Stoner by John Williams
Here’s something you might not expect. A novel that was initially overlooked has found a devoted audience in recent years. William Stoner is an ordinary university professor who leads what some might call an unremarkable life, filled with disappointments and setbacks. The beauty lies in how Williams captures the quiet devastation of unfulfilled dreams without melodrama.
The NYRB editions of John Williams’s Stoner were as much the “It Books” of their respective years of republication as anything actually new. There’s something profoundly moving about a protagonist who doesn’t achieve greatness by conventional measures. His struggles with love, academic politics, and the relentless passage of time feel achingly real, almost uncomfortably so.
Let’s be real, it’s hard to say for sure why certain books disappear while others endure. Timing matters more than we’d like to admit. Stoner’s slow-burn appreciation decades after publication proves that literary merit doesn’t always guarantee immediate recognition.
Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
The book, which follows the titular Berkeley grad student as she attempts to sabotage her twin sister’s nuptials, had “modest” sales initially, but over the past year, seemingly every screenwriter, editor, and Ph.D. candidate from New York to L.A. has picked it up. Baker crafted something genuinely unique here, a psychological portrait of jealousy and codependency wrapped in dark comedy.
Carson McCullers purportedly found herself “overwhelmed” by Baker’s “brilliance.” The novel captures the strange intensity of twin relationships, exploring themes of identity and separation with surgical precision. Cassandra’s desperate attempts to prevent her sister’s wedding reveal uncomfortable truths about possessiveness disguised as love.
Reading this novel today feels startlingly contemporary. The voice is fresh, irreverent, and psychologically complex in ways that feel decades ahead of its 1962 publication.
Warlock by Oakley Hall
Just six months after its successful publication of Stoner in 2006, NYRB turned around and handed readers practically the exact opposite sort of novel: an all-time great Western, or more specifically, a subtle deconstruction of the Western, interweaving themes of Emersonian transcendentalism and Hobbesian man-against-nature conflict with critique of the violent expansionism and nationalism that so characterized the American West. This isn’t your typical gunslinger tale.
Hall’s prose is dense, philosophical, and morally ambiguous. The characters grapple with questions of justice, violence, and civilization in ways that complicate the mythology of the Old West. Interest in the title has only grown since its reissue, culminating in a 2022 film adaptation.
The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes
Originally released in 1963, this novel is about a successful Black doctor on a disastrous road trip through the American Southwest, and a thoughtful afterword by Walter Mosley highlights Hughes’s effectiveness at writing from her protagonist’s perspective as a white woman, exploring the consequences of his decision to pick up a pregnant white hitchhiker who later winds up dead. For a novel from the ’60s, Hughes’s portrayal of the intersections of race and class feels ahead of its time.
The tension Hughes creates is suffocating. Every interaction the protagonist has with white characters carries the weight of systemic racism, and readers feel his vulnerability acutely. The mystery plot becomes secondary to the social commentary, though both elements work brilliantly together.
What’s remarkable is how Hughes, writing as a white woman, managed to convey the psychological burden of navigating a racist society. The novel feels uncomfortably relevant today, which speaks to how little has changed and how perceptive Hughes was.
Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott
Originally published in 1929, it feels as relevant and vivid and true as any book published in the last few years, though Parrott was a prolific writer in her time and is now generally forgotten, with Ex-Wife, her most popular work, having been out of print for decades. This Jazz Age novel about a divorced woman navigating independence feels astonishingly modern.
The novel is considered semi-autobiographical and deals with divorce, abortion, love, class dynamics, women’s rights, and the complexities of a rapidly changing world. Parrott’s voice crackles with wit and pain. The narrator’s observations about relationships, money, and freedom could have been written yesterday.
I think what makes this novel so compelling is its refusal to moralize. The protagonist makes mistakes, enjoys her sexuality, and refuses to conform to expectations without becoming either a cautionary tale or a feminist icon.
Speedboat by Renata Adler
Adler’s experimental debut novel about a young female journalist navigating urban America, originally published serially in the New Yorker, made waves upon its release in 1976, but by 1988 had fallen out of print. David Foster Wallace included it on his syllabus for a 2003 course on “obscure” fictions, and NYRB’s 2013 reissue amounted to a literary seism.
