Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Nathan "N.R." wrote: So, no."

Thankie. The Davenport has been added. As for Steiner: a shame to let him languish in obscurity; but so is the plight of the notquiteBURIED, as Djuna saith: 'Those long remembered can alone claim to be long forgotten.' As for Davenport again: yes--would, however, and firstly, that any of his stuff could be got in a bookshop--never see him--and buying from Amazon is both boring/bad for this reader's moral bearing.

Eric wrote: "but so is the plight of the notquiteBURIED"

I'm not altogether happy with the circumstances either. But so there is a 30 year hole between then and now which could be filled with something like The Great Small Press Club. Lots of UNDERrecognized stuff in those years. My Original Intent for the BBC was to second guess the judgement of the first generation of literary evaluation. I think they got it wrong too often in regard to too many good things. I do have Steiner's Dread on my own shelf, which, along with a dozen others, is my Next Book.

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "The Great Small Press Club"

Yes!!! ... though I'll leave that to some One the more ambitious, than I. As things stand, there will be no dearth of buried books--and a noble task to bequeath, in perpetuity, to posterity.

Oh--and enjoy the Steiner once you get to it. A Psychological Thing, that, much in the vein of mid-career Hawkes.

Joseph Hergesheimer

When asked in 1962 what was his favorite American novel, Samuel Beckett replied "one of the best I ever read was Hergesheimer's Java Head.

Garima wrote: "Joseph Hergesheimer

When asked in 1962 what was his favorite American novel, Samuel Beckett replied "one of the best I ever read was Hergesheimer's Java Head."

Oh yes he's a shoo shoo shoo-in! ADD plEASE!

Let us know if you find any recentish editions of his works. gr seems to have a lot of OCR editions of his books.

Claude Simon -- a little help? Can't quite decide if he's BURIED or just UNDER=recognized TODAY.

a) He won the Nobel in 1985.
b) He has four books with significant # of ratings.
c) A few reviews ; but a lot only of the popular one.
d) He seems to operate solidly within the SNOB Tradition.
e) He even got an issue of RCF (in 1985!)

f) Seems to have a significant quantity of BURIED Books.
g) I feel that if I ADD him I'll be setting an unwanted precedent, but I don't know what the precedent would be.
h)
i) I have his Triptych on my shelf.
j) He's not exactly a KNOWN author with UNknown Books, is he?

I have The Flanders Road on my shelf and keep meaning to get round to it. I think winning the Nobel in the 80's pretty much precludes him from BURIED status, but he is certainly neglected.

Jonathan wrote: "I have The Flanders Road on my shelf and keep meaning to get round to it. I think winning the Nobel in the 80's pretty much precludes him from BURIED status, but he is certainly negle..."

...is what my thoughts were. Any thoughts on The Trolley?

liked it but was not mindblowing - nothing particularly unique

What about Grete Weil? Most of her stuff appears to have been published post-1980, but she does have one (and it's one that actually got translated by Verba Mundi) that was published back in 1963 (Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat). She's got one , and I thought her book Aftershocks: Seven Stories was excellent. 8 books, roughly 31 ratings across the lot.

Ronald wrote: "What about Grete Weil? "

We've got her!!
/topic/show/...

I've got Beethovensraat waiting (waiting for too long, like so many)

Well that saves me a bit of effort! I knew I should have looked.

Might I (I Might) suggest Bryher? She's been on my Radar for a time, so not sure whyIve not dropped her name here, as that's what we love doing, dropping dropped names, so as to pickemup. She seems one of those intereting Muddernists who, tho counting friendly such as Hemingway, Joyce, Stein, and Doolittle, has gone yncommented ypon.

Wyll, yes, of course she is buried. What am I asking permission for? Ah me, but yes again, all "done ... to spite / The great Creator [read: Nate Gaddis]." But our spite still serves His glory to augment. Thots?

Eric wrote: "Might I (I Might) suggest Bryher?"

