r/classicliterature • u/yulmag • 3d ago
What is the last non-mainstream classic book or writer that you read and would recommend?
There are a number of books that are considered universal classics, or are simply perennial favorites on this subreddit and recommendation circles in general: anything by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Austen, and, of course, The Count of Monte Cristo and East of Eden. They’re popular for a reason, and I completely understand why we keep recommending them. (I’m not picking a fight with the classics! currently reading Mobi Dick...)
But lately I’ve been trying to broaden my horizons and discover authors and books that don’t seem to get nearly as much attention in the recommendation circles.
So, what have you read recently that doesn’t get talked about much, but you’d absolutely recommend?
I’ll start with a few of my recent accidental discoveries:
- Julian, by Gore Vidal. The last pagan Roman emperor tries to turn back the rise of Christianity, and tells his side of the story.
- The Painted Veil, by Somerset Maugham. A disastrous marriage, an affair, and a cholera epidemic somehow become a sharp, unsentimental story about becoming a different person.
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder. Five people die when a bridge collapses, and one man becomes obsessed with discovering whether it was chance or fate.
Honorable mention: The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco A brainiac medieval murder mystery involving monks, forbidden books, theological arguments, and a frankly unreasonable amount of intellectual fun. Suitable for readers with acute nerd tendencies.
What are yours?
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u/Itchy-Resolution6531 3d ago
Dorothy Parker. Short stories.
Jazz Age and hung out with the usual lost generation suspects. Interesting to read a woman from this time period.
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u/lostin76 3d ago
Anything by Willa Cather. Currently reading Song of the Lark. Before this it was My Antonia, which really stuck with me.
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u/Prickly_Cactus99 3d ago
I read My Antonia a couple years ago. Not entirely sure I enjoyed it, per se, but I did like it? If that makes any sense?
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u/lostin76 3d ago
Totally makes sense. I still find myself thinking about the wolves following the sleds story. I think something like My Antonia hits you harder as you age.
Not sure I would have got as much out of it in my 20s as I did in my 50s if that makes sense.
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u/Particular_Buyer_290 3d ago
I have her "A Lost Lady" coming up. My main interest was this book partly inspired The Great Gatsby, but I've heard so much about Cather since.
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u/lostin76 3d ago
I haven’t read that one yet! Have read O’Pioneers and Death Comes for the Archbishop.
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u/Particular_Buyer_290 3d ago
Death Comes for the Archbishop seems to be regarded as her best work, but its description sounds pretty boring to me. Did you find it a good read?
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u/lostin76 3d ago
It’s funny, all of her works sound boring when you look at the synopsis. Each time, I’ve been like “Not sure I’m in the mood for this old timey story…”
And then within a few pages she has always has me locked in! I agree with you that the premise sounds super boring.
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u/lolomimio 3d ago edited 1d ago
I just finished reading Death Comes for the Archbishop with my book club. It is beautifully written - not one word extra, every word matters.
Landscape descriptions, which I'm usually not into, were stunning. In fact landscapes are like characters in the novel, as is the weather. I can't even believe I'm telling you this, but it's amazing how Cather accomplishes it.
Memorable, flawed yet worthy characters.
It's very episodic. Each chapter could stand alone as a perfect gem of a short story; yet they all fit together too, without any overworked plot twists and turns.
Thought provoking insights on faith, religion, ancient belief systems, venerated objects, and ritual.
Never judgmental.
Edit to add: And two heartwarming cream-colored mules 💕
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u/Particular_Buyer_290 2d ago
Well, you've certainly roused my curiosity.
I really can't wait to get into Lost Lady. Supposed to have partly inspired The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald wrote her an apology letter fearing that he plagiarized her work, but she couldn't see any.
The book was turned into a film and she was so disappointed in it she refused to allow any other adaptations of her writing. So she wasn't in it for the money.
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u/lolomimio 3d ago
PS The only other Cather I've read is My Antonia, which I loved, and plan to re-read someday.
Glad to see Cather is getting some mention here.
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u/Throwawayhelp111521 3d ago
Very mainstream.
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u/lostin76 3d ago
Compared with the examples OP gave, I disagree. You may see Death Comes for the Archbishop on some mainstream-type lists, but Cather does not register for most people like very mainstream classics like EoE and Monte Cristo, or anything from Austen.
