Post the underrated books you know!
The Good Soldier Svjek by Jaroslav Hasek is criminally underrated.
Otherwise: Les Dieux Sont Soif by Anatole France, Nostromo by Joseph Conrad, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and anything by Flann O Brienn that isn't The Third Policeman.
Anything non-meme essentially.
>>8059131
I really want to read that one anon. But the libraries around here doesn't have it, and I'm piss poor atm.
Life is suffering.
I'll throw in Eduard Levé - selfportrait.
>>8059131
>>8059178
Internet is your friend, mate. Buy it online.
>>8059180
the fuck is this bout
>Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhui by Rafael Ferlosio
"...a picaresque classic -- a children's fantasy for adults-- written in 1951. The hero, a magical little boy, goes in search not of his fortune but of knowledge. He meets a master taxidermist, who teaches him the trade. Alfanhui attempts extraordinary experiments - making trees sprout feathers and creating birds that grow feathers like leaves. When his house is burned down, he travels around Castile, learning about colors, oxen, herbs, and other people: a lonely giant in a wood, a puppet who thinks he is a man, and his own grandmother with her collection of mysterious locked trunks. This is a celebration of the natural world through a boy's experiences."
>u.pomf.is/bwywnb.epub
>>8059201
Read it and find out
>>8059246
i only read physical copies i aint buying shit without knowing a little about it
Everything by John Hawkes. Fuck the detractors here too, they're illiterates.
>Letterletter by Gerrit Noordzij
"This iconoclastic collection of essays on typography, writing and life is the work of Gerrit Noordzij, a master calligrapher and teacher of lettering and type design at The Hague. Letterletter opens up whole new perspectives on not just the world of letterforms but on the world and the written word, in general. Occasionally cranky, always well-written and insightful, Letterletter is an invaluable design tool and, more importantly, a pure pleasure to read."
>u.pomf.is/gjimub.pdf
>>8059249
It's about a writer trying to write a story and the story itself, to put it simply.
>>8059251
My African-American. The Lime Twig and The Beetle Leg are two of my favorite novels.
>The Complete Works of Urmuz
"The collected short and absurdist stories of the Romanian writer “Urmuz”, dating from the early years of the twentieth century up until their author’s death in 1923. Urmuz’s work has been claimed as a forerunner of Dada, and of Surrealism as well, and shows again the sharp sense of the vitality of the avant-garde amongst Romanian practitioners."
>u.pomf.is/nrnlvn.mobi
>>8059131
orientalist garbage
gross
>Sea of Ink by Richard Weihe
"A beautiful novella in 50 short chapters and 10 pictures about the life of Bada Shanren, the most influential Chinese painter of all times. In 1626, Bada Shanren is born into the Chinese royal family. When the old Ming Dynasty crumbles, he becomes an artist, committed to capturing the essence of nature with a single brushstroke. Then the rulers of the new Qing Dynasty discover his identity and Bada must feign madness to escape."
>u.pomf.is/npuspr.mobi
>>8059287
All this irrational hate blinded me!
>The Diary of Geza Csath
"An acclaimed neurologist widely viewed as Hungary's first contemporary author, Geza Csath was also a morphine addict who shot and killed his wife before killing himself. The diary begins as a clinically graphic depiction of Csath's conquest of dozens of women - from chambermaids to aristocrats - during his tenure as a doctor at a Slovakian health spa in 1912."
>u.pomf.is/dwsyun.mobi
>A True Novel by Minae Mizumura
"A remaking of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights set in postwar Japan. A True Novel begins in New York in the 1960s, where we meet Taro, a relentlessly ambitious Japanese immigrant trying to make his fortune. Flashbacks and multilayered stories reveal his life: an impoverished upbringing as an orphan, his eventual rise to wealth and success—despite racial and class prejudice—and an obsession with a girl from an affluent family that has haunted him all his life. A True Novel then widens into an examination of Japan’s westernization and the emergence of a middle class."
>u.pomf.is/qvrmzy.epub
>The Legends of Tono by Kunio Yanagita
"In 1910, when Kunio Yanagita (1875-1962) wrote and published The Legends of Tono in Japanese, he had no idea that 100 years later, his book would become a Japanese literary and folklore classic. Yanagita is best remembered as the founder of Japanese folklore studies, and Ronald Morse transcends time to bring the reader a marvelous guide to Tono, Yanagita, and his enthralling tales. In this 100th Anniversary edition, Morse has completely revised his original translation, now out of print for over three decades. Retaining the original's great understanding of Japanese language, history, and lore, this new edition will make the classic collection available to new generations of readers."
