Best obscure book you've read

July 17, 2024 5:29 AM

Jumping off this Fediverse thread: what is the best book you've read that very few other people have even heard of? All genres and languages welcome, fiction and nonfiction. Would definitely appreciate a quick description and a thought or two on what makes it so great.

Also please don't nitpick others on whether their choice is obscure enough!

posted by brainwane to Media & Arts (106 answers total)

I have two that fall in this category, one is Djinn by Alain Robbe Grillet which started life as a grammar text but comes across with Lynch film vibes in translation.

The other is HA! A Self-Murder Mystery by Gordon Sheppard, a creative non-fiction take on the suicide of Quebecois writer Hubert Aquin in the form of a film treatment.
posted by juv3nal at 5:44 AM on July 17 [1 favorite]

The Sacred History of Knitting. Speculative amateur esoterica. The top review on Goodreads is a white nationalist getting very upset about its content, which only makes me like it more.
posted by Ardnamurchan at 5:54 AM on July 17 [3 favorites]

A book recommended to me by a friend that I'd never heard of - excellent hard SF and while I assumed the author was male, it became clear about ten pages in that she wasn't - Spin State, by Chris Moriarty. The sequels can be hard to find but are worth looking for!

This one shows up on lists of queer fantasy but not often or loud enough, and the series was unfinished for a long time (but is now complete! Fire Logic and sequels, by Laurie Marks. Really interesting fantasy with a focus on psychology/sociology rather than politics or warfare.

Another rec from the same friend, different genre - Mallory's Oracle by Carol O'Connell. Straightforward detective fiction with an ethical-sociopath female lead, which shows up a lot less often than the standard Dexter type. It's gritty detective fiction, if that's not your thing, this won't be your thing either, but if you are into that, I'd recommend it.

Madeleine Robins is (was?) an editor in SF and only wrote a couple of books, but I really loved The Stone War both as post-apocalyptic survival fantasy and a novel with a tremendous sense of place - that of Manhattan, which is a place I am immensely fond of. I also enjoyed her Regency detective novels, starting with Point of Honour - the second two in that series are self-pubbed and worth seeking out.

Deb Coate's Wide Open and sequels is a fantastic urban fantasy - it's UF by genre but it's set in rural South Dakota. Fantastic, compassionate fiction about coming home from Afghanistan and dealing with ghosts, both literally and figuratively.

Skimming through my Goodreads I see a lot more stuff that *you* have probably heard of (Max Gladstone's Last Exit!) or that doesn't get talked about much now but was huge when it came out (I *just this year* read Neuromancer, me being late doesn't make it obscure) but at least there are a couple.
posted by restless_nomad at 5:56 AM on July 17 [7 favorites]

Hey Joe by Ben Neihart is a gorgeous coming of age gay novel set in 90s New Orleans and I wish more people knew about it. It's refreshing to read about a gay protagonist where it doesn't end in death or angst.

I couldn't even tell you how I found out about it but I've been hauling the paperback around for nearly three decades and re-read a lot.
posted by Kitteh at 6:10 AM on July 17

The Snouters or Rhinogradentians, a Brief Review is the most entertaining biology text I've ever read while also being entirely lies; don't think it's been republished lately.

Altmann's Tongue: Stories and a Novella by Bryan Evenson, is an excellent collection of short fiction by a (ex?)-Mormon professor. Mostly on the weird/horror side of things. Job Eats Them Raw, with the Dogs introduced me to him.

The Castle of Eyes by Penelope Love feels like a modern, somewhat outsider take on Gormenghast, with the horror more present in the story. Also the rare book published by Chaosium that's not linked to some other IP.

The Year of Our War by Steph Swainston is actually-good "gritty" fantasy, with excellent characterization.
posted by sagc at 6:13 AM on July 17 [1 favorite]

For me the easy answer is Alex Kerr's Lost Japan— an amazing love letter to Japanese culture, from rural valleys to hidden Kyoto mansions to Kabuki to calligraphy to why the best Japanese comedians come from Osaka. Goes well with Liza Dalby's Geisha.

Another frequent re-read is William Poundstone's Labyrinths of Reason, a delightful exploration of paradoxes.
posted by zompist at 6:16 AM on July 17 [5 favorites]

Mod note: Definitely adding this thread to the sidebar and Best Of blog list!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:45 AM on July 17 [4 favorites]

The Mystic Rose from the Garden of the King by Sheikh Haji Ibrahim of Kerbela, translated by Fairfax L. Cartwright is a wonderful collection of Sufi parables and shorter pearls of wisdom from the height of Victorian Orientalism. I bought a lovely softcover copy at the Samuel Weiser bookstore in New York in the early 1980s, and it's always been one of my treasured books.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 6:52 AM on July 17 [2 favorites]

The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester, about the making of the OED, and the contributions made by an inmate of Broadmoor. Non fiction

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams, also about the creation of the OED, and the words left out, but collected by the daughter of the creator. Fiction, and quite funny in parts.
posted by Enid Lareg at 7:21 AM on July 17 [2 favorites]

@Winnie, the way you've worded it, it sounds like Sufi wisdom comes from Victorian Orientalism? Can you comment on that?

In 1987 I picked up a copy of "The Mantle Of The Prophet" by Roy Mottahedeh. To my twenty-something mind it seemed like it would be an account of Iranian contemporary history. It was much more. I wasn't ready for it and eventually put it aside.

Fast forward nearly 40 years and a conversion to Islam on my part, and I dug in again recently. I was astounded. The book is at once:

• an exquisitely detailed biography of a Muslim scholar that feels like a bildungsroman
• a portrait in miniature of life in the beautiful city of Qom several decades ago
• a history of Persia / Iran from ancient times to 1985 or so
• an examination of Shi'a Muslim education and epistemology through the centuries
• an account of the cancerous effects of imperialism on countries like Iran and how the people of Iran attempted to throw them off

If you'll stick with it you'll begin to see why the ideals of the 1979 revolution appealed to so many.

Best book I've ever read? Well, the most WORTHWHILE book I've ever read is the Quran. But it's nice to know that other books that I couldn't handle years ago now (and I definitely could not have handled the Quran back then either) are treasure chests ready for my exploration.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 7:22 AM on July 17 [2 favorites]

The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare by Doug Stewart, a non-fiction book about a 19-year-old in eighteenth century London who forged documents supposedly written by Shakespeare to win the attention of his father and ended up fooling men such as Pitt The Younger, James Boswell, and the future King William IV, is an absolute fascinating read - far more implausible than pretty much any novel I've ever read, and truly remarkable.
posted by eternalhedgehog at 7:28 AM on July 17

When my wife moved in, her bookshelf held a slim novel called The Other City, by Michal Ajvaz, from a foreign-lit course she'd taken in college. It's utterly surreal but just coherent enough to feel like it has its own inner truth that we could, with the right tilt of head and alignment of mind, understand and predict perfectly. I really should reread it again.
posted by Tomorrowful at 7:30 AM on July 17

a blue thread reminded me of a book i hadn't heard of until reading recently & quite enjoyed: A History of Mechanics [internet archive]
a thought or two on what makes it so great
introduction by Louis de Broglie, pretty much what it says on the tin
posted by HearHere at 7:33 AM on July 17

Anytime this sort of topic comes up, I suggest what I think is a criminally under-read series in my favorite genre: cyberpunk. George Alec Effinger's Budayeen Cycle series: When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss.

