Six Hard-to-Find Books Worth Reading
These titles are no longer fashionable, if they ever were—but should you manage to read one, you might love it.
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Many enthusiastic readers have a personal canon—a unique collection of books they return to for pleasure, edification, or escape. These lists almost always contain works of popular distinction, works so incredible (and so incredibly well-known) that their inclusion surprises no one. But these private lists also tend to include novels that few other people know well, or at all. The sheer volume of printed matter means that a book that once rightfully inspired devotion can simply fall out of favor, or even out of print—but for its loyal fans, a work’s obscurity might actually increase its private value.
Below are six books that I believe are unfairly unheralded. These titles are no longer fashionable, if they ever were. They largely exist outside today’s literary conversation. Some have been rescued and reprinted by indie presses; some can be found only in used-book stores or on niche websites. But should you manage to read one of these selections, you’ll be treated to formal complexity and artistic delight that might just make them permanent additions to your own collection.
Solo Faces, by James Salter
Implying that Salter is neglected, let alone forgotten, would be silly: Both his gorgeous, accomplished novel Light Years and the lyrically erotic A Sport and a Pastime remain touchstones. But I think that the brilliance of these two works has crowded out other masterful efforts, including Solo Faces. This novel follows Vernon Rand, a mountaineer and wanderer whose obsession with the climb alienates him from the more quotidian aspects of his life. The result is a lean, flinty story about a modern-day outlaw, a desperate and strangely pure loner ever at odds with the world. The greatness of Solo Faces is that Salter tests himself as much as Rand does. His rhetorical control captures and ennobles climactic mountain rescues and interpersonal struggles alike. This sophisticated work would get my vote as the greatest sporting novel ever written—and thankfully, it’s still in print from North Point Press.
Passacaglia, by Robert Pinget
Passacaglia is my favorite book to come out of the nouveau roman, a movement whose writers tore down novelistic architecture—plot, chronology, linear narration—in order to explore new creative possibilities. In this case, Pinget marshals spare language and opaque storylines to memorable effect, making thrilling demands of readers willing to enter his puzzle box. The book follows a man known as The Master, who spends most of his time meditating on the recent death of “an idiot” who had lived with him. As he turns over memories, talks with the local doctor, and writes in his notebooks, the death takes on an uncertain, dreamlike quality that will remain with you long after you finish reading the novel. Passacaglia remains sadly out of print in English, though its laconic chill makes it more than worth tracking down.
Yesterday’s Burdens, by Robert M. Coates
If Coates survives in historical memory, it’s as a Lost Generation footnote—the man who first introduced Ernest Hemingway to Gertrude Stein. This is an unfortunate legacy, though, for an audacious American literary experimenter whose 1926 debut, The Eater of Darkness, was called “the first Dada novel in English.” Because Coates worked for three decades as The New Yorker’s art critic, something of a painter’s visual language is found in his strange, oblique sentences. My favorite of his novels is Yesterday’s Burdens, of which Stein was an admirer. (“It is so exciting because it is modern,” she declared.) The novel follows the restless Henderson, a young man who wanders Manhattan, visiting speakeasies and crashing parties to keep despair at bay. Coates absorbs the city’s fabulous energies and arranges the tumult into rich, cubist sketches that reproduce overlapping advertising slogans, subway signs, motor cars, and overheard conversations. After being out of print for decades, Yesterday’s Burdens was resurrected in 2020 by Tough Poets Press. Rife with formal oddities and stylistic verve, this masterpiece captures New York in language that still feels fresh nearly a century later.
The Crazy Hunter, by Kay Boyle
Like Coates, Boyle was known, mostly against her will, as a member of the Lost Generation. She also shares with Coates the fate of falling from fashion. Her 14 compact, psychologically percipient novels have been unjustly overlooked for the past half century. Each is a bit like a short story given room to run: They possess that form’s suggestive, poetic compression and intensity. At just about 140 pages, The Crazy Hunter is archetypal. It is a story of English country life in which a girl fights to save a magnificent blind horse, even though her domineering mother has determined that the animal should be put down. The novel never gives in to the temptation of melodrama, offering instead a restrained moral subtlety. Not as flashy as other modernists, Boyle is perhaps easier to dismiss—but Pushkin Press’s 2024 reissue means you can try her bristling vignettes, where you’ll find that Boyle deserves to be read alongside the other American greats of her time.
With My Dog-Eyes, by Hilda Hilst
Hilst wrote novels that convulse with madness, death, and obscenity. Her works, short and confounding, unfurl like oppressive dreams. A certain comfort with disorientation is necessary to read her fruitfully. This is true of With My Dog-Eyes, which follows the unraveling of Amós Kéres, a mathematics professor, whose lengthy and inexplicable silences during lectures have prompted the dean to place him on administrative leave. From the first page, Hilst depicts Kéres’s psychic fissures with a range of unfamiliar narrative choices: changes of tense, first-to-third-person jumps, streams of consciousness, and baffling leaps in time and circumstance. The world may look different to you after you’ve read Hilst. Although many of her novels have sadly gone out of print, With My Dog-Eyes remains available by way of Melville House.
Lookout Cartridge, by Joseph McElroy
McElroy, at a sprightly 96, is the last titan of a particularly rich era in American fiction. He’s probably best known for his towering Women & Men, a more-than-1,000-page opus that analyzes and rhapsodizes 1970s New York City. It’s a great novel; however, in my experience, Lookout Cartridge is the McElroy fan’s favorite McElroy. Cartwright and Dagger, two Americans in England, have been shooting an experimental film, a kind of meta-montage of late-20th-century life that exudes wary mysticism. Someone has exposed the film to the sun, thus destroying it. (Or so Dagger tells Cartwright.) An obsessive mystery unfolds around the film’s destruction, in which classic tropes from the detective novel are also irradiated and discarded. Answers are rarely forthcoming, and often evidence is merely another opportunity for obfuscation. The novel’s protagonists are trapped within the sinister triangulation of powers they cannot understand. Currently out of print, a physical copy of Lookout Cartridge is well worth a search at your local used-book store.
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