BURIED!(!)

ADD please.

I recently spotted an old Calder & Boyars paperback for a few pence and picked it up on the strength of their reputation for publishing off-the-beaten-path authors. Originally published in 1962, this one was Paolo Volponi's first novel, The Memorandum (aka My Troubles Began). Interesting and rather odd, but perhaps not compulsive reading. Review at /review/show...

Volponi was the only author to win the Strega Prize twice. He seems to have maintained his reputation in Italy, but is firmly BURIED as far as English-language readers are concerned. This is perhaps not surprising, since it looks like only three of his books have ever been translated. A pity, since some of his many works - particularly Il pianeta irritabile - look enticing. But alas I have no Italian...

Peter wrote: "Originally published in 1962, this one was Paolo Volponi's first novel, The Memorandum (aka My Troubles Began). "

Oh yes! Totally BURIED. ADD please.

I need a judgment on René Crevel - his first couple listed in the GR database have rating counts that might be a bit on the high side (his most "popular" has 65 ratings - thanks to an unearthing by Archipelago Press back in 2005) - but the highest review count is 7.

Just his GR Bio is fascinating:

Crevel was born in Paris to a family of Parisian bourgeoisie. He had a traumatic religious upbringing. At the age of fourteen, during a difficult stage of his life, his father committed suicide by hanging himself. Crevel studied English at the University of Paris. He met André Breton and joined the surrealist movement in 1921, from which he would be excluded in
October 1923 due to Crevel's homosexuality and Breton's belief that the movement had been corrupted. During this period, Crevel wrote novels such as Mon corps et moi ("My Body and Me"). In 1926, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis which made him start using morphine. The 1929 exile of Léon Trotsky persuaded him to rejoin the surrealists. Remaining faithful to André Breton, he struggled to bring communists and surrealists closer together. Much of Crevel's work deals with his inner turmoil at being bisexual. Crevel killed himself by turning on the gas on his kitchen stove the night of 18 June 1935, several weeks before his 35th birthday.

Tough call. Four of his things have been English'd, and fairly recently ; although as I get older I have to remind myself that the '90's is no longer recently. But I've already invested some Librarian time ; so I'd hate to just leave that all to amazon's profit.

194 ratings · 14 reviews · 9 distinct works .......... ; ... ? .... ---; ......................... --):

okay so but remember how The BURIED Book Club is all about MY selfish needs to find books, etc? Well, all I need to do in a difficult case like this is make up some (further) arbitrary criteria in order to justify my inclusion of this HIGHly rate'd BURIED book. So here goes. FOUR books in English from FOUR different backHOE pub'ers. ---most importantly, I see only TWO reviews from what I arbitrarily call MY CORN(er) of gr ; only two names I recognize reviewing this guy ; and only TWO reviews with any quantity of LIKES (whereby, LIKES = EYEballs, ie, people who may have seen the REview, but not read the book, and reading reviews about books is part of knowing about the book's existence and being that much closer to reading the book itSELF).

Have I thoroughly justified my breaking my own arbitrary criteria?

ADD Please. (bold'd for your convenience)

Also, on that Crevel page you'll find :: Atlas Anthology Three, which may contain further nuggets.

Excellent. He hung out with Kay Boyle as well!

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Also, on that Crevel page you'll find :: Atlas Anthology Three, which may contain further nuggets. "

Ugh, 1985 publication, no reprints = 1 copy available @ $80. But damn I want it.

Ronald wrote: "Ugh, 1985 publication, no reprints = 1 copy available @ $80. But damn I want it. "

ACk!

I've not confirmed it, but there appear to be four volumes of Atlas. Edit'd by Alastair Brotchie who wrote the recent bio of Alfred Jarry.

Nathan "N.R."I've not confirmed it, but there appear to be four volumes of Atlas. Edit'd by Alastair Brotchie who wrote the recent bio of Alfred Jarry.

