Obscure/Lesser Known Books

Hi,
I'm looking to find some obscure or lesser known books. Not that I dislike the classics and popular literature, but I would like to try to find something different that is still a good read.
I mostly enjoy fiction, but non-fiction can be good too if its an interesting topic/is exciting.
Any good blogs about books you know of would be helpful, too.

Thanks!

James Sherwood - Stradella
It's fairly well known, but dude doesn't have a Wikipedia page, so . . . I dunno. I think it rates pretty high for very good American prose (though I also rate Louise Fitzhugh high, too, so maybe I'm not a good judge). Supposedly erotic, but the erotic scenes are written surrealistically, like Stradella lassooing with the narrator's dick. Published in the early sixties, but sometimes it seems as if it were written in the Roaring Twenties and I can't put my finger on why.

Henriette Martin & Gita Lewis - Naked Eye
Weird hardboiled sci-fi novel from '51, I think, that won't stay on track, like they want to talk about fine art or something instead of write a hardboiled (sci-fi) novel. Involves a man with eye implants trying to exonerate the dude whose eyes he has. Have not been able to determine if it was written pseudonymously, but if it was I would like to know by whom.

Akiyuki Nosaka - The Pornographers
More descriptive than Imamura's movie about the business and culture of pornography in Japan in the fifties and early sixties. Satirical, but not a satire. Anthropological. Sometimes uncanny pathos.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head.

THE Naked Eye. Sorry.

These sound really interesting, I will have to look for them. Thanks!

A good place to start your search: http://www.neglectedbooks.com/

William Maxwell - The Folded Leaf. A most different kind of coming-of-age novel.

Joseph Roth - The Radetsky March

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruges-la-Morte

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41DWYCXSFVL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA240_SH20_OU01_.jpg

junkies & dealers on the lower east side of NYC circa 1982. neo-beat poetics and gritty realism combined. tightly plotted, sharply drawn characters. the author's ear for street lingo is unerring. will give you nightmares.

"delancey street crackled shameless like a neon leper colony"

^^brings new meaning to the term "on the money"

A good place to start your search: http://www.neglectedbooks.com/

― When two tribes go to war, he always gets picked last (James Morrison), Thursday, 6 August 2009 23:28

Cool website!

I thought of another one:
Arfur a novel by music writer Nik Cohn about, uh, pinball and zen, I guess. I think he says he gave the Who the idea for Tommy, but I dunno about that.

Oh, Blue Bamboo by Osamu Dazai. A little different than some of the more elegiac stuff he's known better for in the West. They're all fairy tales, but the first and last, the bookends, feature this family telling the stories, so that they're stories within stories, and the family approximately resembles a Japanese version of Salinger's Glass family.

IVotes in my Hole, a blog that covers mainly books from the late 1940s--some pretty obscure.

http://www.salon.com/books/bag/1999/04/12/wallace/ - the Kosinski especially is a startling read.

Thanks so much for all the recommendations, everyone!
That website looks very helpful, and I'm excited about a bunch of these books.

*The websites look
sorry

Still want to find I Am Your Brother by GS Marlowe (pen name of Gabriel Beer-Hoffman)

Short piece here -

http://www.nsl.com/papers/marlowe.htm

G. S. Marlowe, the author of the extraordinary cult success, now forgotten, called I am Your Brother (1935), which sounds a little like ‘The Dunwich Horror’ with a London setting. Maclaren-Ross, who adapted the book for an unproduced radio drama in 1938, refers in Memoirs of the Forties to ‘the repulsive mother of the schizophrenic young composer, shuffling and snuffling around the Soho markets in search of offal on which to nourish her other, perhaps imaginary son: a monster product of maybe artificial insemination, who lived in an attic above his brother’s studio and had to be fed raw liver and fairy stories once a day’

WOAAH! I collect this kind of vintage weird fiction, and I've never heard of this one - will investigate.

