made any sense to you..

[Nathan "N.R."]

I'm almost sure this has been posted here maybe somewhere [I see Friend=Jonathan has worked through some of the list at one point]. But here's a HEAP of 29 Lost American Fictions.

https://neglectedbooks.com/?page_id=67
[there you'll find links to the respective amazon pages]

In my REVIEW of Yesterday's Burdens I've provided gr=links ;; so you can go there and click LIKE which will circulate the titles of these books much FURTHER than otherwise. But here=below is that very same list for your ADD'd convenience ::

• Aleck Maury, Sportsman, Caroline Gordon, afterword by the author
• Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, Pauline E. Hopkins, afterword by Gwendolyn Brooks
• Delilah, Marcus Goodrich, afterword by James A. Michener
• The Devil's Hand, Edith Summers Kelley, afterword by Matthew J. Bruccoli
• Dry Martini: A Gentleman Turns to Love, John Thomas, afterword by Morrill Cody
• Fast One, Paul Cain (pseudonym of George Carrol Sims), afterword by Irvin Faust
• A Hasty Bunch, Robert McAlmon, introduced by Kay Boyle
• Flesh is Heir: An Historical Romance, Lincoln Kirstein, afterword by the author
• The Great Big Doorstep, E.P. O’Donnell, afterword by Eudora Welty
• Infants of the Spring, Wallace Thurman, afterword by John A. Williams
• Inn of That Journey, Emerson Price, afterword by the author
• The Landsmen, Peter Martin, afterword by Wallace Markfield
• The Cubical City, Janet Flanner, afterword by the author
• Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad, Donald Ogden Stewart, afterword by the author
• The Plastic Age, Percy Marks, afterword by R.V. Cassill
• The Professors Like Vodka, Harold Loeb, afterword by Harold Loeb
• Predestined: A Novel of New York Life, Stephen French Whitman, afterword by Alden Whitman
• Queer People, Carroll and Garrett Graham, afterword by Budd Schulberg
• Rain on the Just, Kathleen Morehouse, afterword by the author
• The Red Napoleon, Floyd Gibbons, afterword by John Gardner
• Salt: Or, the Education of Griffith Adams, Charles G. Norris, afterword by Louis Auchincloss
• The Science Fiction of Mark Clifton, Mark Clifton, ed. by Barry N. Malzberg and Martin H. Greenberg
• Single Lady, John Monk Saunders, afterword by Stephen Longstreet
• Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fall, David Graham Phillips, afterword by Elizabeth Janeway
• They Don't Dance Much, James Ross, afterword by George V. Higgins
• Through the Wheat, Thomas Boyd, afterword by James Dickey
• The Wedding, Grace Lumpkin, afterword by Lillian Barnard Gilkes
• Weeds, Edith Summers Kelley, afterword by Matthew Bruccoli
• Yesterday's Burdens, Robert M. Coates, afterword by Malcolm Cowley

ALMOST everything there is BURIED. [just double check with me (please?) if you wanna create a thread for one of these poor souls ; but you see their numbers are pretty MAL]

[Peter]

Just when I thought it was safe to go into a bookshop.

The only one of these that I have come across is They Don't Dance Much - James Ross's only published work of fiction. The novel is not that buried (222 ratings, 49 reviews), probably because it has been rebranded as "southern noir" and reissued in paperback. I rather liked it - review at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... - but since it's a one-off, there's nowhere else to go for that particular author.

Many thanks for the list, however. I shall happily waste some time looking up the other authors. Grace Lumpkin, here I come...

[Thomas]

I've got a copy of Delilah, it seems to be a sort of modernist take on the nautical novel, pretty interesting looking prose. Goodrich was also supposed to be writing a second part but died without publishing it(or possibly without finishing it at all, I'm not entirely clear on that)

[Nathan "N.R."]

Peter wrote: "Just when I thought it was safe to go into a bookshop.."

Not safe! Not safe!

[Nathan "N.R."]

Thomas wrote: "I've got a copy of Delilah, it seems to be a sort of modernist take on the nautical novel, pretty interesting looking prose. Goodrich was also supposed to be writing a second part but died without ..."

Keep us posted!

[Thomas]

Delilah update: it's very good, and it's unfortunate that the second part as well as his other novels were never published. recommended to anyone who likes modernism, long sentences, boats, or John Cowper Powys.

[Thomas]

I don't know if people are generally aware of this but for those who read ebooks there is some surprisingly obscure stuff on open library. like for example I was able to find a couple of leon forrest books, robert nye's doubtfire and an alan burns novel, and there's probably more buried stuff there that I haven't thought of searching for yet.

[Thea]

Thomas wrote: "I don't know if people are generally aware of this but for those who read ebooks there is some surprisingly obscure stuff on open library. like for example I was able to find a couple of leon forre..."

Thanks for the tip. I would have never thought to explore ol looking for this stuff. I've had success with Google Books in the past, and archive.org scans. My summer project is to see about adding some of these lost buried books to GR, because too many are not here...

[Thea]

Lost chapbooks? Lost zines? Lost small press publishers?
I am anxious to add Bibliomanic links to many. Much of this 1970s-90s underground lit is nearly or entirely undocumented online, certainly with nothing on Goodreads, but interesting fiction, essays, poetry in zine pubs like The Jelly Slide, Toxic Flyer, William Wants a Doll, SkiM, Dream Scene Magazine, Big Nurse Set-Back, etc &tc. A gone world forgotten.

[Nate D]

That's all really interesting and essential history. I for one am always all for charting and preserving more of that universe!

I was pleased to find a republication of this zine-adjacent postpunk-era NYC collection recently, so there's hope that some will reappear perhaps:
Just Another Asshole

[Zadignose]

Someone's probably seen this, but I'm surprised I hadn't until recently. Wiki's list of epic poems surely has buried treasures in there somewhere. Most exciting, of course are the many items I've never heard of. A Tolkein epic's not necessarily going to flip my wig. A national epic of Albania or an 18th-century Irish keen on the death by murder of the author's husband seem more like possible subterranean gold. Though, who knows. That haystack's pretty deep.

(BTW, I'm still in the middle-late part of Orlando Furioso, and I'm really hoping to pick up some Spanish by trying to puzzle out some verses of Martín Fierro, but those are among the non-buried members of the epics list.)

[A]

A modernist feast for free: https://archive.org/details/columbiad...