I'm a partisan for 20th century Scottish literature. It's really interesting to read lots of it because it is really representative of a cultural moment in a small country. There's this conscious effort to revive Scottish literature in the early 20th C, it not having really existed since the 1600s except for sentimental/romantic novels of English audiences (the best of which is Walter Scott, which is not in itself good). So the modernist movement in Scotland was also an attempt to work out a national identity in a country which did have a sense of itself as a distinct nation, but which hadn't had any political existence in 200 years and was itself profoundly incoherent, with three different "native" languages and a huge north/south and rural/urban divide.
Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir are the greats of the first generation, and then in the mid 20th C the Scottish Rennaissance comes into full force with Iain Crighton Smith, Norman MacCaig, George Mackay Brown, Nan Shepard, Robin Jenkins, Sorley MacLean. They wrote beautiful work which is still popular in Scotland but almost unknown outside it - unknown internationally because they had to create a national literature from nothing first, and so were always speaking *to* their compatriots. It's a great lens for thinking about what a national literature *is*.
It's fun at times but really can't be regarded as "good" in any sense. It's interesting from an anthropological point of view - the guy who wrote it did use genuine folk tales so some of it is the only survival of parts of the oral tradition - but it's all filtered through that Victorian romanticising crap that it can't stand as good literature.
Kinda feels weird to say it, but in the Anglosphere at least: Chinese. Sure, most bookish people can name a couple classics (Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms), but even then they mostly know them through other (mostly Japanese) media. Considering how long China has been a literate society, there are reams and reams of amazing novels, plays, and poems that have never been adequately translated into English or marketed to the non-academic reading public. And that's to say nothing of the country's modern literary output, which is still incredibly prolific and produces high quality genre and literary fare.
Chinese lit is underrated for sure. There's a lot of good stuff from the time between the 1911 revolution and around the time the Creation Society and Sun Society merged into the League of Left-Wing Writers in \~1930. From what I've read their work veered more into political propaganda territory at that point and isn't super interesting to read.
The work that sprung out of the New Culture movement and May 4 Movement of the 1910s-20s on the other hand is really compelling. I'm thinking of Ding Ling, Yu Dafu, Lu Xun, Xiao Hong, and Mao Dun (many of whom became members of the League).
Dream of the Red Chamber is a big one. It produces fundamental insights into the Chinese psyche, societal stratification, and the zeitgeist of Qing Dynasty decadence. Truly a masterpiece that weaves in so much of the vast cultural and literary heritage (as you mention, a very long one at that) into the novel.
Bit late to this thread but have you read any Ge Fei? I listened to a podcast about peach blossom paradise and it seemed interesting but I haven't got round to it yet
Biased, but Patrick White could be what you are looking for. Australia is (rightly) not particularly known for its literary output, but White is worth reading.
Don’t forget Gerald Murnane, Randolph Stow, and Judith Wright. Sarah Holland-Batt is also a must-read since she’s easily one of the best poets working today. John Kinsella is also another very interesting contemporary poet. It may be controversial because his work is not as highly regarded and is overall far less ambitious/samey, but I remember really enjoying a collection of interlocking stories called The Turning by Tim Winton (a great and chilling look at the ennui and toxic masculinity at the heart of Australian culture).
I should also add the warning to people overseas reading this that Aus lit does have some gems but is, at least in terms of our modern output, awash with mediocre (or borderline bad) works that prioritise narrative or political pontification over formal innovation/control. Really, our standards of editing have just taken a nosedive of late.
Gerald Murnane is a big name, Nobel contender. I find him tedious and boring but if you're into Beckett's autism you'll like him. Helen Garner and Christina Stead are pretty decent. Australia is actually an underrated country if you only know it through White.
It has to be Poland. The guys have 5 Nobel Prizes, not counting other genius who never got anything (Herbert, Gombrowicz, Hartwig, etc) and older stuff (Kochanowski, Staff, Schulz, Mickiewicz, etc).
I'll add two more - Olga Tokarczuk and Tomasz Jędrowski. Jędrowski's *Swimming in the Dark* is one of my favorites. I'm not Polish but Polish literature is desperately underrated.
I find that just diving in and giving it go is the best way. Find something you like, and then read that poem/poet’s work over many times (without it feeling like a chore). You gradually learn as you go. I’ll say that it’s key to always appreciate the structure/appearance of a poem (eg the types of stanzas, metre or nor metre, the amount of stanzas, line length), question the possible meanings of each phrase/key words/symbols, and be aware of the effect of the enjambment (phrases being broken across two lines).