This site hasn't been updated for years, but there's interesting stuff there:

http://freepages.pavilion.net/tartarus/lost.html

x post. I'd be interested to see what you find out. Calling it 'an extraordinary cult success' seems to sugggest that there are copies out there, but the only ones I've ever found are going for silly money -

http://www.abaa.org/books/94462656.html

There's an archived review from Time here as well -

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,754584,00.html

Only realised after I posted the link that your article originated from The Lost Club. There are copies at abebooks for less, but it's definitely too rich for my blood.

xpost to Omar - Bruges La Morte is well worth reading, and I believe an opera was based on the book.

Yeah, forgot to say, Bruges la Morte is really interesting.

I really love Edward Dahlberg, who I have a hard time finding in print, so I guess he counts - have only read Can These Bones Live in full, but it was absolutely fantastic

I soooooo want to read this book:
http://pictures.abebooks.com/READINK/1269482446.jpg

Oh, I wondered where I had seen that name Dahlberg before (it was Bottom Dogs).

Nice cover scan. Asked about Gabriel Marlowe on a vintage horror group I'm a member of, and have had no response yet. This is a surprise in itself, as the board includes collectors, academics and small-press reprint publishers; if no-one there knows about the book, it has to be really obscure. I'll keep digging.

I found this on Marlowe. Mysterious!

Hah! Already posted. Sorry for lazy thread-readage.

"There are no customer reviews yet" for Henry Bean's excellent False Match, which I read years ago and somehow lost. Just bought a 50¢ copy. Plus shipping.

This book as well has haunted me: Give Sorrow Words. It's completely depressing! You won't be able to put it down.

"I really love Edward Dahlberg, who I have a hard time finding in print, so I guess he counts - have only read Can These Bones Live in full, but it was absolutely fantastic"

you HAVE to read BECAUSE I WAS FLESH! one of the best books ever. i think its his masterpiece. and its an autobio at that.

"He married R'Lene LaFleur Howell in 1950."

R'LENE!!!!!!!

http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/

One of the guys who does this has some other curious ones, too: http://www.blogger.com/profile/17890509406570628152

Thanks for the Wormwoodiana blog link. I subscribe to the hardcopy Wormwood journal, which is excellent, but I hadn't heard about this. Lots of great stuff there.

Might well be worth dropping them a line about Gabriel Marlowe.

scott - as soon as my library access gets set up I'm gonna try to get it!

Anyone read any Jacques Spitz? I was going through some old notebooks the other day and found a note on him. Early 20th Century science fiction writer - he wrote one called L'Homme Élastique (Fall fans!) and one about the Americans creating a new world to live on. I seem to remember Le Vent du Monde sounded interesting as well.

Two more sites:

For obscure Canadian lit: http://brianbusby.blogspot.com/
For obscure Californian lit: http://readingcalifornia.typepad.com/reading_california_fictio/

Dammit, I am sick of it sitting in the middle of this thread looking interesting and mysterious. I am going to the British Library on Saturday specifically to read I Am Your Brother. Will report back.

Can't see much about Beer-Hoffmann - if you play with the number of effs and ens in his name, he's in library cats for a play preface, and in a Broadway database as a producer, and on what I think (it's in German) is a list of pre-WWII Austrian exiles in England. Guess he's related to this guy. Ah - yes. Google books sort of confirms he's his son.

anyone ever read snail by richard miller? looks like one of those shaggy pynchon/vonnegut/dick surreal 60's/70's novels, but it came out in 1984. i got a copy a week or two ago and i might give it a whirl. blurbs on the back by ferlinghetti, s.clay wilson, and william burroughs. about a nazi given an elixir by biblical wandering jew and then he turns into a snail at some point. and there is time-travel involved.

I am going to the British Library on Saturday specifically to read I Am Your Brother.

That's nothing. I actually dragged my arse out of my armchair and went upstairs just now to pull out Memoirs of the '40s to see what else MacLaren-Ross has to say -

There's some stuff about how I Am Your Brother has already been out of print for many years, 'copies of it now fetching £2 or more', but that 'at the time it had not only a critical success but got into the bestseller lists as well: very surprisingly, for Marlowe's staccato cinematic style was in direct contrast to that used by most bestsellers of the day. Also, since by the very nature of the story delusions were often fused with reality and vaudeville humour with scenes of Gothic nightmare, it was not always easy to tell what the novel was about or how many of the incidents happened outside the mind of the protaganist.'