The setting is a cross between Middle Eastern city and New Orleans, it is surprisingly queer in its treatment of gender and personalities, and it's firmly cyberpunk.
posted by griffey at 7:44 AM on July 17 [2 favorites]

My favourite obscure SFF which I wish were less obscure:

* The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World by Catherynne M. Valente, the first two volumes of A Dirge for Prester John. The third book is in the book equivalent of development hell after (IIRC) some publisher misadventures.
* A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar
* The Steerswoman books by Rosemary Kirstein
* The Hwarhath stories by Eleanor Arnason

I hope that neither Ray Bradbury nor Cordwainer Smith are obscure, but if you've never heard of them, I recommend The Martian Chronicles and The Rediscovery of Man.
posted by confluency at 7:47 AM on July 17 [7 favorites]

Sara Coleridge's Phantasmion (1837), increasingly understood as the first secondary world fantasy novel, has only 20 ratings on Goodreads. Sara Coleridge was Samuel Taylor Coleridge's abandoned daughter, although he told her fairy tales as a child. Her work has been overshadowed by his, sometimes cruelly, e.g. in Virginia Woolf's biographical essay: "Like her father she had a Surinam toad in her head, breeding other toads. But his were jewelled; hers were plain." And truthfully, her novel does not read like it was written in 1837: the confusing plot and limited characterization read more like 17th C. lit--a literary romance or a long literary fairy tale. But it is worth some patience because it is incredibly rich, strange, and beautiful. FWIW UNC has her annotated copy connecting places in its secondary world with features of the landscape in the Lake District she grew up in, and UT Austin has a Map of Phantasmion, handwritten manuscript, 1 page, undated, and IMO both should really be online for everyone to see, because the book is amazing. Anyway, there's more about her in this dissertation, and I've written up notes on how to play a 19th C. storytelling game using motifs from Phantasmion myself.
posted by Wobbuffet at 7:50 AM on July 17 [3 favorites]

The Dead Isle by Sam Starbuck is just about the best steampunk fantasy adventure story ever written, IMO. It's well known among erstwhile Livejournal dwellers especially the fannish subset thereof (and maybe he is also well known among current tumblr fan folk, I'm guessing) because Sam Starbuck is an immensely popular fanfic writer under the screen name Copperbadge, and he workshopped his book chapter by chapter online at the height of his fanfic popularity. But Sam only ever published this book (and several other original novels, all of which are well worth reading) on Lulu for POD sales of paperbacks and as a free PDF. He didn't want to put it on Amazon and I don't think he ever tried to get a traditional publisher for this book. It's never in any bookstores AND it's not on Amazon. So nobody I know IRL has ever heard of it, not even if they are very very bookish people who love fantasy and steampunk. I've bought and given away more than half a dozen copies of The Dead Isle to my friends.

Science in Saffron by Meera Nanda - as well as The God Market by the same author are both the best books written on the subject of modern hinduism in India. I can literally say "the best" because I have read damn near every book written on the subject, I was doing research for a project and I spent two years devouring every word written online and off on the topic. Nothing even comes close to Meera Nanda's ability to put a point on the exact thing, and she's rigorous about her data and her citations too. Most people who want to read about Hinduism in India want to read either (a) hagiographies and glowing treatises about the mystical wonders of an ancient religious tradition yadda yadda OR (b) fundamentalist hinduism/hindutva and right wing politics. Meera Nanda's books are about examining ordinary/average modern hindu people's beliefs and practices - and how they intersect with capitalism. Nobody I know online or off has ever heard of her and I keep pressing her books into people's hands whenever they evince any interest in the subject.
posted by MiraK at 7:53 AM on July 17 [3 favorites]

Lost Harbor by Warren Hanna. It's a careful examination of Drake's landing on the coast of Northern California in 1579, and the problems with pinpointing the exact location of the landing. Beyond the historical puzzle itself, it illuminates the problem of "how do we know anything historical?", given that we piece the past together from remnants. Also, the description of the Native American reaction to Drake's arrival, likely their first encounter with Europeans, evokes a "visitors from outer space" scene.
posted by SPrintF at 7:56 AM on July 17

@Winnie, the way you've worded it, it sounds like Sufi wisdom comes from Victorian Orientalism? Can you comment on that?
I apologize for my poor phrasing. I should have been clearer. I meant that the translation and interpretation was in the romanticized style of that period, along the lines of the translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward FitzGerald.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 7:59 AM on July 17 [2 favorites]

When I was in grad school, I read Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm. I remember it as thoroughly entertaining, and wonder why I hadn't heard more about it over the years.

I haven't revisited it yet to see if it really holds up yet. (Note: I read it for fun, not for a class. )
posted by Archer25 at 8:04 AM on July 17 [4 favorites]

Silverlock, a Pilgrim’s Progress story told in a land entirely populated by characters from Northern European folklore and literature. The narrative voice and style of writing has heavily influenced my personal style.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:10 AM on July 17 [8 favorites]

1Q84 by murakami. It's not obscure in the sense that no one's heard if it. It had a lot of hype. But I swear I've never met anyone who read it. It's really something. Inventive. Weird. Made me uncomfortable a few times. Charming. Genre bending as well so it tickled different things for me as it progressed.
posted by chasles at 8:25 AM on July 17 [3 favorites]

In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden is about an older woman who decides to become a nun. Most of it takes place in a convent. I think one reason I loved it was because, since it's set in a convent, the main characters are all women who are managing everything. Definitely passes the Bechdel test.

I also love The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham, which is about a man who is seeking a spiritual life. He is described at one point as a deeply religious person who does not believe in God. It's been made into movies twice, so maybe it's not obscure enough. I haven't seen the movies. (In case you can't tell, I have a strong spiritual bent.)

Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada is based on the true story of a couple in Berlin who resisted the Nazis by placing anti-Hitler postcards all around the city. It is such a small act of rebellion, but it was also extremely brave.
posted by FencingGal at 8:25 AM on July 17 [5 favorites]

Neither of these are super-obscure (they were both reissued by NYRB Classics) but two favorites:

- The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons is nominally a biography of a mostly forgotten eccentric writer but reads like a mystery novel. My wife recommended it to me without telling me anything about it and I genuinely thought it was some kind of Borgesian metafiction for the first four or five chapters.

- Last Letters from Hav by Jan Morris is a fictional travelogue of a nonexistent cosmopolitan country somewhere in the Balkans. It's like if Rick Steves wrote Dictionary of the Khazars.
posted by theodolite at 8:33 AM on July 17 [1 favorite]

In This House of Brede

Seconding this wonderful book!
posted by jgirl at 8:35 AM on July 17 [4 favorites]

Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson.

The story is told in poetic prose, written with the earnest yearning of a young woman's voice, filled with heart-achingly sublime descriptions of the natural world, set on a family farm among the agricultural failures of the 1930s. The first time I read it, I got a little way into it and checked I had the right book with the right publication date; how could a 1930s novel read with such profound and searching psychological insight?

At 24, she's the youngest person to win the Pulitzer for a novel; she did so in 1935. I know you might say "how can a book that won a Pulitzer be little-known?" but it is, though it doesn't deserve to be. It has 256 reviews on Goodreads. Gone With the Wind won two years later and has 1.2 million.

The opening:

“Now in November I can see our years as a whole. This autumn is like both an end and a beginning to our lives, and those days which seemed confused with the blur of all things too near and too familiar are clear and strange now. It has been a long year, longer and more full of meaning than all those ten years that went before it. There were nights when I felt that we were moving toward some awful and hopeless hour, but when that hour came it was broken up and confused because we were too near, and I did not even quite realize that it had come.

I can look back now and see the days as one looking down on things past, and they have more shape and meaning than before. But nothing is really finished or left behind forever.

The years were all alike and blurred into one another, and the mind is a sort of sieve or quicksand, but I remember the day we came and the months afterward well enough. Too well. The roots of our life, struck in back there that March, have a queer resemblance to their branches.”

posted by jocelmeow at 8:35 AM on July 17 [6 favorites]

Thomas Schelling's Choice and Consequence. Each essay is a master-class in clear thinking.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 8:40 AM on July 17

The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner was first published in 1972, long enough ago that it probably counts as at least somewhat obscure in 2024; likewise Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace (1977) by Amory Lovins. Going further back we have The Hidden Persuaders (1957) by Vance Packard and The Tyranny Of Words (1938) by Stuart Chase. All four of these works are flawed but none of the flaws matters very much.

