Everyone knows the stuff we all get assigned in school, but what about the really obscure, seldom mentioned works by great authors? The two that spring most readily to mind for me are:
Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare–I was SO surprised that a movie was made of it–so dreadfully over the top, I loved it! Kept laughing out loud in the movie theater, good thing it was one of those places that serves beer and everyone tends toward the rowdy.
Never Bet The Devil Your Head by Edgar Allen Poe–This is one you never see, more’s the pity. The story is absolutely hilarious and you gotta love a character named Toby Dammit.
Accross the River and into the Trees-Papa wanted it to be his great WWII novel and instead it isn’t even a good potboiler. It is so delightfully bad I am surprised that it hasn’t been made into a movie.
The Fifth Column-Hemingway’s one foray into being a playwright. I searched for years to find a copy of this play and when I finally did, boy was I sorry. To a certain extent I really would like to see this produced just to see how bad it was on stage.
One by Alexander Dumas:
Vicomte de Bragelonne: Ten Years Later-When I was in college I read The Three Musketeers and the Man in the Iron Mask (the subtitle is 20 years Later) and loved them (a college professor once stopped me as I was leaving his class and asked me what I had been reading so diligently during his lecture. When I showed him, he said, “Oh, the way you were pouring over it, I thought maybe it was porn”). I was glancing through something and noticed that, in fact, the books I had read were the first and third books of a trilogy. I set to work finding the middle book, Vicomte de Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. Nobody had it. it took me almost 12 years of off-and-on searching, but I found a copy. I discovered something. Long out of print books are long out of print for a reason. It was terrible.
Villette, Charlotte Bronte’s last completed novel. It’s really a better book than Jane Eyre (in my opinion, anyway), but it’s never been as popular because it doesn’t have the readily sympathetic heroine or the Hollywood ending.
I also like most obscure Shakespeare, especially the Henry VI plays (I wrote my masters’ thesis about them) and Troilus and Cressida. Titus Andronicus is great fun too – you’ve got to love a play with stage directions like, “Enter a messenger with two heads and a hand.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe is ONLY known for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” today, but she also wrote an hilarious 1871 novel called “Pink and White Tyranny.” It’s about a bubble-headed gold digger who hooks herself a rich, naive husband—I have a first edition, chock full of wonderful ink illustrations.
It’s been reissued and is pretty easy to find—grab it!
I’m fond of J. R. R. Tolkien’s last story, Smith of Wootton Major (1967). It is very sad in tone, a departure from the optimism of his more famous works. Its theme is the loss of enchantment. It’s also a very weird and beautiful story.
The short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville. I was so bored by Moby-Dick that I wouldn’t have even looked twice at “Bartleby” if I’d known right away that its author was Melville. It’s everything Moby-Dick and Typee are not: concise, not obsessed with nautical references, and enigmatic without trying to be.
Not only have I read Wyrms but I adored it and forced several of my friends to read it, most of whom responded with “Yea, I can see how that has affected your life.”
So, yes, I love that book. (For more OSC goodness check out his website and read the short story “Homeless in Hell”)
A humble novella (coming in under 120 pages) from the author of Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and The Glass-Bead Game, TJTTE may be the most dreamlike and mystical of Hesse’s books.
As an old hippie/beatnik who likes to believe in humanity’s long esoteric tradition, this is my fave.
Extra points for working in ultra-cool real-life artists Max Klinger and Paul Klee as minor characters.
Not great, meaningful literature, but I found it very funny and charming: Once On A Time by A.A. Milne. It’s not a children’s book; I think Milne called it an “adult fairy tale.”
I used to have a cat named for a character in this book, the Countess Belvane. If a cat ever turned into a human, it would be exactly like Belvane.