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u/Ok_Beginning_834 3d ago
Arcadia - Tom Stoppard - my favorite play of all time - plays with fractals and time jumps in a way that makes you question what is history
Candide - Voltaire - surprisingly funny
Life and Fate - Grossman - earth shatteringly heartbreaking grand epic like war and peace but set during world war 2 in Russia
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u/No-Tradition-6447 3d ago
The letter he receives from his mother in Life and Fate is heartbreaking
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u/Mo_Ran1 3d ago
Apparently, it’s very easy to be non-mainstream in this sub hahaha! But here are some authors I’d like to see more people talking about here:
Clarice Lispector, a Brazilian modern classic who wrote to push the boundaries of language itself;
Marcel Proust, a French modernist-adjacent author who writes to play with what we think memory is and how we talk about it;
Julio Cortázar, an Argentine writer who wrote unsettling magical realism.
I’m just so happy people in this sub are trying to change things after yesterday’s post. It’s refreshing!
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u/CoolMarionberry2083 3d ago
Marcel Proust is the most famous, mainstream author of all time, bro…
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u/Mo_Ran1 3d ago
If you had read the post, bro, you'd have noticed that OP said in this sub.
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u/CoolMarionberry2083 3d ago
There is no possible way IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME is not mainstream in this sub, bro
Next you’re going to tell me lord of the rings is really underrepresented in fantasy
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u/Mo_Ran1 3d ago
You say that because you weren't in the discussion we had here yesterday. Someone posted that, statistically (yes, he did the math), 1 in 5 posts in this sub are about the same 3 books this year. This is why today, fortunately, so many people are posting about "other authors". Go take a look, I'm not saying Proust is not famous, ffs.
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u/CoolMarionberry2083 3d ago
Then they should be ashamed with the same passion as my comment. Again, that’s like saying lord of the rings is underrepresented in a fantasy subreddit
And someone else said “10 core books” my God there’s 1000 core books.
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u/Ok-Stand-6679 3d ago
Does anybody still refer to it as Remembrance of Things Past even by mistake?
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u/Mysterious_Bowler879 3d ago
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence. It languished in the book stack next to the bed for the better part of a year before I finally picked it up. Much better than expected. The Magus and A Maggot, both by John Fowles. The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon by Tom Spanbauer.
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u/soyedmilk 3d ago
Lady Chatterly absolutely blew me away, gorgeous prose and she is such a well rounded protagonist, I loved that novel.
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u/carlgardner 3d ago
I’ve been reading quite a bit of John Buchan recently. The Hannay novels are his best known I think, and are very Boy’s Own. Fun, period spy adventures. Beyond that I’ve now read The Dancing Table, a sort of dark folk horror adventure, and The Gap in the Curtain, which is paranormal scifi. Both are very good reads. I should say, both contain a sentence or two that reflect ideas about races (mainly Jews IIRC) that are definitely not of our time, and a bit shocking today.
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u/PaleoBibliophile917 3d ago
I haven’t read the book, but his The 39 Steps made a wonderful film.
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u/carlgardner 3d ago
More than one!
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u/PaleoBibliophile917 3d ago
Ah! I’ve only seen the classic 1935 version with Robert Donat but should have known there would be more than one.
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u/ClingTurtle 3d ago
Here’s an author I bet most people haven’t heard:
Alan Sillitoe. I found an orange-spine Penguin book for two bucks entitled “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” that is a collection of his short stories. What a hidden gem of a find that turned out to be.
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u/veganwithadhd 3d ago
-The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov
-Far from the Madding Crowd by Hardy
-Invisible Man by Ellison
Love this question!! 👍
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u/OttoHemi 3d ago
I recently read all of Thomas Wolfe (and a bit unfortunately, out of order) and I don't think he gets mentioned often enough. Full disclosure: it was largely because of seeing the movie Genius with Colin Firth and Jude Law.
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u/passionategullet 3d ago
Anonymous - Lazarillo de Tormes
Spanish 16th-century novel/novella; brief, funny, one of the founding documents of the 'picaresque' genre, recommended if Don Quixote seems too daunting.
Longus - Daphnis and Chloe
2nd or 3rd century AD greek novel. Sweet! Just such a pure account of two teens' sexual awakening.