And then there are the Titus Groan books. These are rich and despite their considerable weight they need to be approached like a fine old red and sipped, not gulped, with a deliberate pause after each paragraph to give the flavour of the prose time to develop on the palate. Absolute masterpieces.
posted by flabdablet at 8:40 AM on July 17 [8 favorites]

Oh oh oh and I don't know how obscure Geek Love is these days, only that it deserves to be a lot less so.
posted by flabdablet at 8:45 AM on July 17 [8 favorites]

I definitely second and third guessed myself before suggesting "To Sleep In A Sea of Stars" by Christopher Paolini. It's about a xenobiologist who accidentally makes First Contact in the same way that amusement park patrons feel when they go on the roller coasters a few times. On the one hand, I suspect it is pretty off the beaten track and reviews are very mixed, and it's almost 900 pages. On the other hand, First Contact should by definition be expected to be very non-human and known physics rule violating. Oh I so hope there aren't MORE human beings in the Universe, I think Earth's population is sufficient thank you. Also I hope that whatever beings we encounter are a bit more, ahemmmm, sophisticated than us. And I think the author (who first became famous for his Fantasy) does a half decent job, so maybe that qualifies as "best obscure". FWIW.
posted by forthright at 8:52 AM on July 17 [1 favorite]

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi.

They're both small, quirky little tales that I found very enjoyable.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:58 AM on July 17 [1 favorite]

Billion Dollar Baby by Bob Greene, the columnist not the exercise guy. Long before he became a more-or-less full-time nostalgia factory (and also before he lost his job after it was revealed that he had had an affair with a 17-year-old), he managed to get on the last tour of Alice Cooper with his original band, all of whom had gone to high school with the erstwhile Vince Furnier. Not only is it an excellent snapshot of the early Alice Cooper--who is at that point an unrecovered alcoholic, with his bandmates starting to realize that he may not need them--but it's also probably the best account of a rock tour ever. Long out of print, you may be able to get it through interlibrary loan at your local public library.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:13 AM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Yooooo if we're talking Kazuo Ishiguro, please let me use all possible superlatives for When We Were Orphans. It's kind of obscure because Ishiguro considers it his worst book and a lot of people are bewildered by it, so it might be among the least known of his books? but OH MY GOD THEY ARE ALL WRONG, Ishiguro included. It is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

A famous and celebrated British detective goes back to Shanghai, where he grew up, to find his lost parents and his childhood companion. This is an inside-out detective story, a detective story acted out in shadows on Plato's cave while the front-and-center drama occurs in the main character's mind - in his delusions and his perception of reality. It is haunting and creepy and it has the most skin-crawling climax and, as I said, it is ultimately so so heartbreaking - because out of all Ishiguro heroes this is the only one afaik who gets a happy ending. This book broke me open and remade me anew. There is so much hope in the ending that I almost could not tolerate it. I ended the book sobbing on my knees having slid off of the sofa. I cannot recommend it highly enough for fans of literary novels that play with reality via unreliable narrators.
posted by MiraK at 9:15 AM on July 17 [2 favorites]

As a young day-reader at the local library (I was the first one there when they opened, I was last to leave) two books tilted my world view in new directions.

The Cats of Seroster by Robert Westall. On the surface a simple fantasy story, but with unexpeded darkness and conversation about having to make heavy choices.

Stories of Mullah Nasruddin - a collection of stories about the turkish "wise fool" Mullah Nasruddin who observes, describes, and acts in surprising ways that uncover the underpinnings of society. (There are many different collections of Mullah Nasruddin-stories - you can't go wrong with any of them, in my opinion.)
posted by Rabarberofficer at 9:16 AM on July 17 [3 favorites]

The Caxtons, a Family Picture, by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton, published in 1849, is long, wordy, and hilarious. It is utterly obscure and is written by the "it was a dark and story night..." guy and remains one of the most humourous and entertaining books I have ever read. As far as I know (and I've talked about it for 40 or so years) no one except my sister and I have read it.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 9:26 AM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language changed how I looked at human society and in a roundabout way inspired my own first book.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:29 AM on July 17 [1 favorite]

Nobody ever seems to know what I'm talking about when I recommend The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison. I needed two bookmarks to read this, one for my place in the book and one for my place in the glossary.

I suspect it was more well known years ago?
posted by JaredSeth at 9:33 AM on July 17 [3 favorites]

Stoner, by John Williams. Published in 1965, it's a novel about a time and place more than a plot -- it's set in the early 1900s. The main character is William Stoner who goes from being the son of a farmer to a university professor, and all his relationships are problematic.

They Came Like Swallows, by William Maxwell. Published in 1937. Tells the story of an ordinary family's experience of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. I read this about 15 years ago -- I imagine it hits differently now, with COVID and all. I keep thinking I would like to reread it, but I'm a bit hesitant.
posted by OrangeDisk at 9:37 AM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Kalpa Imperial by Angelika Gorodischer, translated by Ursula Le Guin. A series of convoluted stories about an empire, sort of. If you like Cosmicomics-era Italo Calvino, this may be for you.

Trafalgar, also by Gorodischer - a set of stories about a guy's science fictional adventures, again sort of.

The Henry Rios mystery series. First person narrative by Henry Rios, a gay Latino defense lawyer in LA in the eighties/nineties. Published in the eighties/nineties (although there's a new mid-series novel, apparently). Really sharp snapshot of the height of the AIDS epidemic, good hardboiled stories, very real narrator, strong character arc over the series. I used to read these in bits at the library whenever I could have a few minutes in a quiet corner because I was afraid I'd get in trouble or have trouble if I was seen reading a gay book. Just outstanding.

Sarah Tolmie's The Stone Boatmen and Two Travellers. Possibly some of her other work too - some of her other stuff that I've read is too strong and unsettling for me to love in the same way as I love these two, but she is awfully good. Her books are somehow cool-toned and remote yet very moving. SFF stories, sort of. I'd say that if you like A Stranger In Olondria and Lud-In-The-Mist, you might also like these - they are nothing like either novel, but if you like that kind of eerie small "this is a classic even if no one realizes it" books, you might like this one.

The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica, an early effort by right-wing radio host John Calvin Batchelor. (OOP, so you won't be giving him money). Either JCB was a different person when he wrote this, or he was so anxious to critique neoliberal/non-profit/utilitarian thinking that he accidentally wrote a radical book. This book prepared me for the present. It came out in 1983 and apparently got a second edition in the nineties. Has some leftover seventies quirky-names zaniness and many people do not like the plotting, but the middle sections are extraordinarily astute. Also, weirdly, a book with diverse characters and a gay couple. This book was one of a small handful that made me left-wing.
posted by Frowner at 9:49 AM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Lanark by Alasdair Gray: From the Glaswegian author of Poor Things, his deeply weird and deeply Scottish magnum opus. Absurdist, surreal, poignant. Not obscure in Scotland, but in America I'd certainly never heard of it.

Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin: The queen herself is not obscure, but this is one of her lesser read works! An anthropological study of a fictional post-apocalyptic utopia, featuring stories, songs, plays, poems, and diagrams.

Thessaly by Jo Walton: what if the Greek pantheon was real, and Athena could pluck scholars out of time and plop them on an island together to try and create Plato's Just City? Contains feminism, Socrates, and sentient robots.

Grass by Sheri Tepper: One of the most wonderful science fiction novels of all time, and part of a surprisingly rich subgenre I like to call "Catholics in Space" (see also Hyperion cantos by Dan Simmons and The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, both excellent.) Ecofeminist magic.

Also seconding A Stranger in Olondria and Geek Love! And the Gormenghast novels!!
posted by Isingthebodyelectric at 9:54 AM on July 17 [6 favorites]

Just to lower the tone, I'll mention Frederic Brown's Murder Can be Fun ("He wrote a plot for murder - but a real killer stole the show!"). I stumbled across an extremely tatty Corgi Books paperback edition of this little gem in a UK second-hand bookshop 45 years ago and instantly loved it. It was priced at two shillings* (or had been when new) so, given the condition, I must have paid even less.

It's a hugely entertaining murder story, written with great verve and wit. There's nothing remotely pretentious about it, but lots of fun to be had and an old school penny-a-word man's determination not to let the reader's attention flag for a single second: an unabashed dime store novel in the very best sense of the term.

Brown's been rediscovered now, and many of his books brought back into print, but when I was lucky enough to find my copy - which I still have by the way - no-one I spoke to had ever heard of either him or his books. I only started to find out a little about him myself when the internet came along.