>u.pomf.is/atoddm.pdf
>>8059159
It seems At Swim-Two-Birds is way more widely acclaimed than The Third Policeman. I agree that the latter was more fun, though.
>>8059180
I read about the first half of this and just didn't get it. It wasn't interesting and the typography didn't really add very much. Why did you like it so much aside from it just being wacky?
>Saga of the Jomsvikings
"In A.D. 986, Earl Hákon, ruler of most of Norway, won a triumphant victory over an invading fleet of Danes in the great naval battle of Hjórunga Bay. Sailing under his banner were no fewer than five Icelandic skalds, the poet-historians of the Old Norse world. Two centuries later their accounts of the battle became the basis for one of the liveliest of the Icelandic sagas, with special emphasis on the doings of the Jómsvikings, the famed members of a warrior community that feared no one and dared all. In Lee M. Hollander's faithful translation, all of the unknown twelfth-century author's narrative genius and flair for dramatic situation and pungent characterization is preserved."
>u.pomf.is/caouzn.epub
>>8059270
Hawkes is my favorite author of all time. Of the 8 books of his that I've read, not a single one has disappointed.
>The End: Hamburg 1943 by Hans Erich Nossack
"Novelist Hans Erich Nossack was forty-two when the Allied bombardments of German cities began, and he watched the destruction of Hamburg—the city where he was born and where he would later die—from across its Elbe River. He heard the whistle of the bombs and the singing of shrapnel; he watched his neighbors flee; he wondered if his home—and his manuscripts—would survive the devastation. The End is his terse, remarkable memoir of the annihilation of the city, written only three months after the bombing. A searing firsthand account of one of the most notorious events of World War II, The End is also a meditation on war and hope, history and its devastation. And it is the rare book, as W. G. Sebald noted, that describes the Allied bombing campaign from the German perspective.
In the first English-language edition of The End, Nossack's text has been crisply translated by Joel Agee and is accompanied by the photographs of Erich Andres. Poetic, evocative, and yet highly descriptive, The End will prove to be, as Sebald claimed, one of the most important German books on the firebombing of that country."
>u.pomf.is/jnxtqx.mobi
No matter how wet Cervante's balls get by his critiques, they will never be wet enough.
>Severin's Journey into the Dark by Paul Leppin
"Leppin once wrote: “Prague remains my deepest experience. Its conflicts, its mystery, its ratcatcher’s beauty have ever provided my poetic efforts with new inspiration and meaning.” It is this city of darkened walls and strange decay that forms the backdrop of Severin’s erotic adventures and fateful encounters as he enters a world of femmes fatales, Russian anarchists, dabblers in in the occult, and denizens of decadent salons. First published in 1914, Leppin seeks to unlock the mysterious erotic nature of his native city buried deep in the subconscious of its inhabitants. His depiction of this world, in a Prague straddling the border between the ancient and the modern, has brought Severin’s Journey into the Dark deserved international acclaim. As Max Brod so aptly remarked: "Leppin was the truly chosen bard of the painfully disappearing old Prague...""
>u.pomf.is/ctwqcy.mobi
>Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwob
"Imaginary Lives contains twenty-two mythopoeic literary portraits of figures from ancient history, art history, and the history of crime and punishment. From demi-gods, sorcerers, incendiaries, wantons and philosophers of the ancient world, to the "poet of hate" Cecco Angiolieri and the painter Paolo Uccello, through to the pirates William Kidd and Major Stede-Bonnet, and finally Burke and Hare, the serial killers; Schwob presents a vivid array of characters who display all that is macabre, deviant and magnificently terrifying in human beings and in life. In Imaginary Lives, Schwob has created a "secret" masterpiece that joins other biographical glossaries such as Jorge Luis Borges' A Universal History Of Infamy and Alfonso Reyes' Real And Imagined Portraits in the pantheon of classic speculative fiction, of which Schwob's book is the dark progenitor. Livid with decadent imagery, Imaginary Lives resonates loudly today with its themes of temporality, myth, violence and sexuality, and stands as a major work of the fin-de-siecle."
>u.pomf.is/nhpvjm.mobi
>>8059355
Nabokov didn't thought the same.
>>8059447
He was wrong.