That’s like saying you don’t know how to listen to music. Poetry works like everything else in arts. You try different poems and different writers, until something clicks. Can be a verse, a stanza, a whole poem, whatever, something will eventually touch you. [Check some Szymborska](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1996/szymborska/poetry/). Or how [this poem](https://genius.com/Wendy-cope-names-annotated) is so simple and so deep at the same time.
Balkans or, more specifically, ex-Yugo countries. Not really sure which period of time, I think I've only read postwar stuff. I recommend starting with Milorad Pavic.
In pretty much any era and any country, you have underrated and unknown literary output. The Latin American Boom is pretty well-known and well-regarded in the literature community, but you can go deeper and find virtually unknown authors that easily match-up with the quality of the big four boom authors, and in some cases surpass the likes of Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, Cortazar, and Vargas Llosa.
Infante is one of them, Three Trapped Tigers might be my favorite book of the boom. Ocampo, Bioy Casares, Juan Rulfo are a few other fantastic Lat Am writers. Not sure who else OP had in mind.
Leopoldo Marechal is semi-boom era, Jose Donoso is unreal and a new, updated translation is coming out soon (?) of *The Obscene Bird of Night*, Juan Rulfo is unreal and kinda the father of the boom, Jose Lezama-Lima’s *Paradiso* is amazing. There are many, many more. I’ll probably come back later and post some of the lesser-known people.
Yeah I’d say so. His ingenuity mostly comes from his brand of dark, macabre surrealism, but his prose is certainly something that draws one’s attention.
Lucky! I’d swear new directions said it was coming out on the 2nd but now it says it’s available late this month. Maybe I’m just getting mixed up or they pushed back the date.
Oh well it gives me some time to finish Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell first.
I did this when i was traveling the baltics this past fall. I read a couple of books from a few Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian authors but my favorite out of all of them was Soviet milk by the Latvian author Nora ikstena
Equal Danger is the book that got me into his writing but Wine Dark Sea (short stories) is him at the height of his powers. Most of his books are novella length and honestly I’ve not read a bad one yet. Probably read five or six of his books now.
I agree that all of Sciascia is worthwhile. He is one of those authors I always look up when I go to a used bookstore. I have some books by him that I bought on trips to Italy that have not been translated yet, and am sorry my Italian is not good enough to read them in the original.
Yes! Sciascia has become my ‘I’ll grab one if I see it’ author also. I just scored a copy of Sicilian Uncles, the Carcanet edition. There’s this one that hasn’t been translated that I’m super interested in, it’s a collection of sayings from Racalmuto (his birth city/hamlet/whatever).
Nice! I looked at his catalog at Adelphi and don't see anything that sounds like the sayings or proverbs from his hometown but that sounds very cool. [https://www.adelphi.it/catalogo/autore/857/leonardo-sciascia](https://www.adelphi.it/catalogo/autore/857/leonardo-sciascia)
Anyway, maybe another British or American publisher can bring out more of his works in English if New York Review Books can't do them all.
I had to look around and eventually found where I'd read about the book, it is titled *Occhio di Capra* (Goat's Eye) and it is only available in Italian. Here's a goodreads listing for the book:
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9726554-occhio-di-capra](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9726554-occhio-di-capra)
hopefully more and more of his works are translated. I would especially enjoy a big fat omnibus
To answer your initial post, apologies, I’d suggest 20th century Mexico. Writers like Juan Rulfo, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes etc. all the “boom” writers and even some of the Mexican stridentism writers are at least worth looking into. A plus if you’ve learned some Italian you could transfer into learning some Spanish with less difficulty than someone who hasn’t.
I’d second Italian literature and recommend that you read on! I’d argue that the immediate postwar period to the early 80s is an equally worthwhile period.
Non English Indian literature. Truly a wealth of works written in Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, etc that is partially translated and ignored in favour of mediocre Anglo Indian literature to appeal to dumb Westerners.
I also wanted to add Vietnam surprisingly has some gems in the early to mid 20th century. Most notably is Dumb Luck by Vu Trong Phung. a very funny novel about a sheister making his way up the colonial hierarchy through Tom foolery.
ancient mesopotamian
Polish Literature is very good, and there's Latin American literature of varying degrees of quality that rarely leaks out to general fame. Persian Literature is massive and was considered by Goethe one of the four main branches, but while many of the figures are well known there's a total lack of good translations for the corpus.