Yes, confirmed - per the Atlas Website:



Atlas Volume 4 is actually Raymond Roussel: Life, Death and Works (edited by Alastair Brotchie) :

The essays and texts in this collection constitute a virtual history of Roussel crticism and exegesis, and they are printed here in chronological order, so far as that is possible. Most are translated for the first time. However, several are not - this and the differing interpretations of translators means that certain passages recur throughout the book in different versions. We have not attempted to harmonise them. The bibliography at the end includes the contents of the present volume and provides full details of first publication, etc.

Which, of course, sounds awesome.

I may have missed someone’s previous post on this, but the World Literature Today issue arrived with a list of gift suggestions for various readers in your life (the Paranoid, the Exiled, the Translator (recommended: the Heim tribute from Three Percent) etc.) and for ‘the Social Critic' they list something that sounds intriguing although Dalkey won’t publish it until July next year:

Octave Mirbeau, 21 Days of a Neurasthenic, Justin Vicari, tr.

(Dalkey Archive Press)

it’s not ‘lost' in English, because there doesn’t seem to be a prior English translation, but only 7 ratings on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ; sounds worth putting on the watch list.

from amazon.uk
Octave Mirbeau, author of the classic satires The Torture Garden and Diary of a Chambermaid (the latter filmed by both Jean Renoir and Luis Bunuel), wrote this scathing and uproarious novel on the very cusp of the twentieth century. Feeling that he's being driven mad by modern life, Georges Vasseur heads off for a rest cure. At a spa town, however, he encounters precisely those things he's been trying to escape: corrupt politicians, amnesiac coquettes, cheerfully sadistic killers, imperialist generals, and quack psychiatrists. Hypocrites are eternal, and not much has changed since Mirbeau wrote this acid portrait of his era.

The full WLT gift list is at

Caroline wrote: "The full WLT gift list is at
... "

That list oughta intrigue a few folks.

Mirbeau, if I'm seeing things correctly, seems to be a bit of a one-hit wonder with several BURIED things behind it and one Chambermaid Diary which most Anglo=readers didn't find DIRTY enough for their satisfaction. Le Calvaire appears to have been English'd ; any others?

ADD please! (with the caveat against that one super=POP-u-l'aire Torture book).

That Neurasthenic book's not made its way into the gr bd yet ::

Octave Mirbeau is fascinating. The Torture Garden is pretty bizarre, but he definitely has tons of buried works. I think including a travelogue written from the perspective of his car?!

Well, I've just joined this group, and it is quite amazing. I've been thinking of various obscure novels that I have read and admired over the years--

Hedayat's The Blind Owl
Mirbeau's Torture Garden
Anna Kavan's Ice
Ortese's The Iguana

--and blimey, they've all been mentioned here and/or reviewed dozens or hundreds of times in Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. I'm going to have to dig deeper, and deeper yet, into my past, to see if I can actually find something that needs unearthing...and meanwhile, I'll start to explore some of the wilder recommendations here....

D.N. wrote: "Hedayat's The Blind Owl
Mirbeau's Torture Garden
Anna Kavan's Ice
Ortese's The Iguana"

You're definitely in the right company!

If Ortese has something of note in addition to The Iguana (whether translated into English or not!) she'd qualify as BURIED.

As a general note re: criteria -- in addition to ridiculously few ratings/reviews (fewer than 30 or 40 ratings or something like that), we're looking for authors whose first major publication is 1985 or before.

Ortese wrote several other books--I've got The Lament of the Linnet and a collection of her stories, A Music Behind the Wall. These are good, especially the stories--and available in English.

Here's someone who hasn't been mentioned: Rosaire Appel, particularly her transiT...I see it has no reviews or ratings. It was published in '93, though, so perhaps too recent. Her work is very fragmentary, like shards of glass scattered about. (She was one of my co-authors at FC2, and a friend--I was living in Mexico in those days, and we wrote long argumentative letters to each other about the nature of art--so I don't know if it is fair to recommend her?)

