Have you ever read a book that was virtually unknown even in literaly circles, yet great?
I notice that great-but-unknown books are getting memed more and more into popularity or at least cult status by social media. There's Mating, of course, which I find unreadable. But when did I Who Have Never Known Men become the it-girl/hot-girl book of the decade? Or Come Closer everybody's hip Halloween read? As one heard the band in a small club before it started selling out arenas, I read these two now-trendy novels years before BookTok did, for whatever it may be worth. I remember enjoying the latter, but not the former.
I unimaginatively read too many already famous and canonical books for this exercise, but I will put it in a word—though it may have missed its moment now that we're so post-woke—for The Fortunate Fall, a 1996 cyberpunk hallucination, a lesbian love story by a trans writer who never wrote another novel, a political thriller about genocide and environmentalism and online news and internet swarms and Slavo-dystopianism and Afro-futurism and brain implants, a prose-poem spiked with Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, Stein, and Nabokov, and an all-around under-rated book. I read it when I was 14 in 1996, plucked from the new book shelf at the public library, and never forgot it. In some ways, it is only intelligible now. I see it was republished literally two months ago, so here is everybody's chance to turn it into the new accessory.
(Also science fiction, also gathered at random from the new shelf at the public library, also prose-poetic and cyberpunk-adjacent, also unknown, but much more recent, is The City of Folding Faces, which I wrote about here.)