The structure is fragmented, almost mosaic-like, capturing the disconnection of modern life through rapid-fire observations and anecdotes. Some readers find it challenging, but that’s precisely the point. Adler constructs meaning through accumulation rather than conventional narrative.
The prose is sharp, intelligent, and oddly funny. Reading Speedboat feels like overhearing the thoughts of the smartest person in the room, someone who notices everything but judges sparingly.
Fat City by Leonard Gardner
Gardner begins his sinewy and staggeringly deep work of fiction with a joke: the seedy dive in Stockton, Calif., where down-and-out boxer Billy Tully lives is called the Hotel Coma. This 1969 novel about boxers struggling in California’s Central Valley is devastatingly beautiful.
Gardner captures the desperation of men who bet everything on fading dreams with unflinching honesty. The boxing scenes are visceral, but the real punches come from the quiet moments between fights, where characters confront their diminishing options. There’s no sentimentality here, just raw observation.
What makes Fat City extraordinary is Gardner’s ability to find dignity in failure. These are not heroic underdogs who overcome adversity. They’re ordinary people trapped by circumstance, bad choices, and terrible luck, yet Gardner never condescends to them.
The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf
“Princess Esmerelda,” as the unforgettable narrator of this unclassifiable novel calls herself, is an Upper West Side bohemian who feels herself about to embark on a “radiance,” as she calls her manic episodes, which previously have caused her to sleep with anyone she meets, leap around the city naked, and be committed to the mental ward. Published by Modern Library in a recent edition, this 1982 novel defies categorization.
Kraf’s portrayal of mental illness is neither romanticized nor clinical. The voice is exuberant, terrifying, and darkly comic all at once. Reading it feels like being inside someone’s unraveling mind, which is both uncomfortable and oddly exhilarating.
Ladies and Gentlemen by Adam Ross
This short, grubby novel of sexual and literary obsession was published in 1982 but takes as its subject the Berkeley of the 1970s, in all its freedom and squalor. There’s no way, really, to explain what makes this loathsome story so perfectly eye-opening – you have to experience the self-satisfied, increasingly panicked voice of its antihero, Harold Raab, recording his desperation in the notebook that’s the only thing this so-called writer can write. The feel-bad read of the year!
Ross creates a protagonist you’ll probably despise yet can’t stop reading about. The novel dissects male entitlement and artistic pretension with surgical precision, offering no redemption or catharsis. It’s the literary equivalent of watching a car crash in slow motion.
Blood Brother by Henry Van Dyke
This effervescent comedy, the story of Oliver, a precocious, ambitious, gay, Black teenager in 1950s small-town Michigan, was a kind of rebellion against the kind of “struggle” expected by the literary establishment in 1965. What readers did not expect from a young, Black, gay novelist was that he should take his worth for granted, that he should shrug off the gay thing with nonchalance, or acknowledge racial hostility without a flash of rage. McNally Editions recently reissued this groundbreaking work.
Van Dyke’s refusal to write trauma porn was radical for 1965 and remains refreshing today. Oliver navigates racism and homophobia without becoming defined by oppression. The novel is funny, optimistic, and subversive in its insistence that marginalized people can live joyfully.
What strikes me most is the confidence of Van Dyke’s voice. He wasn’t interested in explaining or justifying his characters’ existence to white or straight readers. He simply let them live, which was perhaps the most revolutionary act of all.
Conclusion
A new press joined the growing field of reissue publishers, with Quite Literally Books, a New York-based firm, debuting in April 2025 with three novels including Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset. Publishers big and small devote time and resources to searching out lost classics, out-of-print gems, and ahead-of-their-time authors, and this year, some of the most rewarding reading experiences came from work first published 10, 30, or 80 years ago.
These forgotten novels remind us that literary value isn’t determined by commercial success or sustained visibility. Sometimes the best books slip through the cracks, waiting decades for readers to rediscover them. Each of these ten novels offers something unique: psychological depth, formal innovation, social commentary, or simply gorgeous prose.
The resurgence of interest in overlooked classics suggests we’re hungry for perspectives outside the mainstream canon. These books deserve shelf space alongside the famous names everyone recognizes. So which of these forgotten gems will you read first?