JMR is invited round to Marlowe's flat in Kensington

I had formed from reading Marlowe's work a mental picture of him as aa short thin waspish man of middle-age, dark and slightly sinister perhaps, certainly sardonic: also it had not occurred to me that he would be anything but English. The off-beat quality of his books arose from an extremely individual attitude to life, rather than any foreign turn of phrase.

But Marlowe was definitely not English, and the exact opposite of what I'd imagined him to be like. He was not short, indeed when he stood up to greet me he seemed to fill the room, which was his study and admittedly not large. Marlowe, howefer, was very large. Nordic-looking, in his middle thirties, amiable, ambling, almost ursine in appearance. Like a big gentle blond bear, and he worse a light brown shaggy suit that fostered the resemblance. His eyes smiled short-sightedly behind shell-rimmed specctacles, his English wa sfluent, his voice soft and his accent heavy.

I never did find out where he came from. He could have been Scandinavian but somewhere round the Danube Basin was more likely, and I've heard all sorts of origin attributed to him, including Viennese. Despite his amiability there was something mysterious about him after all. Not sinister, as I'd expected: just mysterious. He really was a man of mystery.

Marlowe told me .. how I Am Your Brother had originated as a bedtime story which he used to tell in nightly instalments to the children of Sir Roderick and Lady Jones [Enid Bagnold, author of National Velvet, and if I remember correctly, fully functioning morphine addict] while staying as a guest at their country house.

Reading on a bit I see that MacLaren-Ross actually did an adaptation of it for radio, but it was never produced (like so much of his stuff - he did one of A Gun For Sale which produces a memorable anecdote of a alcohol-laden meeting with Greene in his Clapham Common flat).

Anyway, MacLaren-Ross kept up the acquaintance with Marlowe until,

'Working overtime,' he told me. 'A play. Four acts. Two complete but the other two,' he flung his arms wide: 'Confusion! I am going abroad next week, somewhere peaceful to finish this.'

'Where do you think of going?'

Marlowe shrugged. 'It's not so easy now, with half Europe in the hands of Hitler, and I don't want to fall into them also because you see I'm Jewish. But I think I've found a place where the Nazis won't invade,'

(follows an incident with his laundry being returned to him, but he can't afford to pay for it, meaning the return of only one shirt)

I asked him again which country he had chosen for his temporary refuge.

'Norway,' he replied.

This was the spring of 1940, and naturally the last I saw of Gabriel Marlowe.

The place where the Nazis wouldn't invade was invaded, and Marlowe who had meant on returning to join the British army never returned, never published another book, was in due course written off as dead by all including his executors.

Yet was he dead? For a few years ago I was drinking champagne cider with a man who'd known Marlowe before the war, and claimed to have met him recently, alive and well, in some village the name of which I can't remember. The man had no idea he was supposed to have been lost in Norway, so asked no searching questions, and in the village inn they had together sunk a pint. Thus Marlowe contrived to enshroud himself in mystery right up to the end, if indeed it was his end.

Oh, god, going on rather, but I like this bit as well -

Marlowe spoke warmly of National Velvet, the secretary came in to refill our glasses [of scotch], and he cocked his head to listen, with one finger uplifted as one of his own characters might have done, to the rain dripping on the bushes outside the window.

He quoted: '"Such dank gardens cry aloud for a murder." Do you know this? Stevenson. Cry Aloud For A Murder, a wonderful title. But it's better in the suburbs. They have there laurel bushes and in the houses behind the bushes live murderers. Respectable little people, but with passions also. For love and for money. Like Crippen, Seddon, wonderful fellows. And all the time on the laurel bushes drips the rain.'

He slid open a drawer of his desk: 'I have written here about murder in the London suburbs,' taking out four typescripts clipped into manilla folders: Four novelettes to make a volume. But they will not be printed yet. My publishers say after the next novel only, otherwise they will not make money.'