* Two shillings was then one tenth of a pound. Based on my edition's 1958 publication date, the sum would be worth about £2 today.
posted by Paul Slade at 10:06 AM on July 17 [2 favorites]

For those who like memoirs: A London Family, 1870-1900. Molly Hughes was a charming writer and storyteller.
posted by JanetLand at 10:21 AM on July 17 [6 favorites]

Lucas & Morrow's What a Life!: an autobiography (1911). Proto-Dada pasteup humour telling the story of a life illustrated by pictures cut out from a mail-order catalogue. It's very out of print, though Dover reprinted it in the 1970s. I made a mediocre web version of it years ago, but at least there's a scanned PDF in there (self-link, sorry): What a Life!: an autobiography

H. H. Bashford's Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man. Yet another early 20th century send-up. Carp is a pious, pompous, utterly un-self-aware bore who cheats his way through a life written down in excruciatingly tedious detail. Needless to say, the rest of the world around him doesn't hold him in any kind of positive regard at all.

The Uncle books by J. P. Martin. Written as episodic bedtime stories by a Methodist minister some time in the 1920s, these very anarchic tales are probably my favourite books of all.
posted by scruss at 10:24 AM on July 17 [1 favorite]

I'll put in a word for the short stories of Rhys Davies (1901-78). He would have been a mid-list author in his heyday, but isn't much read now. Any of his collections from the '30s or '40s are worth a look, but a 1955 volume of Collected Stories is probably the single best place to start.

He hailed from the South Wales valleys (as do I) but moved away to London as a young man. Despite that, Welsh settings predominated in his fiction for decades afterwards: in realistically-drawn tales of miners and their families from his industrialised home turf; or in stories set in a more or less idealised vision of rural West Wales. His tales run the gamut from the broadly comic to the bleakly tragic. Vividly-drawn & headstrong female characters feature prominently. I'm biased due to his being a 'local' author for me, but think he could stand to have a wider readership.
posted by misteraitch at 10:42 AM on July 17 [1 favorite]

While we're on the topic of memoirs:

Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood is very engaging and just what it sounds like.

For a different kind of memoir/book, The Classic Slum

For something really different, try Victor Serge's books. An anarchist who decided to throw in with the Soviets in the interest of the revolution, he had to flee when he fell afoul of Stalin. The tankies have clearly been at his Wikipedia, because they describe him as an anarchist who became a communist and elide his flight into exile. A wonderful, grim, cold writer who really tried his best to forward the revolution and who was destroyed thereby.
posted by Frowner at 10:44 AM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Mallory's Oracle is fantastic (and the first of a series of twelve), and the Uncle books are delightful. Grass, The Cats of Seroster and the Steerswoman books are amongst my favourites too. I have copies of The Worm Ouroboros, Silverlock and The Stone War on my shelves, but haven't read them yet... maybe I should move them up the TBR mountain?

Does Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart (and its two sequels) count as obscure around here? Tales of an ancient China that never was. Joyous.

There's a portal fantasy duology by Barbara Hambly - The Silent Tower and The Silicon Mage[1] - that I've reread so many times I could practically recite the whole thing, and yet nobody else seems to have read them even once. Well-drawn characters; convincing worldbuilding; 1980s technology; a diffident female computer programmer applying her debugging skills to some very unfamiliar problems; a half-mad magician with his heart in the right place. What's not to like?

[1] Even reading the back of book 2 is a spoiler for book 1, so I'm not linking it. Look at the beautiful UK covers (by Mark Salwowski), though! The Silent Tower and The Silicon Mage.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 11:29 AM on July 17 [7 favorites]

The People series by Zenna Henderson. A fascinating set of novels and short stories about an alien civilization with psychic powers that settled in the rural Western US who sometimes help out their neighbors with their cool powers, but mostly just want to be left alone to live in peace. As far as I can tell, Henderson came up with this stuff pretty independently of other sci-fi in the 1960s, and I've never read anything else quite like it.

We had a neighbor who was a librarian and this was her favorite series. She would buy up the novels at used book stores and hand them out to people looking for something to read. Definitely a bit hope punk for those of us who could use it.
posted by hydropsyche at 11:39 AM on July 17 [4 favorites]

I'm not sure how obscure these are but here's a few favourites:

Keep the River on Your Right by gay American anthropologist and artist Tobias Schneebaum. This is a very charming memoir of his time traveling among the Harakmbut people of Peru and how he connected with them through his art and his love of theirs.

I think all the underrated books of the underrated Thomas Disch books are great but The Genocides and On Wings of Song are my two favourites. On Wings of Song is a bitter and sometimes prescient satire of America and the culture wars and is favourite of Harold Bloom and William Gibson. I think it is likely his best book. The Genocides is an earlier book, nominated for a Nebula award, which follows a group of people confronted by an apocalyptic situation involving giant extraterrestrial plants. Equal measures B movie and disturbing critique of our failings.
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:44 AM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Do Glaciers Listen by Julie Cruikshank still resonates in my head from when I read it last year. It looks at how the local knowledge of people living in the Mount Saint Elias range is produced and communicated, following indigenous accounts of the Little Ice Age and first contact with European colonists. It's a bit academic and anthropological but fascinating.
posted by crossswords at 11:47 AM on July 17

None of these are really, really obscure, but I think they're little-known enough to qualify.

Kleinzeit by Russell Hoban. Everyone always recommends Riddley Walker, but his other books are good too. Here's how Kleinzeit starts:

There it was again, like a signal along a wire. A clear, brilliant flash of pain from A to B. What was A? What was B? Kleinzeit didn't want to know. His hypotenuse was on that side, he thought. Maybe not. He'd always been afraid to look at anatomical diagrams. Muscles yes. Organs, no. Nothing but trouble to be expected from organs.

Flash. A to B again. His diapason felt hard and swollen. His scalp was dry and flaky. He put his face in front of the bathroom mirror.

I exist, said the mirror.

What about me? said Kleinzeit.

Not my problem, said the mirror.

If you're looking for books to read to your kids, there are a lot of excellent but obscure ones by Russell Hoban. Everyone knows the Frances books, but there are others that deserve to be just as well known. My kids and I liked The Serpent Tower. The single review on GoodReads is "Really no idea what the book was about. It was more like poetry than prose in many ways. Made me think though." I guess that sums it up pretty well.

Mornings Like This: Found Poems by Annie Dillard. I loved these poems and I loved the whole idea of found poems. The one called "Index of First Lines" gave me the idea of making poems from the first lines of other poems, which is a lot of fun.

Describing Inner Experience?: Proponent Meets Skeptic by Russell Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel. I found this fascinating. It made me reflect on my own inner experiences and I think that was what made me realize how non-visual my mental imagery really is.
posted by Redstart at 11:47 AM on July 17 [1 favorite]

Lovestar by Andri Magnason. A review describes the book as "a dystopian novel with strong Black Mirror vibes...This story was written long before Instagram, but describes, among other things, a company buying access to people’s personal lives in order to more effectively target their ads and propaganda. LoveStar is almost 20 years old, but its relevance to the present day is scary, to say the least.”

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It doesn't really qualify as obscure because they made a movie about it. However, I don't know anyone else who has actually read it. The non-linear plot and the vernacular dialogue can be hard to get used to, but IMO it definitely pays off in the end. There are some really elegant lines of prose in this book.
posted by carnival_night_zone at 12:29 PM on July 17 [3 favorites]

I may have a few for you, and my choices may be a bit more "mainstream" comparatively - but they still seem to get the "huh, no, I never heard of that" reaction when I describe them to people.

* First comes a trilogy - Memory of Fire, by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. It's a history of the Americas told as a series of magic realist brief vignettes, starting with pre-Columbian myths and ending in 1984 (when he was writing). It's mind-blowing - it really gives a sense of history as having been the chaotic, whim-driven, random mess it actually is, as opposed to having been the neat and tidy Inevitable Outcomes it's often presented to be. And Galeano covers pop culture and everyday life as well - a vignette set in a Bolivian silver mine is followed by a vignette set at Wounded Knee, and that's followed by a vignette about Mark Twain, followed by....it feels like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Howard Zinn got drunk and decided to write a history book together. I was assigned the first volume, Genesis, in a college class, and loved it so much I kept it and tracked down the next two (Faces and Masks and Century Of The Wind) soon after.