>Suggested by the life of Arthur Rimbaud, this biographical novel becomes- in Ullman's hands- an extraordinary and moving document of a man possessed, gifted, but for the greater part of his life- unmotivated. The slender thread of factual record informs a live, at times repellent, portrait of the man he calls Claude Morel, but where Morel's story departs from Rimbaud's is not evident to the reader. Born in the Ardennes of northern France, his childhood dominated by a strange mother and his need to escape her, Claude finally reaches Paris- there to become a drifter, and in a second return, a depraved waster, involved with another poet, Maurice Druard (recognizably Paul Verlaine), but writing, ceaselessly, brilliantly, with a decadence then virtually unknown. Their relationship ends with a shooting and from then on Claude becomes even more of a wanderer, up and down the length of France, then briefly as a soldier of the Dutch in Asia, a deserter, a hunter, trader, perhaps a slaver, a pilgrim. Finally a teacher at the court of the Lion of Judah, Menelik, he returned to France to die in Marseilles. A haunting tale with an obsessive fascination, it is a tragic book, symbolic of waste, frustration, lost genius. Ullman has used Rimbaud's own work as an integral part of his text.
>>8059368
I second this. It's delightfully eerie.
Thank you for this thread, lots of promising stuff.
>>8059355
One of the least overrated books of all time.
I'm enjoying this thread
>>8059338
Well, in addition to the wackiness, I really enjoyed the metafictional aspects, which were interesting and uniquely done; I enjoyed the writing itself; and I really, really enjoyed how he applied concreteness (there has to be a better term) to it, which, before reading it, I had only seen done well by Gass.
>>8059704
What is a "concrete" novel?
>>8059731
It's 200 pages of shape poems.
>>8059315
I hear this is good, but I can't trust goodreads since it might be popular among people whose opinion is worth shit.
So is it actually good?
>>8059159
>The Good Soldier Svjek by Jaroslav Hasek is criminally underrated.
I think it's the most known Czech novel after The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And I've heard that translations do not work well for it because of the playful use of language.
Just saying, it's a pretty well known novel.
>>8059754
It was one of my favorite books I read that year. Have you read Makioka Sisters? I would compare it more to that than Wuthering Heights, that it's a "remake" isn't really so important.
If you like sprawling family sagas, it's definitely good. The first 150 pages aren't entirely needed if you want to skip to the actual story; they're mostly autobiographical build-up, with some cameos of the Japanese Heathcliff character.
It reminded me of Middlemarch in some ways, another book that I really adore and somehow wish were longer despite being nearly a thousand pages. It's one like that, that you could never tire of. With much more likable characters than WH.
>>8059215
>>8059252
>>8059279
>>8059368
These sound intersting, thanks anons!
I recently bought pic related for a couple of bucks. Not sure if it's that obscure but it's pretty hard/expansive to get. It's a surrealistic delight, especially if you're an (english) sports fan.
>>8059785
>Have you read Makioka Sisters?
No. But I've been meaning to since I really enjoyed In Praise of Shadows.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll read it this summer!
What are some good underrated Italian novels I can look forward to reading when I learn the language?
>>8059827
zeno's conscience, the leopard, the tartar steppe.
And then of course there's eco and calvino but those are obvious.
Alasdair Gray comes to mind, I've only seen Lanark mentioned a handful of times and 1982, Janine hardly ever.
>>8059731
The text is arranged into different shapes and patterns. Most of the time, pseuds do it to look cool, but authors like Gass and Federman, who are both legitimately talented writers (sometimes overwhelmingly so), do it to experiment with form and symbols.
>>8059858
Everyone knows of those
>>8059827
I enjoyed this one, though I have no idea how it goes in Italian.
>The Wooden Throne by Carlo Sgorlon
"In this modern retelling of the Parsival legend, the throne belongs to the storyteller who keeps the community alive through the magic of myth and narrative. Only occasionally, by some hand of fate, does the outsider find and then refind the house of the throne as a stage in his own quest for meaning and love. The Wooden Throne, Sgorlon's most famous book, was awarded the prestigious Premio Campiello when it was published in 1973. It has gone through fifteen printings since and is now considered a twentieth-century Italian masterpiece. It has been translated into French, Spanish and Slavic. This was the first English edition of Il trono di legno or, indeed, of any of Sgorlon's literary work. His “Army of the Lost Rivers” was published in English by Italica in late 1998."
>u.pomf.is/rqygrb.mobi
>>8059865
Lanark was talked about here a lot in the past. You're right, though: it's really cooled off.
I have a copy I've never gotten around to reading.
>>8059447
>I can't think on my own!
>>8059302
He sounds like my kinda guy :DDDDDD
The book had been banned in Iran for its links to readers' suicides. A very disturbing, macabre little book.
>>8060909
>little known
>part of the sticky
>>8060958
Oh, my bad, so few people have known about it.