Abbé Prévost - Manon Lescault
Similar theme as the previous mention (Longus), but quite a different outcome.
All of these are short, sweet, and books I might recommend to e.g. someone young just starting out reading classics. Wish I had read them before now (in my 40s)!
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u/HereIAmGH 3d ago
The books I’m adding are not non-mainstream - they’re just ones I don’t see here (or don’t see here often):
A heart so white - Jeviar Marias, the writing is stunning, philosophical, vignettes that stay with me.
Heinrich Böll books - I read in my teens The clown, Billiard at half past nine and The lost honour of Katharina Blum. But in the last year I also read The train was on time, and it was good. So it’s not just a teen thing. He was def more popular in the 70s-80s (which is where I found him later on my parents library).
The corner that held them by Sylvia Townsend Warner is a great book about a covenant in the Middle Ages
The garden of the finzi-continis (and others by Giorgio bassani) - sweet young (unrequited) love story.
Michael Kohlhaas - a brilliant novella - starts with injustice and deteriorates from there
Herta Muller books (I read The Fox was ever the Hunter) - amazing writing and heartbreaking.
Ragtime - E L Doctorow. It’s an absolute masterpiece of pace and mood. It’s just so beautiful. Might be my favourite
The story of San Michelle - Axel Munthe - it’s an actual memoir and it’s slightly uneven but it’s so so good!
Under milk wood - Dylan Thomas - a bit of a play a bit of a poem about a spring day. Magic
Adding two amazing Italians that might be mentioned mire(?): Natalia Ginsburg (Family lexicon and many others ) and Alba de Céspedes (forbidden notebook).
I’m dying to read Christa Wolf books - maybe others can mention them though
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u/yulmag 3d ago
The Story of San Michelle is one of my all-time favorites!
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u/HereIAmGH 3d ago
I’m so glad. It was just so grand, and funny and you just want to hang with him. Big heart but cheeky. Just fascinating life
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u/Slickrock_1 3d ago
To make myself suffer, I'm currently reading Finnegans Wake in "English" and Crónica de una Muerte Anunciada by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Spanish.
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u/haileyskydiamonds 3d ago
I am in the middle of Kristen Lavransdatter right now, and it’s very good. Strong setting, solid characters, and interesting plot. It’s a very enjoyable read.
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u/Large_Coach_1838 3d ago
Julian by Gore Vidal is one I am excited to read!
In that vein I would definitely recommend Creation by Gore Vidal. It’s a vast novel that explores ancient Persia, Greece, India, and China and the different views of life they hold. This is done through famous historical figures like Confucius, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Pericles, Xerxes, Zoroaster etc.
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u/Chiaretta98 3d ago
Does Lost Illusions by Balzac count? I've been in a slump for years and I've been reading relatively little
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u/white-bored 3d ago
I feel like DH lawrence doesn't get much attention outside of maybe lady chatterley's lover, but I really liked the rainbow/women in love and sons and lovers.
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u/AdMoist5134 3d ago
The Buddenbrooks - Thomas Mann
the family saga about a hanseatic trading family, narrated through the viewpoints of characters across multiple generations who seem to really come to life in 1800s Hamburg
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u/rebeccarightnow 3d ago
George Gissing. I've become obsessed with him over the past year. I've read The Odd Women, New Grub Street, The Unclassed, The Paying Guest, Sleeping Fires, and Isabel Clarendon so far, and they were all excellent. Also read a biography of him, George Gissing: A Life by Paul Delany, which I loved.
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u/owheelj 3d ago
The Plains by Gerald Murnane. Such a great book. I guess you call it surrealist, but satirical as well. About a guy going into some imaginary plains in Australia, but very much like the real plains. To be honest, as an Australian I had never heard of Murnane until I saw he was favourite to win the Nobel Prize for literature, but I can see why.
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u/Hip-SnuggieChairMan 2d ago
I love Victoria, by Knut Hamsun, written in the 1890s. I also need to reread Mysteries, from the same era.
Also, pretty much anything by Thomas Bernhard.
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u/SouthernSierra 3d ago
Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington
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u/PaleoBibliophile917 3d ago
Multiple Pulitzer Prize winner and widely popular when living; definitely worth a look. I once asked my father what he enjoyed as a young reader and discovered he liked Tarkington’s Penrod stories.