* Cal got some brief attention recently in a thread about Mark Knopfler - there was a film of this book and Knopfler did some work on the soundtrack. The book is worth seeking out - it's going to sound like a total soap-opera from my description but I promise it isn't. It's about a young Catholic man in a small Northern Irish town; a year before the book he drove the getaway car when his buddy in the IRA assassinated the police chief on his doorstep, and Cal has been laying low ever since, trying to find odd jobs and bumming around the local library. A new librarian starts working there and he starts to get a crush on her - then finds out that she's the widow of that police chief. By now they've chatted on occasion and she offers him a job on their family farm - he takes it to punish himself a bit, and she starts to check him out too. ...Again, I know, total soap-opera, but the writer is remarkably understated and manages to avoid melodrama.

* There are some kids' picture books that had a weird impact on me - one of them was the subject of my very first AskMe, since i couldn't remember the title Soonie And The Dragon. I appreciated that Soonie wasn't a delicate princess, but rather was a very practical, roll-up-her-sleeves and sort-shit-out kind of heroine. Zeek Silver Moon is a bit painfully 70s'-hippie in its imagined depiction from "moments from the life of a little boy", but deep down that's the kind of childhood I think I wished I'd had on some level. And Shazira Shazam and The Devil is a kids' picture book about an Arabian man who makes a sort of Faustian bargain with the Devil in the form of a camel; I was fascinated with this as a child because it didn't have a happy ending, and the illustrations were mind-blowingly trippy.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:32 PM on July 17

Oh, and two more history-related anthologies!

* History Lessons tells the history of the United States by using excerpts from other countries' history textbooks. So it uses the British account of the American Revolution, the Cuban textbook's account of the Bay Of Pigs, a Portuguese and then a Spanish textbook's account of Columbus' voyage, etc.

* One of History Lessons' editors went on to then do History In The Making, which also uses excerpts from history textbooks - but this time, he picks a handful of specific moments from American history and prints excerpts from American textbooks from different time periods. So for instance, if he were focusing on Washington at Valley Forge, first you might see what a textbook from 1812 wrote about it, then a textbook from 1856, then one from 1898, then one from 1915, then one from 1952, then one from 1972.

Both of those books each had one excerpt that was so over-the-top bonkers that I've periodically pulled it off my shelf to read to other people as a sort of "wait 'til you hear THIS" anecdote.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:38 PM on July 17

First of all, this thread is getting MINED.

My go-to for this type of thing is James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It has a surprising amount of reviews on Goodreads but I've never met anyone familiar with it (though the author, AKA "The Attic Shepherd," is treasured in Scotland).

It's a period novel set in 17th c. (I think) Scotland at a time when there were warring religious and political factions, one of which was the Calvinists, whose belief that certain people are destined for heaven leads to all kinds of pernicious outcomes. But beyond this it is a absolutely fascinating and modern narrative with unreliable narrators, metatextual elements (Hogg seeded Blackwoods IRL with a weird report just so he could refer to it here!) and a totally hallucinatory vibe sometimes. It's really wonderful.

I will also say that William Hope Hodgson's post-post-post-apocalyptic The Night Land, though acknowledged as an important progenitor of the Weird by many, is read by few due to being nigh unreadable. Reader, I read it!! And it is unbelievably good as long as you can learn to deal with his fake-olden language. The imagination on display is shocking - once in a century stuff.

And because those two are definitely not everyone's taste, I think a thriller many should read is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's The Rose and the Key. He's known for ghost stories and Uncle Silas, but I think this one is actually better, a slow-burn gothic that really pays off.

Last for sure: if you're interested in a book of such recommendations, check out the Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler. He tracks down a ton of authors from history who were popular but have since been lost (some justifiably, others, inexplicably). I got a lot of recommendations from that and already enjoyed one (The Woman in the Car with Glasses and a Gun).
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 12:51 PM on July 17 [3 favorites]

My favorite book is Solo Faces, by James Salter. I think he's well known in certain circles, but I don't personally know anyone else who has read it.
posted by Horselover Fat at 1:13 PM on July 17

Obscure mostly in that they are from the fairly distant past: EM Delafield and the Diary of A Provincial Lady, which is completely hilarious. Patricia Wentworth, a Golden Age romance / mystery writer who really deserves to be better known. The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany, another very early fantasy novel. All my books are in storage or I could add more!

Sarah Caudwell's Hilary Tamar mystery series.
Patricia A. McKillip. If you like fantasy and have not read her, you should. Anything at all. She has lots of books.

The Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson. This is a serious weirdie from the 60s/70s that I read in college in the 80s that completely blew my young mind. Sure, a lot of it is ridiculous but not all and it's good to have your brain opened up. Also works as an introduction to the Illuminatus trilogy and, of course, the Book of the Subgenius. Are these obscure? I don't know anymore. They were, then they weren't and I kind of think they are again.

And in new books that probably aren't actually obscure, I just finished a book called No Gods No Monsters and I recommend it unequivocally. I had never heard of it, knew very little about it, but it's really just an extraordinary book.
posted by mygothlaundry at 1:28 PM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Oh and I'm going to nth Gormenghast and Zenna Henderson.
posted by mygothlaundry at 1:28 PM on July 17 [1 favorite]

Wait, I forgot Wilhelmina Baird! Unjustly overlooked early cyberpunk. I LOVED the Crashcourse books.
posted by mygothlaundry at 1:31 PM on July 17

At Swim-Two-Birds by Brian O'Nolan. Perhaps not super obscure, but little discussed these days.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:33 PM on July 17 [5 favorites]

Because of the two film adaptation, people have heard of True Grit, but almost nobody has read it. That's a shame. It's a terrific book. In fact, it might be my favorite book. The films are true to the novel (and both fine in their own right), but neither can quite capture the sly wit of Mattie Ross as a narrator.

“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band. Here is what happened.”

That's the start. And even typing it out just now makes me want to re-read the book. Or, better yet, listen to the audio version from novelist Donna Tartt.

Tartt was a huge Charles Portis fan, and after he died she wrote this remembrance of him. (That's a New York Times link, but it should be a viewable gift link...for a while.) She also penned this essay about the abiding pleasure of True Grit, which became the introduction to modern editions of the book.

Tartt writes, "Certainly when I was growing up in the 1970s, True Grit was widely thought to be a classic...Yet True Grit vanished from the public eye..." So, perhaps not a completely obscure book, but one completely overlooked by modern audiences, and that's a shame.
posted by jdroth at 1:48 PM on July 17 [3 favorites]

I don't know if this qualifies as obscure but it was to me when I found it randomly on goodreads: Kabloona by Contran de Poncins. It was genuinely an amazingly interesting and engrossing book that I highly recommend (everyone in the family read it and loved it!).
posted by bluesky43 at 1:50 PM on July 17

> Does Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart (and its two sequels) count as obscure around here?

One of my favorites. I've got a pristine first edition of the first book on my bookshelf (and a dog-eared paperback copy as well for actual reading).
posted by JaredSeth at 1:52 PM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Brian O'Nolan is better known by his pen name, Flann O'Brien. The Third Policeman is incredible too.

→ James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Is completely fantastic, in all senses. For someone (the legend goes) self-taught, Hogg was a very advanced writer. It's like Lanark put through a time machine with better jokes.

G V Desani's All About H. Hatterr is brilliant, and far more obscure than it should be.
posted by scruss at 1:56 PM on July 17 [1 favorite]

Of the books mentioned above I have read In This House of Brede, The Sheep Look Up, Titus Groan, The Worm Ouroboros, Lanark, Always Coming Home, Grass, Bridge of Birds, The Silent Tower, Kleinzeit, a few by Patricia Wentworth, The King of Elfland's Daughter, and The Book of the Subgenius. I second the recommendation in each case!

I'd like to recommend Sonnets and Songs (1880) by Emily Jane Pfeiffer, a late-Victorian poet who deserves to be better known. The poems are on a variety of subjects including Darwin's theory of evolution, the relation between religion and science, the landscapes of Scotland and the Alps, the house of Atreus, and the natural world.