Instead, Perec
>/r9k/: Trans-dimensional Glaswegian EditionIt's a lot better than it sounds.
Don't be put off by the heft or the odd arrangment of the constituent books: it's meant to be read in one order (i.e., as printed) and understood in another.
>Lead character is an old NEET with obnoxious, contradictory opinions
>spends his time boozing, thinking about William Blake, and abusing his friends
>is somehow a talented painter, but manages to fuck it up every time by overthinking the idea and/or being a dick to everyone around him
>underneath his grim surface, he's nothing more than a sad idealist trying to make art triumph at least once
How /lit/ doesn't know about this book befuddles me.
>>8060997
Another miss. Not underrated anywhere.
>>8059131
This is probably my favourite novel 2bh
Perfume Patrick Suskind
>>8060909
>it tells the story of an unnamed pen case painter
wtf is a 'pen case painter'?
somebody who paints pen cases? somebody who walks around with a pen case and paints stuff?
>>8060997
copypasting wikipedia: the book
thanks for the summer reading list, everyone
>>8061121
i think it's a guy who paints pen cases
'worm' is gobspanking amazing.
>>8061286
by who?
>>8061276
it doesn't sound as an amazing job...
>>8061291
It's just some capeshit web serial with an idiotically huge number of chapters for what it is. Some fag shitposted it here a few times.
>>8061353
does that count as literature?
>>8061323
maybe that's why the story gets "macabre" prolly a cuckoo lad
war with the newts by karel capek is genius and i rarely hear it mentioned
>>8061286
Helloo, reddit.
>>8059827
my favorite authors are
Trevisan, Carlo M. Cipolla are Albinati, they're prettyunderrated i think
>>8062311
*and
What an amazing book this is
>>8064431
Shit forgot my pic
![51777J0V2NL[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/g1uWjbQ.jpg "51777J0V2NL[1].jpg")
Despite the lines, where he says that all people who don't believe in god are idiots or something in those lines, I thought this book was fantastic. Wonderfully written with great humor and a disturbing ending.
>>8065287
but he's right about that
>>8065292
...right.
>>8059131
>there are people here who don't read 19th C Bengali literature
>>8059249
Funny because I have so many physical copies of books it's ridiculous but I need some ebboks now so I don't have to luge around books to the hospital.
Does anyone have a link to some classics that I go through while I'm hospitalized.
Thanks
Thanks anon desu, posting links for the lazy like me.
>>8065306
Why don't you drop some names then, champ?
>>8060909
Fuck. This is the best book I've read in the past year. I've never encountered that kind of narration before. I've read "dream-like" before but the way the action is narrated in this novel I found very unique. I loved it. Very dark though.
>>8059287
Fuck off you cunt
>>8059142
go to bed, will
>>8065287
>Despite the lines, where he says that all people who don't believe in god are idiots or something in those lines, I thought this book was fantastic.
You sound like a fascinating person and original thinker. Thanks for sharing.
>>8059760
The BBC radio adaptation is piss your pants funny.
>>8059131
The Hearing Trumpet
>>8066826
That's one of my favorites. In case anyone wants to read it as an ebook:
>u.pomf.is/vvvwwg.pdf
>>8068376
>>8068380
>>8066424
I'm lazy. Got a link?
>>8061009
this book was so bizarre and awesome. still not sure what to make of the end. without spoiling too much, i think he's parodying neoliberalism? Or Thatcher's economic policies?
>>8066924
well that's an interesting cover
>>8067462
is this and the rest of his books in this series any good?
more books please
i'm keeping a list
>The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe
Really enjoyed this. Found it to be comically macabre and have never seen it posted here.
>>8066179
>original thinker
>>8069525
Yeah, the trilogy is excellent.
I haven't read anything else he's written though.
have never seen it mentioned on lit. anyone else read it?
>>8059355
i'm spanish. Just curious how is reading this book in english? Is it too hard or complex? I don't know... whats the feeling?
>>8059178
gen.lib.rus.ec
search alamut
you're welcome
>>8068381
Yep, fantastic book. Read it, /lit/.
gay Joyce
don't know if it's been translated tho
>The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night - A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments
1001 Night. Unabridged. Published in a limited number (with good reason) by this charming fellow.
A book that will make your liberal friend throw up on first chapter, and change his or hers views on burning books.
>>8068381
I know this one after a film. The Desert of the Tartars. Brilliant one.
>>8072063
How is Burton's Arabian Nights underrated?
>>8068381
top top top
All of Pars stuff its bretty gud