André Pieyre de Mandiargues -- The Girl Beneath the Lion, The Margin, The Motorcycle -- a few ratings, few reviews, but an excellent, quirky writer.

Friedrich Durrenmatt seems to have almost no mention on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, which is hard to believe, a great Swiss writer. Try "The Assignment, or On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers"

Pierre Louys -- Aphrodite, a lovely turn-of-the-century bit of erotica, with illustrations

Well, that is a quick look through my library. I'll have to do some more brooding and searching through my spotty memories....

Anna Maria Ortese -- BURIED! ADD please! (and especially let us know what's been English'd)

Rosaire Appel -- KNOT! (too recent) but that FC2 tag might catch a few eyes.

André Pieyre de Mandiargues -- Totally BURIED! ADD please!

Friedrich Dürrenmatt -- WAAAY too popular for our CORPSE Blood!

Pierre Louÿs -- from what I see, he's KNOT quite BURIED.

Thanks D.N. Exciting stuff!

Ortese's Lament of the Linnet is certainly in English (cause I have it right here), and I'm comfortable calling it buried -- 93 is still over 20 years ago now, and most of those 39 ratings are surely Italians.

Mandiargues is interesting too, for sure. Another under-read later surrealist, and all the surrealist writers tend to fall by the wayside.

And Pierre Louys -- I've been meaning to read The She-Devils! Thanks for the reminder on all of these!

It'll be a couple weeks before I do the ADD thing--I want to reread these books, it's been years since I read them, and both Ortese and Mandiargues are writers who deserve lingering...I've already well into the Linnet, and it is like wakening in an entirely different world...

Mildly sinister forces are at work obscuring Anna Maria Ortese's works. I looked up Nate D's Lament of the Linnet on Amazon UK, but could not find it. A bit of puzzled searching uncovered, however, several booksellers offering The Grieving Linnet by the same author. Yet more searching suggested this latter book does not exist, despite having an ISBN. Title confusion mystery...

I was also disconcerted to find that Ortese's The Iguana claims to be "a memoir in which the author describes her isolated childhood in the Australian outback" (). Struth, bit of a surprise for an Italian sheila. Continental confusion mystery...

Blimey! Sinister forces indeed!

There are several copies of Lament of the Linnet available from Abebooks , although if you want a copy that is not ex-library, it is surprisingly expensive. I have an unread copy of the book published by the superb Harvill Press (it cost me 3 euro a few years ago). I will begin it soon.

Carry on with the Ortese discussion in her shiny new thread? /topic/show/...

Ali wrote: "Jean Dutourd? "

ADD Please! Yes!

Another local secondhand bookshop shut as everything moves on-line...but at least I picked up a few things at the closing-down sale. Among them, a volume of short stories by Curtis Zahn.

From what I can discover, Zahn had a Malibu beach house in the 1950s/60s which doubled as an arts workshop - painting, poetry, theatre, fiction, in all of which he dabbled himself. He seems to have known a lot of novelists and poets of the time. The 1968 Penguin paperback American Contemporary collects some (most? all?) of his short stories. Nothing dramatic, but I quite liked them. More impressionistic than experimental and very much linked to urban/suburban postwar California. Dimly reminds me of some other writer, though I can't think of a name. Someone I read too long ago. Review at /review/show....

Unsurprisingly, Zahn is BURIED, but there is not a lot to unearth. I searched around and added a slim booklet of poems and half a dozen playscripts to his works, but that's about it. Not a writer I am especially keen to ADD...but perhaps worth flying a small flag for.

Peter wrote: "Not a writer I am especially keen to ADD...but perhaps worth flying a small flag for. "

Then the small flag flying shall suffice! Too bad about that novel never getting written to the end.