A moth belated,—sun and zephyr-kist,—
Trembling about a pale arbutus bell,
Probing to wildering depths its honeyed cell,—
A noonday thief, a downy sensualist!

posted by cyanistes at 1:58 PM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Along with the afore-mentioned True Grit, other books in this thread that I've read and appreciated: The Razor's Edge by Maugham, Stoner by Williams, Bridge of Birds by Hughart, and Cloud Atlas by Mitchell.

Books in this thread that I've read and don't particularly care for: the Gormenghast series (inventive but dull), Geek Love, and At Swim-Two-Birds. None of these is bad. I just didn't care for them.

Other (now-)obscure books I consider great: The House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds and the Nero Wolfe mystery novels of Rex Stout.
posted by jdroth at 2:09 PM on July 17 [1 favorite]

Cloud Atlas is very satisfying. I also enjoyed Mitchell's 2010 historical novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet tremendously; it was widely reviewed when it came out ("Readers need to bear in mind that the book is fiction and not history"!), but seems to have faded from view a bit.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 2:38 PM on July 17 [3 favorites]

Seconding anything by William Maxwell.

Contractually obligated to mention Wittgenstein’s On Certainty which is his most accessible later work IMHO.

Zenna Henderson’s The Anything Box is also worth mentioning.

Edgar Pangborn - Davy and Still I Persist in Wondering.
posted by wittgenstein at 2:38 PM on July 17

I definitely second Grass by Sheri S. Tepper -- it's a book which permanently changed my understanding of what knowledge is, both in fiction and in real life.

Another weird addition to the list: Nova One, a New Wave SF short story anthology edited by Harry Harrison. It's one of the first science fiction books I ever bought, and while there's no individual story that stands out to me, there's something magical about the collection as a whole which makes me remember it particularly fondly.

(I also have Nova 2, but it didn't leave much of an impression.)
posted by confluency at 2:41 PM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Simon Winchester's book : The Perfectionists is a fantastic read (non-fiction).

Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence is another great read.

Alexander Mikaberidze's The Napoleonic Wars was fascinating to read. I learned a LOT. Especially how global it was. He makes a good case that this was probable the first World War in a sense.
posted by indianbadger1 at 2:44 PM on July 17 [1 favorite]

Interstellar migration and the human experience is the proceedings of the Conference on Interstellar Migration held at Los Alamos in May 1983. It's a series of chapters where scholars from different disciplines try to answer questions like "What would happen to language if humans began travelling throughout the solar system/galaxy?" Many of the authors draw on historical parallels e.g., what happened with languages when humans have populated isolated islands. It's written by academics but it's an explicitly crossdisciplinary conference and publication so I found it very readable despite not being a scholar of any of the disciplines represented in the book.
posted by ElKevbo at 2:55 PM on July 17 [3 favorites]

Third-ing In This House of Brede (do you know you can visit Brede?! and adding Remainder by Tom McCarthy, about a man with amnesia who uses unlimited money to recreate very specific, yet vague memories.
posted by Threeve at 3:31 PM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Rocket City (not amazon), cathryn alpert. PW review.

Set in the motels, highways and restaurants of New Mexico, Alpert's first novel is an elegant and witty, if modest, peek into the lives of a handful of characters in the American Southwest. Successfully sidestepping the cliches of the road novel, Alpert introduces her cast of fully dimensional characters with strong, selective strokes[...] Alpert's imagery--melons on a car seat, a stunted boy digging in the dirt with a spoon--is inventive and often beautiful. Wry dialogue and a lean sense of humor give life to this novel about the awkward comedy of overcoming loneliness.

posted by j_curiouser at 3:31 PM on July 17 [1 favorite]

Renee Gladman's Ravicka novels, including Event Factory, The Ravickans, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, and House's of Ravicka. Poetic, surreal, intellectual, elliptical science fiction of a sort. Also her maybe-memoir Sentences. Think Christopher Priest's Dream Archepelago books written by a younger lesbian of color.
posted by aught at 3:40 PM on July 17

A cartographer and a calligrapher walk into a bar. Thirty years later, so does a publisher.

The Wayfarers' Journal by John Lloyd and Pat Sellars is a book by a group of walkers who record their journeys through the English countryside.

For decades, they walked once or twice a year, generally following Roman roads, and then used their skills to create leather bound copies of their walks every 5 years. The writing is modern, but the script and illustrations look medieval.

My dad gave me new copy when it came out in the early 90s. It is the first book I pack up whenever I move house, and always the first to be placed on the bookshelf.
posted by Calvin and the Duplicators at 4:44 PM on July 17 [5 favorites]

Can I also recommend this wonderful un-romance: THE RIBS AND THIGH BONES OF DESIRE by Sandra Hutchison. The book is available on Amazon and in local bookstores in some parts of New England. The author is a personal friend and deserves a much wider readership.

This is her second book. Her first book, THE AWFUL MESS, is a modern take on THE SCARLET LETTER and was quite successful, reaching the semi finals of Amazon's self-published novel contest in the year it was released (2014 IIRC?). It is also a wonderful book, very relatable and readable, wickedly funny and full of heart.

Sandy's other novels, which include two sequels to THE AWFUL MESS, are also really really good. She's a very political writer who happens to be a hopeless romantic, so most of her books are love stories with very topical and uncomfortable political themes taking center stage in the plot and she takes wild, breathtaking risks: e.g. a police shooting of a Black man - where the police officer is the romantic hero of the previous novel. I'd better note at this point that Sandy is radically progressive as well as anti-racist, and imo she does justice to the subject.

My heart belongs to her second book, RIBS. It's set in the 1970s in a New England town, and the story centers around a 16/17 year old girl who enters into a romantic relationship with her thirty-something college professor neighbor. It is a subject that made me want to throw the book across the room, instead I found myself cheering and weeping as I read it. It is SO FEMINIST that I felt seen and heard by the book. That girl's mother, oof, I want that mother - hell I want to *be* that mother. Sandy's courage and her deftness in selling this volatile and risky un-romance makes me want to stand up and applaud.

Instead I will settle for recommending THE RIBS AND THIGH BONES OF DESIRE by Sandra Hutchison to anyone who enjoys unpredictable romances that dance on the knife edge of taboo, roaring with power!
posted by MiraK at 5:12 PM on July 17

I'm not actually sure how obscure she is, but Caitlin Sweet, wife of sf author Peter Watts, has several of her formerly published fantasy novels available on her website for free. I'm about halfway through A Telling Of Stars which is a slow and gorgeously told tale. I can't read much of it at a time, which irritates me a bit because I want to finish it and discover more of her stuff.

Though it's been many years since I read them, the Gormenghast books are wonderful, especially the first. Written in the 1930s, they were rediscovered in the rise of fantasy following The Lord Of The Rings' "discovery" in the mid-60s, though Gormenghast and Middle Earth are in two different universes.
posted by lhauser at 6:25 PM on July 17 [2 favorites]

If you would like to read some very camp comedy of manners from 1920s England, I recommend E F Benson's Lucia series, starting with Queen Lucia. Then move on to Miss Mapp. Like P G Wodehouse, easily equal in merit IMO, but if he were gay and just a little bit more grounded.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 7:14 PM on July 17 [3 favorites]

"Hopeful Monsters" by Nicholas Mosley -- a grand epistolary modernist novel of ideas /love story set against the background of the rise of fascism in Weimar Germany and ending around the time of the Manhattan Project. The characters encounter real historical personages -- Einstein, Wittgenstein, Vavilov, etc.

Collected short stories by Henry Kuttner -- he is an underappreciated mid-century science fiction writer (and an influence on Ray Bradbury). Really smart, emotionally resonant, sometimes hilarious science fiction. One of his best short stories, "Mimsy Were The Borogroves" was loosely adapted into an atrocious Hollywood movie called "The Last Mimsy" and I think there was a brief minor resurgence of interest in him, but other than that he is pretty "obscure."

"The Golden Spur" by Dawn Powell -- a lovely, light bildunsgroman that also doubles as a kind of comedy of manners set in 1950s NYC / Greenwich Village.
posted by virve at 7:39 PM on July 17 [2 favorites]

There’s a longform (but short) reported nonfiction book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez called Clandestine in Chile that is so good at the craft of suspense, while also being about life under a dictatorship that is really so worth reading.