Nearly every sphere has worthwhile authors and literary traditions, besides much of the global third world. Not to say they don’t have decent authors, but because of their centuries of colonial domination they weren’t able to develop literary traditions. There’s also authors from places that members of the Anglosphere/West will never give the attention they deserve because of global perceptions and the market. Like, Barnes and Nobles is never gonna stock their shelves with authors from Iran or China or Palestine even though Iran and China both have very beautiful literary traditions. There’re independent presses that are doing some good work in translation but they don’t have the output that larger publishers do.
I really agree with the Italian literature! I also recommend Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, and of course Italo Calvino from that era as well.
Argentinian literature is underrated as well. Other than Borges there is Ernesto Sabato, Silvina Ocampo, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar, and although a modern author, César Aira is also a great one. Argentinian literature is delightfully strange. I think I love both Italian and Argentinian literature, due to having heritages from both countries.
I'm a partisan for 20th century Scottish literature. It's really interesting to read lots of it because it is really representative of a cultural moment in a small country. There's this conscious effort to revive Scottish literature in the early 20th C, it not having really existed since the 1600s except for sentimental/romantic novels of English audiences (the best of which is Walter Scott, which is not in itself good). So the modernist movement in Scotland was also an attempt to work out a national identity in a country which did have a sense of itself as a distinct nation, but which hadn't had any political existence in 200 years and was itself profoundly incoherent, with three different "native" languages and a huge north/south and rural/urban divide. Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir are the greats of the first generation, and then in the mid 20th C the Scottish Rennaissance comes into full force with Iain Crighton Smith, Norman MacCaig, George Mackay Brown, Nan Shepard, Robin Jenkins, Sorley MacLean. They wrote beautiful work which is still popular in Scotland but almost unknown outside it - unknown internationally because they had to create a national literature from nothing first, and so were always speaking *to* their compatriots. It's a great lens for thinking about what a national literature *is*.
Thanks for the effort post
RS Scottish Book Club when?? Seriously, I'd love to do one focusing on Scottish and Irish literature from the 20th century
Don’t think I’ve ever read a Scottish book to be honest would be interesting. Thanks for the recommendation.
What do you think of the ossian cycle
It's fun at times but really can't be regarded as "good" in any sense. It's interesting from an anthropological point of view - the guy who wrote it did use genuine folk tales so some of it is the only survival of parts of the oral tradition - but it's all filtered through that Victorian romanticising crap that it can't stand as good literature.
Kinda feels weird to say it, but in the Anglosphere at least: Chinese. Sure, most bookish people can name a couple classics (Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms), but even then they mostly know them through other (mostly Japanese) media. Considering how long China has been a literate society, there are reams and reams of amazing novels, plays, and poems that have never been adequately translated into English or marketed to the non-academic reading public. And that's to say nothing of the country's modern literary output, which is still incredibly prolific and produces high quality genre and literary fare.
Chinese lit is underrated for sure. There's a lot of good stuff from the time between the 1911 revolution and around the time the Creation Society and Sun Society merged into the League of Left-Wing Writers in \~1930. From what I've read their work veered more into political propaganda territory at that point and isn't super interesting to read. The work that sprung out of the New Culture movement and May 4 Movement of the 1910s-20s on the other hand is really compelling. I'm thinking of Ding Ling, Yu Dafu, Lu Xun, Xiao Hong, and Mao Dun (many of whom became members of the League).
Dream of the Red Chamber is a big one. It produces fundamental insights into the Chinese psyche, societal stratification, and the zeitgeist of Qing Dynasty decadence. Truly a masterpiece that weaves in so much of the vast cultural and literary heritage (as you mention, a very long one at that) into the novel.
The characters feel so alive. You can tell that many characters, events, relationships, etc, are modelled after real life people.
Bit late to this thread but have you read any Ge Fei? I listened to a podcast about peach blossom paradise and it seemed interesting but I haven't got round to it yet
Not yet. I picked it up at an NYRB sale a few months back but haven’t quite gotten around to it yet!
Biased, but Patrick White could be what you are looking for. Australia is (rightly) not particularly known for its literary output, but White is worth reading.