It will be fascinating to see what you make of it, woof.

For me its Felisberto Hernandez's Piano Stories. Italo Calvino -- who I'm thinking is a better critic/popularizer than a novelist -- really likes him.

Also a book called Death of Webern (just googled but I don't think its Death of Webern: A Drama in Documents). I have recollections of reading about it somewhere however it is so so long ago that right now I'm not even sure it ever existed.

http://books.google.com/books?id=3xkY2pbTLQYC&pg=PA28&lpg=PA28&dq=reruns+richard+baumbach&source=bl&ots=egyFPxa2MM&sig=BdrT3urTarY-lXBlRHpp_gGfqV0&hl=en&ei=KzGYSrzDCY6I8QaZ9vHCBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

awesome, crazy book

this is a better link

http://books.google.com/books?id=3xkY2pbTLQYC&lpg=PA28&ots=egyFPxa2MM&dq=reruns%20richard%20baumbach&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Ok, book report on I Am Not Your Brother.

I did not enjoy this very much.

McLaren Ross sort of gives the gist of it there. The first forty or so pages set up a grimy London science-horror novel pretty well. As he says, grotesque mother crawling round Soho, buying meat, extorting money from the doctor whose experiments impregnated her with the polite monster-thing in the attic. She's mean to her other son, an aspiring composer who's playing piano for a trashy theatre & is in love with a singer/dancer/whatever called Viva.

All fine. Style is quite melodramatic-misanthropic, quite 30s: dense, bit of Wyndham Lewis, maybe early Huxley? Terrible ear for dialogue.

After the mother dies it goes completely off the rails and becomes a dream/psych novel about Julian, the composer brother. He needs to make money to feed the brother, so he tries to sell some songs to a man called Catfish, who isn't called Catfish, and then has a symphony performed, and his patron is an aristo called Catfish, but he goes on a mystical trip through a mysterious landscape with aristo's wife, called Lamenta. Meanwhile in Brighton Viva is being seduced by a German strongman called Kraut (the impresario of the company is called Shark, iirc). But then she's in his flat when he goes there with Lamenta, oh I don't know.

Anyway, after being fitted for evening clothes by a singing tailor and almost being late for his premiere, Julian is famous the second the symphony is performed, then his monster brother (who's been pretty much put to one side for the last 100 pages) feels neglected, and Julian poisons him, but he lives. The monster brother wants sex, so Julian goes to get a prostitute, but this won't do, and the brother actually wants Viva. Julian drowns the brother but he comes back, then Julian shoots him and is sent to nuthouse, and of c the brother turns up at the end.

I know this might sound kind of amazing, but it's quite boring to read.

I suspect the horror list mentioned above won't have much on it because it's not really any sort of horror novel: those elements are immediately neglected in favour of psychoanalytic dream narrative. If all the info upthread is right - Marlowe/Beer-Hoffmann's an exile from Vienna, and his dad was mates with Schnitzler et al - then there's a decent set of pointers as to where this novel's at. It's mostly about a composer's psyche.

There's a ton of DO YOU SEE & obvious Freudian stuff, as you might get from the summary. Xyzzz, if you're about, it may be relevant to your thread here.

Some of the concrete stuff - Soho scenes, the theatrical company - is fairly lively. But the dream-logic makes the narrative dull & doesn't have that unsettling tension & uncanniness that's a potential compensation.

Still, glad I read it. I suppose.

Sorry. I Am Your Brother, not I Am Not Your Brother.

Freudian slip. Denying the Id, DO YOU SEE?

Ha ha, oh dear, sounds a right old mess. Maybe his unpublished suburban murder mysteries aren't such a loss then. Sterling work, woof.

Bloody hell! Thank you for this fine job--I was still idly planning on tracking this down, so you've saved me a ton of time and money.

Many thanks! I was seriously intrigued, but, yes, sometimes there are reasons why an out-of-print collector's item remains out of print.