Also The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis. Based on the true court case, very interesting to me about life in Medieval France .
posted by vunder at 7:39 PM on July 17

Thomas De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater for a slice of a certain time, place, and social tier in England 200 years ago.

Ib Melchior, Case by Case: A U.S. Army Counterintelligence Agent in World War II is an account by a Danish immigrant whose experience backpacking through Germany before the war gets him an in with counterintelligence. Full of color about people on both sides, including a few details that history has papered over.
posted by dws at 7:44 PM on July 17

Seconding Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada - incredible.
posted by Rash at 8:17 PM on July 17

Because books about math are often underrepresented in lists like this, even though most people would consider math books "obscure" I will offer two:

The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics by Edna Krameroffers short bios of many influential mathematicians over the centuries, and accessible explanations of many mathematical concepts

Logicomix: an epic search for truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou is a graphic novel featuring Bertrand Russell and the early twentieth century quest to make mathematics more rigorously logical internally (until Kurt Goëdel proved it could not be done). It really doesn't have a lot of math or logic in it, but it's a great story and presented in a good way.
posted by TimHare at 11:01 PM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Some wonderful obscurities now available online:

A FORTRAN Coloring Book by Dr Kaufman is the best computer language textbook I've ever found, better even than the Poignant Guide.

Science Made Stupid and its sequel Cvltvre Made Stvpid by Tom Weller hit all the right notes for those of us whose early education included those endless large-format Made Easy paperbacks.

What Is Science?

Put most simply, science is a way of dealing with the world around us. It is a way of baffling the uninitiated with incomprehensible jargon. It is a way of obtaining fat government grants. It is a way of achieving mastery over the physical world by threatening it with chaos and destruction.

Science represents mankind's deepest aspirations - aspirations to power, to wealth, to the satisfaction of sheer animal lust.

The cornerstone of modern science is the scientific method. Scientists first formulate hypotheses, or predictions, about nature. Then they perform experiments to test their hypotheses.

There are two forms of scientific method, the inductive method and the deductive method.

INDUCTIVE

formulate hypothesis -> apply for grant -> perform experiments or gather data to test hypothesis -> alter data to fit hypothesis -> publish

DEDUCTIVE

formulate hypothesis -> apply for grant -> perform experiments or gather data to test hypothesis -> revise hypothesis to fit data -> backdate revised hypothesis -> publish

Science for everyone

Sound simple? It is.

Once, when the secrets of science were the jealously guarded property of a small priesthood, the common man had no hope of mastering their arcane complexities. Years of study in musty classrooms were prerequisite to obtaining even a dim, incoherent knowledge of science.

Today all that has changed: a dim, incoherent knowledge of science is available to anyone. Popular science books - with their simple, fatuous, and misleading prose, their garish four-colour illustrations, their flimsy modern binding - have brought science within the reach of anyone who can afford their inflated prices, or wait a couple of weeks for the remainders.

Indeed, today a myriad of books is available that can explain scientific facts that science itself has never dreamed of.

This is one of those books.

posted by flabdablet at 11:42 PM on July 17 [2 favorites]

1) I have a copy of Days of Our Years (1940) by Pierre van Paassen, which I bought in a library book-sale in Boston in the early 1980s. It is a travel book, starting in Gorkum in Zuid-Holland where it looks across the river at Brabant, and bucketing round Europe and Africa and the Near East through the 1920s and 1930s. As a journalist he covered Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War but he always worked out his own story from events rather than accepting press releases; this was not well appreciated in those troubled and polarised times. Accordingly, he spent 10 days banged up in Dachau in 1933 and was later expelled in turn from both France and Germany. Despite being a Unitarian minister he was a committed Zionist before there was anything like a state of Israel. An interesting man, so. But wholly sunk into oblivion nowadays.

2) Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape (1976) by Oliver Rackham. By applying his eyes, informed by a lifetime's study of maps, manuscripts and place-names; and tangled banks and transects through the landscape; Rackham could conjure up the whole dynamic history of a hedgerow between field and wildwood. He was a notable iconoclast, rubbishing cosy certainties about what trees were and how woodlands should be handled. He realised that, to be a resource for weekend walks they must be managed and indeed had been managed by foresters for many generations. That felling trees for building was part of the process. That you couldn't hurry along the process of regeneration. That forestry was playing the long game. When the Great Storm of 15-16th October 1987 swept millions of English trees to the ground, Rackham was vocal "A fallen tree is not a dead tree" about letting some of the corpses be left to fulfill their natural destiny as a home to beetles and fungi.

3) Brazilian Adventure (1933) by Peter Fleming. The previous year he answered a small ad in The Times "Exploring and sporting expedition, under experienced guidance, leaving England June to explore rivers central Brazil, if possible ascertain fate Colonel Percy Fawcett; abundant game, big and small; exceptional fishing; room two more guns; highest references expected and given". If you like your upper lip to be stiff, your sang to be froid, and your humor laconic these are the chaps to follow. cw: 1930s semitic stereotypes.
Peter's rep obscured by that of his younger brother Ian "007" Fleming.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:50 AM on July 18 [1 favorite]

The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara may not be properly obscure, but since it ought justly be in the "basically required reading" section of the American canon I think it's fair to mention.

The main plot of the book takes place over the course of like maybe twenty minutes, but it is nonetheless about approximately everything. It's a masterpiece.
posted by quintessence at 7:38 AM on July 18

My fave obscure book is:

The Ethics of the Dust: Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Crystallisation (1875) by John Ruskin.
posted by ovvl at 8:21 AM on July 18 [1 favorite]

Barnard Baruch: My Own Story

It is the first part of his autobiography. He wrote a second one about the War years when he was in government. That is interesting but not as entertaining as this one.

Interesting story on how I got my copy or even learned about the book. I went up to visit my gf's parents whom I had never met in person to ask Mr. gf for his blessing to ask his daughter to marry me. He was a formal man, kind of stern but with a decent sense of how he came across. He greeted me and asked me to have a seat in his home office. The walls were lined with bookcases. Lots of heavy wood panels and leather chairs. He was a lawyer and this looked like what I would have guessed his office would look like from central casting.

So I sat in one of the chairs opposite the desk. He said he would be right back. He left me there for 25 minutes. It was his way of both testing me and being funny. He knew how nervous I would be waiting to ask him the big question. After about 15 minutes I was getting steamed and decided to see what I could learn about him by browsing the book cases. I had heard of Baruch College, so when I saw the book, I decided to see if I could find out why the college was named after him. I started reading from the first page. 10 minutes uninterrupted so about 10 pages. I was loving the book because it turns out that Baruch was a Wall Street Speculator and one of the greatest short sellers of all time. I was a floor trader on one of the Chicago exchanges at the time and was fascinated.

So future FIL comes back after 25 minutes and sits down. I was so engrossed in the book I kept reading. He cleared his throat. I just said, "Hold on. Let me finish this page." without really realizing I had never met him and that all I knew was he was a formal guy. Instead of a suit, on the weekend he would wear a sport coat and slacks to relax. That formal of a guy. "so what brings you here today young man" he sort of bellowed. "I have two questions" I replied. "Ask me" . "First, can I borrow this book?" "Surely you did not come all the way up here (300 miles of driving) to ask me that" "No, but I figured I should ask this one first because if the answer to the next question is no, so will the answer to this question." "Yes, you may HAVE the book."

Being the wise guy that I was at the time, I said, "If I can have the book, nevermind about the other question." and I stood up to leave. That got a smile out of the stern older man. Then I asked the real question and he said, "Of course, but know if she is like her mom, you will have your hands full." Up until the day we divorced, my (ex) wife would complain that her dad liked me more than he liked her.

Anyway, I cherish the book for its content and for the memory of this kid scared shitless asking him if I could have his blessing to essentially sleep with his daughter.