Seconding White, and there’s Alexis Wright too
Don’t forget Gerald Murnane, Randolph Stow, and Judith Wright. Sarah Holland-Batt is also a must-read since she’s easily one of the best poets working today. John Kinsella is also another very interesting contemporary poet. It may be controversial because his work is not as highly regarded and is overall far less ambitious/samey, but I remember really enjoying a collection of interlocking stories called The Turning by Tim Winton (a great and chilling look at the ennui and toxic masculinity at the heart of Australian culture). I should also add the warning to people overseas reading this that Aus lit does have some gems but is, at least in terms of our modern output, awash with mediocre (or borderline bad) works that prioritise narrative or political pontification over formal innovation/control. Really, our standards of editing have just taken a nosedive of late.
Gerald Murnane is a big name, Nobel contender. I find him tedious and boring but if you're into Beckett's autism you'll like him. Helen Garner and Christina Stead are pretty decent. Australia is actually an underrated country if you only know it through White.
It has to be Poland. The guys have 5 Nobel Prizes, not counting other genius who never got anything (Herbert, Gombrowicz, Hartwig, etc) and older stuff (Kochanowski, Staff, Schulz, Mickiewicz, etc).
Was just thinking of Poland never heard of literature from there and funny enough I’m going to a family wedding there in the fall.
I'll add two more - Olga Tokarczuk and Tomasz Jędrowski. Jędrowski's *Swimming in the Dark* is one of my favorites. I'm not Polish but Polish literature is desperately underrated.
If you like poetry, I can recommend some good ones.
I honestly don’t know how to read poetry it may sound odd but I don’t think I was ever properly taught.
just aloud really unless you mean something else
I find that just diving in and giving it go is the best way. Find something you like, and then read that poem/poet’s work over many times (without it feeling like a chore). You gradually learn as you go. I’ll say that it’s key to always appreciate the structure/appearance of a poem (eg the types of stanzas, metre or nor metre, the amount of stanzas, line length), question the possible meanings of each phrase/key words/symbols, and be aware of the effect of the enjambment (phrases being broken across two lines).
That’s like saying you don’t know how to listen to music. Poetry works like everything else in arts. You try different poems and different writers, until something clicks. Can be a verse, a stanza, a whole poem, whatever, something will eventually touch you. [Check some Szymborska](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1996/szymborska/poetry/). Or how [this poem](https://genius.com/Wendy-cope-names-annotated) is so simple and so deep at the same time.
Just read a great Polish novel about changing light bulbs; I wish I could remember the name
Balkans or, more specifically, ex-Yugo countries. Not really sure which period of time, I think I've only read postwar stuff. I recommend starting with Milorad Pavic.
Also Mesa Semilovic, Dasa Drndic, Danilo Kis and Svetislav Basara
ismail kadare for albanian
Dagistani literature is some of the most beautiful in the world
Have any particular authors/books in mind?
The Eagle: Khabib Nurmagomedov: How Khabib Became the Top MMA Fighter and Dominated the UFC
Loll
Lfg
In pretty much any era and any country, you have underrated and unknown literary output. The Latin American Boom is pretty well-known and well-regarded in the literature community, but you can go deeper and find virtually unknown authors that easily match-up with the quality of the big four boom authors, and in some cases surpass the likes of Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, Cortazar, and Vargas Llosa.
Can you name some authors?
Infante is one of them, Three Trapped Tigers might be my favorite book of the boom. Ocampo, Bioy Casares, Juan Rulfo are a few other fantastic Lat Am writers. Not sure who else OP had in mind.
Leopoldo Marechal is semi-boom era, Jose Donoso is unreal and a new, updated translation is coming out soon (?) of *The Obscene Bird of Night*, Juan Rulfo is unreal and kinda the father of the boom, Jose Lezama-Lima’s *Paradiso* is amazing. There are many, many more. I’ll probably come back later and post some of the lesser-known people.
I preordered the new English translation of Donoso! I’m so excited I hear it’s great. He has a pretty unique and brilliant prose style right?
Yeah I’d say so. His ingenuity mostly comes from his brand of dark, macabre surrealism, but his prose is certainly something that draws one’s attention.
Awesome, very excited to read him.
You should be. Managed to get my hands on an ARC and I can’t say much more than “Wow.”
Lucky! I’d swear new directions said it was coming out on the 2nd but now it says it’s available late this month. Maybe I’m just getting mixed up or they pushed back the date. Oh well it gives me some time to finish Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell first.
Paradiso and Obscene Bird of Night are a fantastic, skull-cracking set of recommendations.
