Ever come across a book—on a nightstand in an Airbnb, in a box of your mom’s college junk, on a shelf at a friend’s Bachelor viewing party—that’s so energizingly rip-roaring, so envelopingly world-building, that you can’t really believe you’ve never heard of it before? A book that you find was admired in its time but is now sorta shoved to the side and forgotten, except by the most trusted reader-friends in your life? Well, these are those books. And your reader-friends, in this case? They’re 21 of our favorite writers from the past several years. Kick back and listen to them stump for the most criminally underappreciated books on their shelves.
Jonathan Franzen
suggests The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (1940)
As in a dream where I’m shouting at the top of my lungs and nobody can hear me, I’ve been advocating for Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children for 20 years, describing it as the greatest family novel ever written and one of the greatest 20th-century novels of any kind, and waiting for even one person to tell me I’m right. Only in Australia, where Stead was born and lived until she was 25, do I regularly encounter people who’ve even heard of it. But here, I’ll say it again: For psychological depth, for indelible characterizations, for savage humor, for muscular prose, for disciplined insanity, The Man Who Loved Children has very few peers in world literature. Please, will someone who is reading this get back to me and say I’m right?
Junot Díaz
suggests The Motion of Light in Water by Samuel R. Delany (1988)
I cannot imagine confessional literature without this genre-shattering memoir. To see how this queer black young artist came into himself during the tectonic delirium of the ’60s is to be given a revelation of near biblical intensity.
George Saunders
suggests American Youth by Phil LaMarche (2007)
This is one of the best novels of the past ten years, and meaningful to me in two ways: first, as a reminder of how efficiency and a fast pace are a writer’s best friends; second, as a profound meditation on the particular American soup of guilt, violence, and denial.
Emma Straub
suggests Stoner by John Williams (1965)
Stoner is what I loved most to hand-sell when I was a bookseller—it’s a sad, dark little book about one professor’s depressing life. Williams’s beautiful prose manages to make the whole thing sing, though, and readers would almost always come back and thank me for bringing the book to their attention.
Hanya Yanagihara
suggests My Abandonment by Peter Rock (2009)
This is probably the recent novel I recommend most. This short, disciplined, unsettling book is about a girl, Caroline, who’s living with her father off the grid in the Oregon woods. One of the things I love most about this novel is how much it manages to do in so little space, and with such grace and subtlety. Father is a wonderful, mysterious, vivid creation who manages to be compelling while not quite pinnable: Is he really what he seems? What does he want, and what has he done? And then there’s Caroline herself, whose affectlessness becomes heartbreaking as the narrative progresses. The mood of dread that hovers over the book culminates in a single, spectacular scene of violence, but one that’s more suggested than shown. And that, really, is this novel’s power: It demonstrates how the most resonant fiction is by writers who have mastered the art of absence, who have found a way to wield negative space as a literary weapon.
Marlon James
suggests Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1980)
There aren’t many post-apocalyptic novels as post as Riddley Walker, which opens 2,000 years after we finally push the red button and drop the big one. In an instantly recognizable England that nobody remembers, humans are back to being hunter-gatherers, scrapping for iron that they’ve forgotten how to make. Killer dogs roam the roads, priests with belly scars preach prophecy by watching Punch and Judy, and Riddley Walker—just named at 12—is trying to become a man. But the shock of the book, especially in its dazzling language, is the old, not the new. What does 2,000 years in the future sound like? Two thousand years in the past, “Beowulf” smashed into “Be-Bop-A-Lula.” Riddley Walker was nominated for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Nebula Award back in 1981, but if it wasn’t for Salman Rushdie, I would never have heard of it.
William Gibson
suggests Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack (1993)