I was all ready to drop the substantial sum that is being asked for even a reading copy E.H. Visiak's piratical weird tale 'Medusa', on the basis of a rave review from Karl Edward Wagner, but was talked out of it by wiser heads on a horror collector's forum. I've since read a couple of Visiak's short stories and another novel, and I'm SO grateful I didn't part with any serious cash.

Just reading Maclaren-Ross's Selected Letters, and in a footnote it mentions of Marlowe/Beer-Hoffman that he was born in 1901 and died 1971, having somehow survived his Norway trip and ended up in Scotland.

The letters themselves are, so far, sadly un-entertaining.

Dreadful aren't they?

was just reading Julian Maclaren-Ross's memoirs which talk about GS Marlowe extensively, and lo and behold, ILB has some discussion of him!

Used bookstores and charity shops are crammed with obscure books. A fair number of these are interesting reads, especially if you concentrate on the non-fiction. There are damned few obscure masterrpieces, though.

http://newyouproject.wordpress.com/

A magnificent, single-minded campaign on behalf of a novel by Jonathan Baumbach (who is mentioned above).

Strangely enough I've just finished a Maclaren-Ross novel, Of Love and Hunger, the first thing I've ever read by him. It mines similar territory to Patrick Hamilton's novels - seedy love affairs in seedy boarding rooms, the threat of war a brooding backdrop - and although I enjoyed it and was glad I read it I don't think it was nearly as good as Hamilton's Hangover Square or Slaves of Solitude.

Hangover Square or Slaves of Solitude are the books to beat, but I did love all of Maclaren-Ross except for his rather tedious letters

Hangover Square is really an extraordinary novel, I guess there aren't too many better, period.

Love Hamilton, Hangover Sq is my favourite too. I haven't yet read Of Love and Hunger, but I've been wanting to ever since I read Dance to the Music of Time, where Maclaren-Ross forms the basis for the wonderful (if ultimately tragic) character X Trapnel.

For me its Felisberto Hernandez's Piano Stories.

Anyone here read any of the supernatural fiction of LTC Rolt? This is as opposed to his numerous works on engineering, including Red for Danger - a history of railway accidents and safety measures.

Many of his ghost stories share features with those of the antiquarian sub-genre, but his work is highly original and draws heavily on his profound knowledge of Britain's industrial landscape.

Or Satan's Circus by Eleanor Smith?

A rare collection of macabre short stories about circus and gypsy life .. unusual and polished tales

Ok, library's got the latter. Will read this weekend. It's actually the former I'm more interested in, even of the latter sound better.

if

http://neglectedbooks.com/

In the same spirit: http://writersnoonereads.tumblr.com/

i'll have a look at those pages, but looking above to my last posts, I never read those books. That was clearly a mistake. Will take them if i can to oz with me.

Don't know how obscure this really is, though nobody I've mentioned it to (hardy readers all) seem very familiar with it: The Gay Place, by William Bramner. Published in '61, consisting of three novelettes in orbit around a prodigious politician (closely resembling LBJ, if he'd been Governor of Texas, but some resemblance to Big Jim Folsom and others of that era), it tends to come to mind while I'm watching the best early episodes of Mad Men (it's way past House of Cards etc.) Good if sometimes breathless description here, from modern Texas: http://www.texasmonthly.com/content/return-gay-place

But this is more like it, re great Obscuro (been a while since I read it, so may be something of a hype, but I don't think so).From What Books Have You Purchased Lately?
Some Data and Other Stories of Southern Life, by Sarah Barnwell Elliott, 1848-1927, I think. Civil War-associated trauma, but mostly avoiding antebellum sentimentality except when and how it fucks up her characters (aside from the occasional shameless hardcore Dickensian pathos, when she needed the money badly enough). More the rising tide of social realism, proto-Southern Gothic x absurd/satirical robust oatburners, prob a fan of the later Twain and sure seems like a possible inspiration for Faulkner and Welty. A sufferagette leader of the Deep South. This very posthumous collection, incl five prev unpub., is small press & not rec to font freaks and eyestrain wusses.

Her point of view (Doctor Honoris to yew, payin' those dues)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Sarah_Barnwell_4465090326_ab1d962187_o.jpg