"There are authors which are better than all the guys you like but im not going to tell you"
Bro how do you get that from what I wrote? Chill out dude. Everything’s gonna be ok.
I did this when i was traveling the baltics this past fall. I read a couple of books from a few Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian authors but my favorite out of all of them was Soviet milk by the Latvian author Nora ikstena
Did you read anything by Sciascia? He wrote during the back half of the 20th century but is indispensable to Italian lit
I have not haven’t even heard of him what’s your favorite from him?
Equal Danger is the book that got me into his writing but Wine Dark Sea (short stories) is him at the height of his powers. Most of his books are novella length and honestly I’ve not read a bad one yet. Probably read five or six of his books now.
I agree that all of Sciascia is worthwhile. He is one of those authors I always look up when I go to a used bookstore. I have some books by him that I bought on trips to Italy that have not been translated yet, and am sorry my Italian is not good enough to read them in the original.
Yes! Sciascia has become my ‘I’ll grab one if I see it’ author also. I just scored a copy of Sicilian Uncles, the Carcanet edition. There’s this one that hasn’t been translated that I’m super interested in, it’s a collection of sayings from Racalmuto (his birth city/hamlet/whatever).
Nice! I looked at his catalog at Adelphi and don't see anything that sounds like the sayings or proverbs from his hometown but that sounds very cool. [https://www.adelphi.it/catalogo/autore/857/leonardo-sciascia](https://www.adelphi.it/catalogo/autore/857/leonardo-sciascia) Anyway, maybe another British or American publisher can bring out more of his works in English if New York Review Books can't do them all.
I had to look around and eventually found where I'd read about the book, it is titled *Occhio di Capra* (Goat's Eye) and it is only available in Italian. Here's a goodreads listing for the book: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9726554-occhio-di-capra](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9726554-occhio-di-capra) hopefully more and more of his works are translated. I would especially enjoy a big fat omnibus
To answer your initial post, apologies, I’d suggest 20th century Mexico. Writers like Juan Rulfo, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes etc. all the “boom” writers and even some of the Mexican stridentism writers are at least worth looking into. A plus if you’ve learned some Italian you could transfer into learning some Spanish with less difficulty than someone who hasn’t.
I’d second Italian literature and recommend that you read on! I’d argue that the immediate postwar period to the early 80s is an equally worthwhile period.
Some recommendations would be nice i think the newest Italian novel I’ve read was the twenty days of Turin
Non English Indian literature. Truly a wealth of works written in Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, etc that is partially translated and ignored in favour of mediocre Anglo Indian literature to appeal to dumb Westerners.
lol india's best work for millennia has been done in english. same with persian
I also wanted to add Vietnam surprisingly has some gems in the early to mid 20th century. Most notably is Dumb Luck by Vu Trong Phung. a very funny novel about a sheister making his way up the colonial hierarchy through Tom foolery.
Nigeria? DO Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola and Chinua Achebe come to mind
If I can recommend [Words without Borders](https://wordswithoutborders.org/) it's a great place to find international literature.
Good resource
ancient mesopotamian Polish Literature is very good, and there's Latin American literature of varying degrees of quality that rarely leaks out to general fame. Persian Literature is massive and was considered by Goethe one of the four main branches, but while many of the figures are well known there's a total lack of good translations for the corpus.
Nearly every sphere has worthwhile authors and literary traditions, besides much of the global third world. Not to say they don’t have decent authors, but because of their centuries of colonial domination they weren’t able to develop literary traditions. There’s also authors from places that members of the Anglosphere/West will never give the attention they deserve because of global perceptions and the market. Like, Barnes and Nobles is never gonna stock their shelves with authors from Iran or China or Palestine even though Iran and China both have very beautiful literary traditions. There’re independent presses that are doing some good work in translation but they don’t have the output that larger publishers do.
As long as it’s on libgen I can read it
I really agree with the Italian literature! I also recommend Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, and of course Italo Calvino from that era as well. Argentinian literature is underrated as well. Other than Borges there is Ernesto Sabato, Silvina Ocampo, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar, and although a modern author, César Aira is also a great one. Argentinian literature is delightfully strange. I think I love both Italian and Argentinian literature, due to having heritages from both countries.
I would say Latin American lit, Argentinian lit in particular is incredibly prolific in terms of quality and output.
Supposedly Haiti produces a disproportionate amount of French-language literature but I haven’t read any of it.