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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. Her best known work, The Man Who Loved Children, is a touching, if disturbing, look at family life. Ms. Rowley is the author of ...

Literary critic James Wood pays tribute to Italo Svevo in today’s edition our special Summer Reading Series on underappreciated literature. In 1907, Svevo hired an English tutor, who turned out to be a young, unpublished James Joyce. And it’s rumored that Svevo inspired Joyce’s legendary character Leopold Bloom. Svevo's masterpiece, ...

In this week’s edition of our Summer Reading Series, 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 ...

We continue our Summer Reading Series with a look at the writings of J.G. Farrell, a promising British-Irish writer whose work fell into obscurity after he died in a freak accident at the age of 44. Though he won a Booker Prize in 1973 for Siege of Krishnapur, he’s largely ...

In this week’s edition of our Summer Reading Series on underappreciated literature, Gregory Rabassa joins me 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 ...

This July and August, Leonard Lopate explores underappreciated and forgotten works of great literature as part of a special Summer Reading Series. In today’s installment, he’ll speak to Edwin Frank of the New York Review of Books and Michael Redhill of Brick magazine about what makes a book a classic, ...