Frank Stanford. Particularly his epic The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You from 1977. Reprinted in 2000 (and still in print?) and yet remarkably hard to find anywhere save for the internet. ~400 page poem without any punctuation on the Ozarks, racism, America, death, and dreams. 309 Ratings and 34 reviews. Few wellread people (fellow poets even) who I have met are aware of him.

/book/show/9...

Griffin wrote: "Frank Stanford. Particularly his epic The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You from 1977. Reprinted in 2000 (and still in print?) and yet remarkably hard to find anywhere save for the interne..."

You won't believe this, but he's kind of popular by the arcane standards of the BBC (especially for poetry!). I think that's probably a bit insane sounding. But 34 likes and 3.4 reviews is more the depth of BURIAL we're looking for explicitly. (none of that matters in regard to dropping his name in this thread which can't hurt at all)

How about LeRoi Jones' fiction? His collection of short stories, Tales (which I had to add to the GR database, and has since shored up a total of 4 ratings), and his novel The System of Dante's Hell (a total of 64 ratings and 4 reviews) are complex, fractured, and interesting texts. Worth being exhumed by modern readers.

Tales: /book/show/2...

TSODH: /book/show/4...

Griffin wrote: "How about LeRoi Jones' fiction? His collection of short stories, Tales [...]The System of Dante's Hell..."

Looks like a gr db mess! Tales is the same as Tales of the Out & the Gone which has some (relatively) healthy numbers. It'd be good if a Librarian could merge these two author profiles.

But I can go with an ADD for The System of Dante's Hell in the BURIED Books by KNOWN authors folder ::
/topic/group...
ADD please!!

Nathan, there is actually no overlap of material between Tales and Tales of the Out & Gone. The former is much more experimental/wilder/weirder and dates from '68. The latter is collected previously uncollected stories (as is the case for "Norman's Date" from Playboy) and previously unpublished old (from the '70s) and new (21st century) material . The contents of Tales has been collected in The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka from 2000, but still only has 19 ratings (even as a recent republish!!): /book/show/7...

Looks to have remained BURIED despite the goodhearted attempts at digging.

The error on that Tales of the Out & Gone page seems to be someone accrediting an edition of it as an edition of the earlier Tales. The overlap in titles is the source of all of this confusion, not their contents!

More than happy to take your word over the word of the gr db which is always of dubious help in all matters BURIED! ADD the Tales too, but I'm more comfortable with that KNOWN Author folder -- he's got heaps of popular stuff, but we still need some spade'ing of his fiction it would appear.

Any Librarians hearing this? Two author profiles + a jumble of books that need dis-merging.

A librarian speaks... I have probably made matters worse, but I have tried to disentangle the two Tales and cross-connect the two authors.

I also note that I have had a copy of the original Tales sitting on the shelf for such a long time that I can't remember whether I ever read it or not. I really should exhume my own bookshelves before anything else...

Much thanks Peter! And let us know what you find when you SPADE into those bookshelves of yours!

I nominate Ana María Matute (1925-2014)

She's pretty celebrated in Spain, but only a handful of her books have been translated to English and the combined number of ratings for those books (including Spanish and English readers) is 116. The last of her books translated into English have been in the late 80s.

Here are the ones that I found available in English: /review/list...

I just read School of the Sun. It is a masterpiece: /review/show...

Here's an article about her life:

Jimmy wrote: "I nominate Ana María Matute (1925-2014)"

Despite a few OUTrageously HUGE numbers on a few of her titles, I've gotta say ::

ADD please!

Her ridiculously popular Olvidado Rey Gudú is FAT and NEED's an Englishing (although it is of recent vintage).

There's a weird thing that though she Spanish be, her second most pop'ul'air title is in Persian in the gr db.

She has the valuable Wendy Walker seal of approval.

There's really not much reading of her being performed in English, in general.

(and specifically, Jimmy, thanks for the links ; makes the Com-mit-tee Work easier)

Yay! Thanks :) I'll add now

"May I add, please?" ~~ No. You may not...