Five below-the-radar classics you need to read, by the editors who rediscovered them

Rosie Shackles, Assistant Editor at Picador, says:

Actual Persephone book tbc

Actual Persephone book tbc

Brigid Hughes, editor and publisher of the Brooklyn literary magazine A Public Space, says:

An editor is part sleuth, part subsonic listener, we search in all sorts of directions for writers and work. A few years ago, browsing in a secondhand bookstore in Manhattan, I came across a book on the one-dollar cart. W-3 by Bette Howland. It had a striking black and neon green cover, and a blurb from Saul Bellow. I opened to a page at random: 

'All I knew was this: I couldn’t take it anymore, no longer could bear this burden of concealment. Things seemed bad enough without adding extra weight. I wanted to be rid of it all, all of it. I wanted to abandon all this personal history – its darkness and secrecy, its private grievances, its well-licked sorrows and prides – to thrust it from me like a manhole cover. That’s what I had wanted all along, that’s what I was trying for when I swallowed those pills – what I hoped to obliterate. That was my real need. It had at last expressed itself, become all powerful.'

How could one not want to read on?

I’m interested in writers who have a complicated relationship with that word ‘I’. I love the way W-3 upends expectations for a memoir. The way she pays attention to the world of W-3 [the psychiatric ward she is on], the other patients, the doctors, the visitors. And how we come to know her through what she notices about others. Also, her joy and her superb humor. 

Read our interview with Brigid Hughes, the editor who rediscovered W-3, here.

Stephen Emerson, editor of the collection, says:

'Compiling the stories for this book has been a joy in countless ways. One was discovering that in the years since her last book and her death, the work had grown in stature. Black Sparrow and her earlier publishers gave her a good run, and certainly she's had one or two thousand dedicated readers. But that is far too few. The work will reward the most acute of readers, but there is nothing rarefied about it. On the contrary, it is inviting.

Lucia's writing has got snap. When I think of it, I sometimes imagine a master drummer in motion behind a large trap set, striking ambidextrously at an array of snares, tom-toms, and ride cymbals while working pedals with both feet. It isn't that the work is percussive, it's that there's so much going on. The prose claws its way off the page. It has vitality. It reveals.'

Lucia Berlin was relatively unknown during her lifetime, but eleven years after her death, forty-three of her short stories were selected for publication in A Manual for Cleaning Women. These semi-autobiographical tales of working-class people and their everyday lives – in the laundromat, in the ER, in schools, in other people’s houses – are as relevant and fresh as they were when they were written.

Read Stephen Emerson's full piece on Lucia Berlin.

In a similar way to Bette Howland, William Melvin Kelley owes his literary renaissance to a chance find in a thrift store. The New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz bought a $1 hardback of a Langston Hughes book, which she discovered was dedicated to William Kelley, who she then researched and wrote a piece about in the magazine. A Different Drummer tells the story of a small Southern town where all the Black people have taken their possessions and left. Told from the perspectives of the remaining white people, it provides a striking viewpoint which considers the damage white supremacy does to all who live within its systems.

This book has caused waves since it was first published in the 1960s, though it was written earlier in the twentieth century in a Soviet Union under Stalin’s rule – and Mikhail Bulgakov actually burned the original version.  Indeed, even the sixties version wasn't the original, having been heavily censored, however, and it was another seven years before the final manuscript was published in full. The action sees the Devil, disguised as a magician, arriving in 1930s Moscow on a mission. Surreal, satirical and surprising – the literary equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Unpublished in Franz Kafka’s lifetime, and almost not published at all, as the author requested the manuscript was destroyed, unread, before he died, this profound psychological horror teeters between reality and fantasy throughout. His friend Max Brod ignored Kafka's instructions to destroy the story, but the order of the chapters has been disputed and the abrupt ending is due to it being unfinished. Somehow, though, this doesn't matter, and only heightens the labyrinthine nature of the novel. Just what crime did Josef K. commit? No-one can say, but he's going on trial for it. Or he would be, if anyone had given him the address of the courthouse.