Read both volumes of Baruch's autobiography. I liked the first better, but the 2nd was interesting too.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 2:13 PM on July 18 [3 favorites]

The Rocket Company is a 1995 fictional story of a group of billionaires who create a reusable rocket. Essentially it's a white paper wrapped up in a digestible story. Now that 30 years have past, it's fascinating to compare the book to the choices made by Bezos, Musk, Bruno, etc
posted by Sophont at 2:37 PM on July 18

I came in to recommend The Third Policeman, which I guess is not as obscure as I thought, as I see it’s mentioned above. But it’s a perfect book. Absurd, hilarious, and weirdly kind of the most Buddhist (in a loose use of the term) novel I have ever read, which is weird for something written by an Irish writer in 1939-40
posted by SomethinsWrong at 3:49 PM on July 18 [2 favorites]

A few days ago, I finished the third and final volume of Henry "Chips" Channon: The Diaries. I started volume one on May 8. The diaries, with some extensive coverage gaps, cover the years from 1918 to a short time before Channon's death in 1957. He was above all a social climber and loved being royal adjacent. Volume three was released in 2022.

My interest was in his recorded thoughts on the two world wars, the interwar years, and the Cold War as they happened. His best writing is in capturing details of the singular events he witnessed or took part in. Unlike memoirs or histories, diaries tell you the deal without any benefit of hindsight. This is the most engaging obscure stuff I've recently read. There's plenty of internet coverage of Channon that much better says anything I could say about him.
posted by jgirl at 4:27 PM on July 18

I just thought of two more:

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake - if you’ve read Demon Copperhead, you’re gonna wanna read this one. Gritty short stories with different perspectives about what it’s like to live in/ come from Appalachia. Alas, the writer killed himself, aged 26, in 1979, so that was it from him. Some of those stories are really something; they live with me.

David Vann, a writer from Alaska, started out his fiction-writing career with a semi-autobiographical book of stories called Legend of a Suicide. There’s a novella in the middle of that book called “Sukkwan Island” that’s one of the most exceptional pieces of writing I’ve ever read. It really taught me something about human nature, about empathy even for people I might initially be repulsed by. (Actually , I see that a film of Sukkwan Island is in the works now by a French filmmaker. I think Vann’s been more popular in France than the U.S. for some reason.)
posted by SomethinsWrong at 4:57 PM on July 18 [1 favorite]

The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka is quite possibly my favourite book. It's technically about a farming technique, but it's philosophy, and a joyful read.
posted by droomoord at 5:45 PM on July 18 [2 favorites]

Really surprised not to see anyone rec Lives of the Monster Dogs in this thread
posted by potrzebie at 7:20 PM on July 18 [1 favorite]

Sarah Hall is best known for The Carhullen Army, a post-apocalyptic novel about a female enclave in Scotland.

But The Wolf Border is a quiet, weirdly tense novel about family and relationships, and class and politics, in the context of an attempt to rewild the Scottish-English border by reintroducing wolves. Set in the future/now, I guess? Really well written, and you also learn a lot about wolf biology.
posted by suelac at 10:04 PM on July 18 [2 favorites]

The poems, novels, and essays of Gustaf Sobin. Start with Luminous Debris, the book of essays.
Also Norwegian poet, diarist, and orchardist Olaf Hauge, a favorite of Karl Ove Knausgaard. Start with the White Pine Press "Selected Poems and Journals."
posted by diodotos at 3:46 PM on July 19

The Circus of Doctor Lao by Charles Finney. A small town in 1930s New Mexico is visited by mythic beings, but the residents have no comprehension of Wonder. This book usually bears a warning that it contains racial slurs. It's true that the characters use Unacceptable words to describe non-Whites. I make no apology.

Also: Every Man Dies Alone is great!
posted by CCBC at 4:25 PM on July 19

I'm going to add another: Tay John by Howard O'Hagan. Possibly the best Canadian novel ever (yes, better than Atwood or Ondaatje). White and First Nation contact produces a character lost between the different heroes people want him to be.
posted by CCBC at 4:33 PM on July 19

John Buchan's 1916 WW1 novel Greenmantle [Gutenberg] CW racism (and a lot of biases, but such is war). It continues to feel very current with the sucession of oil-wars since 9/11, delving into many current flashpoints - explores war-fighting, spying, various partisans, and a huge level of visual detail. I've read it about fifteen times so far.

It's the second of five books and preceded by The Thirty-Nine Steps.
posted by unearthed at 12:48 AM on July 21

You Can't Win by Jack Black (note: not the musician!) is a fascinating memoir by a former Edwardian rail-rider and safe-cracker who went on to become a librarian. It's the only first-person account I've ever read of a lot of things I've otherwise only heard of, if that makes sense, and he's an incredible writer. William Burroughs really loved this book (to the point of ripping it off a bunch, honestly) but it's not well-known nowadays and I'd never have heard of it if Metafilter's own St. Sorryass had not recommended it back when we were a couple.
Lud-in-the-Mist is an obscure fantasy novel by Hope Mirrlees that deserves to be better known, I think. It's kind of twee (you know if that's your thing or not) but it's also honestly kind of unsettling.
Little, Big is another fantasy novel, from the 70s this time, and my mother's very favorite book, so I grew up with a very fragile paperback copy until it came back into print in the 90s. A real weird one and kind of a brain workout, but worth it.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 6:29 AM on July 21 [1 favorite]

Jack Womack's Random Acts of Senseless Violence. Should've been a classic. Best reviewed by the also excellent Jo Walton: Random Acts of Senseless Violence: Why isn’t it a classic of the field?
posted by curious_yellow at 6:56 AM on July 21

Properly obscure, I think (only 54 ratings on GoodReads, even less on StoryGraph): Toolmaker Koan.

It's been a long time since I read it, so all I can tell you is that it's science fiction and it made a big impression on me at least a decade ago. (Closer to hard sci-fi than space opera, I think, and not exactly cosy.) If you like science fiction and are up for something a bit different, give it a try.

In a completely different genre, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers (by Julie Andrews Maria Augusta von Trapp herself) has the real story behind the Sound of Music, and what happened afterwards. I was impressed and inspired by her faith, dedication and tenacity.
posted by demi-octopus at 1:43 PM on July 21

Jan Willem van de Wetering's Grijpstra and De Geir novels. They are not just 1960s/70s mysteries, they're an introduction to zen.
posted by mygothlaundry at 10:44 AM on July 22 [1 favorite]

I was intrigued by The Odd Tales of Irene Orgel when I read it a few years ago, and had a hard time finding details about it. The description from the publisher:
"Very few people are capable of being independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever tries it, however justified, without having to, proves that he is probably not only strong but bold to the point of complete recklessness. For he walks into a labyrinth, he increases a thousandfold the dangers which are inherent in life anyway.” This quotation from Nietzsche is the theme of eleven original stories by Irene Orgel. No schmaltz. Wit and authority. The real thing."

Maybe not super obscure, but I love Mount Analogue, which is weird and wonderful and unfinished. A surreal story in which a group of explorers attempt to find the mountain which bridges heaven and earth. I come back to this one a lot.

John Crowley is more obscure than I think he should be, and Engine Summer is one of his more obscure works. A moving coming-of-age story in a gorgeous post-post-apocalyptic world. I re-read this every few years.
posted by taltalim at 12:22 PM on July 22

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip
posted by 168 at 6:43 PM on July 22 [2 favorites]

Anyone who has seconded something has actually made the argument that it's insufficiency obscure.

I'm going to recommend the web novel Worth The Candle. A dude is isekaied into a world based on the fucked up role-playing games he used to run after the death of his friend.
posted by novalis_dt at 8:36 PM on July 22

I love considering the relationship between us and non-human animals and I've recently come across two books by the same two co-authors that explore that relationship.

Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus is a wonderful read exploring the relationship between humans and canines and humans and bats, and while never shying from the science, it's far more interested in the cultural impact of the virus on human and animal relations. The second by the same set of co-authors is pretty new and titled Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals and looks at the birth of the anti-cruelty and anti-vivisection movements of the late 19th and early 20th century and again through digression and context shows how attitudes towards animals affected attitudes toward immigrants, minorities, women, the poor, the disabled, and how animal rights supporters partnered with progressive movements at the time like suffrage, temperance, child protection, and abolition to address injustice to humans and animals alike. These are both by Bill Wasik & Monica Murphy. Murphy is a vet. and Wasik is a book review editor for the NYT. These explore specific questions I'm fascinated by and when I found them, I wondered how I ever missed them.
posted by Stanczyk at 5:04 PM on July 23