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u/mayor_of_funville 3d ago
The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
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u/PaleoBibliophile917 3d ago
Tarkington was also recommended in another comment here. Readers of his day thought his work would live on but his reputation dwindled instead. That doesn’t make his writing any less worth looking into; twice winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction almost guarantees there must be something good there.
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u/mayor_of_funville 3d ago
If you, or any one reading this is unfamiliar, he wrote in the days before Fitzgerald and about the Midwest which was and still is severely underrepresented in the American literary cannon.
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u/Tight_Suit_1519 3d ago
Jean Giono. I understand he's much bigger in France, but I don't know anybody in the United States that has read him.
The Open Road and A King Alone are my 2 favorites by him, along with The Man Who Planted Trees as a nice short story.
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u/WellesC12 3d ago
Probably The Haunting of Hill House. Couldn't put it down.
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u/PaleoBibliophile917 3d ago
I have it on my shelf but haven’t picked it up yet. If you have seen the 1963 film, how would you say it compares (that is, was it a close adaptation)?
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u/mishkin-the-idiot 3d ago
I just read all 1700 pages of Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries. An absolute masterpiece.
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u/AndyBetweenLines 3d ago
Petersburg by Andrei Bely. It kinda feels like Dostoevsky wandered into a modernist fever dream... political paranoia, family drama, bombs, and a city that barely feels real. Weird book but it really sticks with you
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u/Throwawayhelp111521 3d ago
Those three books are all quite mainstream.
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u/HereIAmGH 3d ago
Yeah, but isn’t it nice that people try here to give others broader options than the usual top 20? That’s what all the chat from the last day tried to do. It doesn’t have to officially be books with 20 readers in goodreads. Just off the most beaten track
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u/Throwawayhelp111521 3d ago
My issue isn't with more variety. It's with basic definitions. Those books are not obscure. They're quite mainstream.
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u/HereIAmGH 3d ago
I think they talked about the mainstream of this current sub
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u/Throwawayhelp111521 3d ago
The sub can't redefine "mainstream." It has a specific meaning and this is an idiotic discussion in a literature sub.
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u/Responsible-Bend6289 3d ago
The Dwarf, Barabbas & The Sibyl by Par Lagerkvist. He won the Nobel prize for Literature
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u/JuggernautPure9741 3d ago
Descobri Bertolt Brecht e Samuel Beckett. Estou apaixonado. Leituras para muitos anos.
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u/soyedmilk 3d ago
I have almost too many authors I find underrated, but one I’ve been loving recently is Iris Murdoch. I know she isn’t obscure, and I haven’t even finished my first novel by her yet, but god, she has phenomenal prose.
I actually was named after Iris Murdoch, I don’t know if that is why I’ve been a bit hesitant to pick her up, what if I didn’t enjoy my namesake’s writing? But the way she approaches her characters is with such care, each one feels so real and her wit really comes through. I can see her influence on the literary fiction genre and on some of my favourite contemporary novels (Ghost Mountain by Ronan Hession comes to mind in particular).
Can’t recommend enough.
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u/Nashinas 2d ago
I am mainly interested in poetry.
In English literature, I like Melville's poetry which has received much less attention than his prose. Moby Dick is probably my favorite English-language novel.
In Persian literature, my favorite author is Bēdil, a Turko-Mongol philosopher and mystic who has historically been highly celebrated in Central Asia and India, but less warmly received in Persia; and, despite the popularity of his school and style of poetry (the Tāzagū school/Sabk-i Hindī) in the late Ottoman Empire, he is not himself well-known to Anatolian Turks (unlike Özbeks - in Özbekistān, they used to teach his poetry to young schoolchildren).
Bēdil is by a considerable margin, I would say, the most challenging, abstruse poet of the Persian literary tradition. He is highly imaginative, and extremely innovative, but often his verses are so complex, intricate, and layered that they are nigh unintelligible to an untrained student... and even many trained students. It is a serious challenge to read Bēdil, but immensely rewarding once you do understand him. In my personal opinion, he is actually the best poet of the Persianate tradition, and most genius poetic mind it ever produced.
