Unknown Masterpieces

Writers Rediscover Literature's Hidden Classics

Edited by Edwin Frank

In this original collection, several of today's finest writers introduce little-known treasures of literature that they count among their favorite books. Here Toni Morrison celebrates a great Guinean storyteller whose novel of mystical adventure and surprising revelation transforms our image of Africa, while Susan Sontag raises the curtain on a distant summer when three of the greatest poets of the twentieth century exchanged love letters like no others. Here too John Updike analyzes the rare art of an English comic genius, Jonathan Lethem considers a hard-boiled and heartbreaking story of prison life, and Michael Cunningham uncovers the secrets of what may well be the finest short novel in modern American literature. Other contributors include such noted authors as Arthur C. Danto, Lydia Davis, Elizabeth Hardwick, Francine Prose, Luc Sante, Colm Tóibín, Eliot Weinberger, and James Wood.

Lucid, polished, provocative, inspiring, these essays are models of critical appreciation, offering personal, impassioned, thoughtful responses to a wide range of wonderful books. Unknown Masterpieces is a treat for all lovers of great writing and a useful and stimulating guidebook for readers eager to venture off literature's beaten tracks.

Eliot Weinberger on Hindoo Holiday by J.R. Ackerley
Arthur C. Danto on The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac
John Updike on Seven Men by Max Beerbohm
Jonathan Lethem on On the Yard by Malcolm Braly
Toni Morrison on The Radiance of the King by Camara Laye
Colm Tóibín on The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
Francine Prose on A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
Susan Sontag on Letters: Summer 1926 by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke
Luc Sante on Classic Crimes by William Roughead
James Wood on The Golovlyov Family by Shchedrin
Elizabeth Hardwick on The Unpossessed by Tess Slesinger
Lydia Davis on The Life of Henry Brulard by Stendhal
Michael Cunningham on The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott

Reviews

Essayists expound on their favorites, ranging from the obscure to the classical, often so persuasively that the reader will add several new titles to his reading list.
— Richmond Times-Dispatch

[A] gilded path into the New York Review Books series is through the new volume Unknown Masterpieces. It collects 13 of the most inspired introductions the publisher commissioned for the Classics Series.... To describe these essays as superb is to miss their spirit. Forged in furnaces stoked by equal measures of awe and angst, they are not mere celebrations of unjustly forgotten works. They are the work of artists who know that their own reputations are beyond their control and who fear the chill wind that may flicker their own flames.
— J. Peder Zane, Raleigh News & Observer

Also see:

Seduction and Betrayal By Elizabeth Hardwick Introduction by Joan Didion Seduction and Betrayal is a virtuoso performance, a major writer's reckoning with the relations between men and women, women and writing, writing and life.

A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays By Mary McCarthy Edited and with an introduction by A.O. Scott "Fierce, provocative, and lovely, a collection of small masterpieces, by one of the twentieth century's most dazzling minds." —Katie Roiphe

Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories Edited by Randall Jarrell This wonderful anthology, with its celebrated introductory essay, enlarges and deepens our perception of the storyteller's art and its central place in the world of our feelings.

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