This July and August, Leonard Lopate explores underappreciated and forgotten works of great literature as part of a special Summer Reading Series. He'll look at why some authors are little-known in America, even though they're widely respected in other parts of the world, and at why certain books fall in and out of fashion (and print).

Monday, July 4

Edwin Frank of the New York Review of Books and Michael Redhill of Brick magazine discuss what makes a book a classic, and how trends in literature affect whether worthy, though little-known, books survive.

Monday, July 11

Gregory Rabassa joins Leonard for a look at the author Machado de Assis. Born in 1839 in Rio de Janiero, he's widely considered to be the father of Brazilian literature. Mr. Rabassa, who is probably best-known for his translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, claims that it wasn't until he worked on two of Machado de Assis's novels that he felt "fulfillment as a translator."

Monday, July 18

John Banville reflects on the works of J.G. Farrell, best known for his Empire Trilogy: Troubles, Siege of Krishnapu (which won the Booker Prize), and The Singapore Grip. Farrell was a promising British-Irish writer whose work fell into obscurity after he died in a freak accident at the age of 44.

Monday, July 25

Phillip Lopate looks at the work of Mikhail Zoshchenko. During the 1920s, he was one of the most widely read authors in Russia, and his satirical short stories appeared in popular journals. But by the 1930s, he faced increasing pressure from Soviet authorities to conform to the state mandate of "socialist realism," and in 1943 his autobiographical work Before Sunrise was banned.

Monday, August 1

James Wood pays tribute to the work of Italo Svevo.

Monday, August 8

Hazel Rowley tells us about the nearly forgotten work of Christina Stead—a woman whose writing was compared to James Joyce and Leo Tolstoy during her lifetime.