When everyone stops talking about a great book, a certain kind of silence descends upon it. It’s not the quiet of something that was forgotten because it wasn’t good; rather, it’s the more subdued kind of silence that results from attention shifting while the work itself stays just as remarkable as it always was, waiting on a shelf somewhere. You won’t need to search for them if you walk into practically any used bookstore. Spines were a little faded. Prices were written down as two or three dollars. There is prose inside that, if it were twenty pages long, would stop you cold.
The literary discourse has always had a short memory, but the last ten years have accelerated this forgetfulness. Algorithm-driven recommendation engines, reading vlogs, BookTok, and Bookstagram all have a propensity to focus attention on the newest and loudest content. A book has a brief period of popularity, peaks, and then fades. The lesser books are not always the ones that are left behind. They are occasionally the greatest ones.
It’s hard to explain The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa to someone who hasn’t read it. It was never intended to be a completed novel in the traditional sense and was found in a trunk following Pessoa’s death in 1935. It depicts the inner life of a Lisbon bookkeeper who hardly leaves his room but observes the texture of existence with an almost unsettling precision. It is disjointed, meandering, and structured around feeling rather than plot. The writing reads as though the author is reflecting deeply on life. The majority of readers wouldn’t recognize the title if you brought it up at a dinner party, despite the fact that no book has ever depicted urban loneliness with greater tenderness or clarity.
The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati functions in a similar emotional register, but it does so in a different way. A young military officer spends his entire career waiting for an enemy who might never arrive after being assigned to a remote desert stronghold. It sounds like it could be tiresome. The reverse is true. The passage of time and the human ability to deceive oneself by convincing oneself that the moment you’ve been preparing for is still just around the corner are the subjects of Buzzati’s suffocating, beautiful tension. Somewhere there is a reader who will sit motionless for a few minutes after finishing the last page of that book. Though it hardly ever comes up, it is difficult not to feel that this book belongs in the same discussions as Kafka.
The shift away from browsing has made things worse for these titles, in part because overlooked books are frequently found in physical spaces. The Book of Disquiet finds new readers in places like a used bookstore in Washington, D.C., a library sale table, or a shelf in a friend’s apartment. Someone might pick up Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams because the spine seems intriguing and leave after discovering one of the most bizarre and exquisite things in modern fiction. Lightman, an MIT physics professor, imagined thirty different versions of time, such as a world in which time stands still or one in which it runs backwards, and he managed to write about each one with the poetic restraint and lyricism of poetry rather than the theoretical density. brief book. deep experience. hardly ever brought up.
Geographically and genetically, the pattern is consistent. The Bridge of Beyond, written by Simone Schwarz-Bart and set in Guadeloupe, is a generational tale told in prose that is so vivid and rhythmically alive that it reads more like listening than reading. It’s an oral history that has been translated into something that somehow keeps the warmth of the spoken voice. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman is a lean, eerie speculative novel about women who emerge from an underground cage into a world they cannot recognize or explain. It creates the kind of dread that lingers in the reader’s mind long after the last page. The prose in Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, which spans decades of one man’s life in the Idaho wilderness, is spare and elegiac in a way that feels authentically American without explicitly stating so. The book is only a hundred pages long. These three books are all real. Each of the three is outstanding. They don’t seem to be popular anywhere.
It’s important to consider why readers have permitted social media to drastically reduce the scope. The issue of overhyped books is real; readers who get all of their reading from online communities frequently report having high expectations and low expectations. The algorithm prioritizes engagement over long-term literary quality, rewarding novelty, controversy, and emotional response. Seldom does a book that rewards perseverance and focus become viral. It’s not always the books that deserve to become viral.
Finding backlisted titles—books that have been out of print for more than a year and have fallen below the line of active recommendation—has an almost activist quality. There are no waitlists for Pulitzer Prize winners from the 1990s; instead, they sit in library stacks. In used bookstore corners, small-press novels from the 2000s pile up at prices that seem to indicate no one is vying for them. The lack of a recent social media post is the only thing preventing a new reader from reading some of these books, which are masterpieces by any standard.
A similar process is typically described by readers who appear to be the happiest with their literary lives—those who talk about discovering a book that truly altered their perspective. They strayed. Without a list, they perused. At a book club meeting, they chose a book based on a stranger’s recommendation, the first sentence, or the cover. They entered without any preconceived notions influenced by a hundred other people. They emerged having discovered something genuine.
Online replication of that process is more difficult but not impossible. Project Gutenberg and the Open Library provide free access to older works. The same serendipity can be found in library sales as in a quality used bookstore. There are still the books. The quiet ones, the lovely ones, the ones that are no longer discussed—they are still just as good as they were when they were first published. All they need is for someone to pause scrolling long enough to take notice.
Alyssa Bennett as editor at vclib.org, oversees editorial coverage of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political commentary. Alyssa brings rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an approachable editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant. Her career spans the intersection of literary journalism, political writing, and educational publishing.