Three Places to Go to Read About Neglected Books

We’re delighted that we’re not the only literary enterprise on the lookout for under-appreciated books and authors. We’re not even the best or most practiced at the hunt. Here are three places to go to find out about books that have probably flown below, around, or mysteriously through your radar: 1) The Neglected Books Page, http://neglectedbooks.com. If you’re a book lover and haven’t heard of this page, you really ought to be sore with yourself. Not only does it list recently neglected books (how’s that for a concept?), but it delves into neglect of years past, linking to lists like The American Scholar’s “Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years,” published in 1970. An old list like that one can be unexpectedly invigorating: it’s good to know that authors like Kate Chopin, Isaiah Berlin, and A.R. Ammons were once considered overlooked, since it means that time does remedy some injustices. It’s impossible to tell from the website who edits the Neglected Books Page, but it’s somebody judicious and industrious, and obviously not in it for the credit.

2) LeeSandlin.com. Many of our readers will know Lee Sandlin from our website’s effusive praise of him — praise that, we have reported before, helped him land a book deal with Pantheon. But Lee is not only a splendid essayist, he is also a champion of neglected books. Check out his list “Ten Novels That Not Enough People Have Read.” (Of the ten authors, we’d heard of one, and thought that maybe we’d heard of a second.) He annotates on the list here.

3) The Believer, annual award issue. This magazine, published by the same people responsible for McSweeney’s, reviews overlooked books in every issue, and once a year it gives out the Believer Book Award, the rubric for which is summed up here: “Each year the editors of the Believer generate a short list of the novels they thought were the strongest and, in their opinion, the most undervalued of the year.” Once again, we’d be surprised if you’d heard of any of the winners. Last year’s was Remainder, by Tom McCarthy.

NHR party/Palin poetry/NHR author signed to Pantheon

First things first: the issue #3 launch party will be at Labyrinth Books, 290 York Street, New Haven, from 6pm to 8pm. Please come! Second, we are thrilled that after we wrote about essayist Lee Sandlin, an undiscovered literary treasure, an agent on our email list contacted him, they got together, and now he has a two-book deal with Pantheon. Congratulations! (And glad we could help.)

Finally, a couple weeks back, we put out the call for poems about Sarah Palin. We just had a hunch that out there, somewhere, somebody had decided that Sarah Palin merited verse. A lot of great poems came in, but the sure winner, for dedication if not for quality, has to be the blogger at wittyditty.wordpress.com, who in the past few weeks has turned her (why are we so sure it's a “her”? we could be wrong) blog over to the versified crucifixion of Alaska's leading flutist/politician.

Lee Sandlin

Usually, we use this Monday post to recommend an unfairly neglected book. Today we’d like to introduce you to an unfairly neglected writer.

I’m now at that biblical age (New Testament age, anyway) of thirty-three, which is about when many of us decide that we know the names of all the good writers we’ll need to know. Not that we’ve read all the great books, or ever will, but that coming across an entirely new name whose work, upon discovery, instantly seems essential is an increasingly rare phenomenon. The last time it happened was when I found Dave Hickey’s amazing collection of essays, Air Guitar. Or maybe it was when my friend Emily Moore introduced me to the poet David Wagoner. Well, it’s happened again. His name is Lee Sandlin.

For a class I am teaching in the fall, I assigned a terrific collection of journalism, edited by Ira Glass, called The New Kings of Nonfiction. It includes pieces by many of the greats—Susan Orlean, David Foster Wallace, Malcolm Gladwell, Lawrence Weschler--and a couple pieces by people I hadn’t heard of. One such piece is Lee Sandlin's “Losing the War,” which originally appeared in the Chicago Reader. It is a classic essay, easily better than most of what appears in any magazine in the United States.

I won’t do much to summarize the essay, which thankfully is online, except to say that it’s a meditation about our historical memory of World War II: how war fever made it impossible for even great reporters to write accurately about the war then, and how historians have failed to find the language to write about it since. The essay does not read as if it’s written by more scholarly writers on war and memory, like the redoubtable Paul Fussell, whose books are brilliant and clear, but not, well, fun; Fussell is too much the literary critic (except when he’s not, as in the hilarious book Class, which is one of the few books that will actually make you laugh out loud). Lee Sandlin’s essay is accessible and blunt, personal and cerebral at the same time.

Sandlin has written other long, brilliant essays for the Chicago Reader. Most of them seem to be posted at his web page. It’s a cool page, filled with Desert Island lists of favorite books and songs, most of which I have never heard of. The level of obscurity is a bit maddening. This is a man who recommends that we listen to “Night Recordings from Bali” and tells us which is his favorite Icelandic saga (Njal’s, if you care). And don’t even get me started on his list of “Several Movies That Do Not, In Any Way, Shape or Form, Suck.”

I’d raise high the poseur lantern if not for the fact that a) he seems to have a sense of humor about all this (his list of recommended recordings is called “Old, Scratchy and Mostly Unintelligible Spirituals”) and b) Jesus, can the guy write. As a former alt-weekly editor, I am humbled that elsewhere in the country one of my peer publications was publishing stuff like this. As a writer, I envy the man’s gift. As a civic booster in the city of Publishing, I hope some editor will collect this man’s essays into a single volume, fast.

Mark Oppenheimer is an editor of the New Haven Review.