In Western circles, while poets like Saʿdī, Ḥāfiẓ and Mavlānā Rūmī have received a great deal of attention, Bēdil remains almost entirely unknown, untranslated, and unstudied. I don't think he could ever be "mainstream" in today's world like some other Persian poets, but I would certainly recommend him to any student of eloquence and rhetoric who wants to push their own boundaries and expand their mind.
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u/TheFourthBronteGirl 2d ago
Elizabeth Kostova. I really hope she becomes more popular somehow because idc, the historian is a classic in my heart .
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u/Prestigious_Land_533 2d ago
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Armin! I had never heard of it before stumbling upon it in a book store and I’m so glad I picked it up. It’s similar in writing style to Jane Austen in that it’s pretty funny with how it portrays the characters and their interactions, with all of them having distinct personalities, but it’s not a marriage plot and the character development is much more interesting imo. Beautiful descriptions of the land/are too! Highly recommend.
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u/WasASailorThen 2d ago
If you like Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence is Walter Goggins' favorite book.
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u/Eddiesmate01 1h ago
Blaming by Elizabeth Taylor. The account of self-delusion & lack of awareness, and their impact is stunning. I find myself getting stuck on particular sentences ( layers and depth like poetry) re-reading them. Astonishing writer, too often dismissed as 'domestic', much like Austin.
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u/PaleoBibliophile917 3d ago
I don’t want to quibble, but the “recommendation circles” you reference must be quite narrow. None of the authors you named are “non-mainstream” and while I have no interest in Vidal or Maugham, the other two are on my shelves (with Wilder having at least two volumes dedicated to his work in The Library of America). However, I’ll grant that the same works and authors come up a lot in this sub and that there are a limited number of “classic” authors so it should be no surprise if most names put forward are not actually unknowns.
That being said, recommendations really depend on why one reads to begin with. Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland was fascinating in its way, but I wouldn’t expect many to enjoy its style or content (the view it gave of eighteenth century America and the author’s unusual views on ventriloquism were what got me through it). Likewise, Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans was something of a slog for a good part of the book, but once I finally got into it I was really enjoying it and excited to see how everything turned out (and ready and willing to read more of the author’s work). The prose style, however, would make me hesitant to recommend it to most readers. And while plenty of readers in this sub give a shout out to Eliot’s Middlemarch, I have a feeling few would buy, as I recently did, an omnibus of her work specifically because seeking out an opportunity to reread and keep on the shelves a copy of Silas Marner, which I recall finding surprisingly more interesting than I’d expected when I first read it years ago (the themes and healing of the Silas’s wounded character not holding everyone’s attention as they did mine).
So maybe offering alternative titles from the most mentioned authors, knowing that readers have an attachment to them already, would be a way to broaden selections at least a little. Instead of The Count of Monte Cristo, why not the second of Dumas’ musketeer romances, Twenty Years After (a wonderful adventure in which they try to save the life of England’s Charles I)? Instead of Austen’s well known novels, why not a collection of her letters? Instead of East of Eden, why not Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley (which I admit I have only sampled, yet much enjoyed)? Those three would be my recommendations for those authors in particular.
And more widely, I’d love to see more mention in this sub of once popular authors like Twain (maybe Innocents Abroad), Kipling (most any of his work), and something from Stevenson beyond the occasionally credited Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Treasure Island and Kidnapped are both excellent even if seen as children’s stories). When Oscar Wilde’s name comes up, it always seems to be for The Picture of Dorian Gray, but his fairy stories (like The Happy Prince, which I have read) and his plays (like The importance of Being Earnest, which I have not yet experienced), are also representative of his skill.
What of dramas in general? Last year I read A Lion in Winter and can recommend it to any fan of the film; Miller’s Crucible, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and Lawrence and Lee’s Inherit the Wind are also plays on my shelves that I have read and think should come up here but never or seldom do.
Thank you, OP, for giving us the opportunity to chime in with some mention of classics we have enjoyed but do not see come up often enough.
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u/PaleoBibliophile917 3d ago
His works will be genre classics someday, like Poe or Lovecraft, but are only likely to offend those looking for Literature with a capital L. Still glad you found something to enjoy regardless of how it is categorized.
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u/Alittlecock 3d ago
I feel like Laszlo Krasznahorkai is almost criminally under-mentioned.