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Underappreciated Literature

A Weekly Feature on The Leonard Lopate Show

This August, Leonard Lopate explores underappreciated and forgotten works of great literature as part of a special summer reading series. The series will focus on authors that are little-known in America, authors that mysteriously fell out of fashion, and authors who never gained wide recognition in the first place.

Underappreciated: Sheppard Lee

The Leonard Lopate Show

August 31, 2009

In our latest Underappreciated segment, UCLA English professor Christopher Looby discusses Robert Montgomery Bird’s novel, Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself about an unrepentant deadbeat discovers the ability to project his souls into dying men’s bodies, a form of antebellum identity theft.

Underappreciated: Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities

The Leonard Lopate Show

August 24, 2009

On our latest Underappreciated segment, Burton Pike, editor and translator of Robert Musil’s titanic though unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities, discusses the philosophical and aesthetic ideas circulating in pre-war Viennese society as depicted in the novel.

Underappreciated: Paul von Heyse

The Leonard Lopate Show

August 17, 2009

German writer Paul von Heyse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1910. A translation of Von Heyse’s most famous book Children of the World: A Novel, Volume 1 has just been printed. We’ll be joined by John T. Hamilton, who will be teaching comparative literature at Harvard this fall.

Underappreciated: Yusuf Idris

The Leonard Lopate Show

August 10, 2009

Yusuf Idris is an Egyptian writer best known for his short stories. On today's underappreciated we’ll discuss Idris’s book The Cheapest Nights with Roger Allen, Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. He'll explain why Idris is considered one of the most important writers of the Arabic-speaking world in the 20th century.

Underappreciated: Petersburg by Andrei Bely

The Leonard Lopate Show

August 03, 2009

Our second Underappreciated segment of the summer is on Andrei Bely's Symbolist novel Petersburg, which Vladimir Nabokov ranked as one of the top four novels of the 20th century, along with Franz Kafa's Metamorphosis, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and James Joyce's Ulysses, to which it is often compared. John Elsworth, Professor Emeritus in the Russian Studies Department at the University of Manchester, is the translator of the most recent edition (2009) of the novel. He'll explain why the novel is often overlooked.

Underappreciated: Alamut

The Leonard Lopate Show

July 27, 2009

On our first Underappreciated segment of the summer, we look at the Slovenian novel Alamut, by Vladimir Bartol, a story that takes place in 11th-century Persia. It was originally published in 1938 and was widely translated, but wasn’t published in English until 2004. Michael Biggins, the translator of the English edition and head of the Slavic and East European Section of the University of Washington Libraries, and Tjasa Koprivec, an editor at the Slovenian publisher Sanje, which publishes the current Slovenian edition of Alamut, explain why the book should be read more, and why the author is such an intriguing character.

Underappreciated: Yuri Olesha’s Envy

The Leonard Lopate Show

September 01, 2008

When it was published in 1927, Yuri Olesha's Envy was celebrated by the Soviet establishment as a condemnation of the bourgeois psyche. But two years later Olesha came under suspicion when Communist officials realized that the novel was a satire. Marian Schwartz, who translated Envy for the New York Review of Books imprint, tells us why Olesha's forgotten masterpiece deserves a second look.

Weigh in: Tell us your ideas for underappreciated works of literature we should talk about on this show in the future.

Underappreciated: Howard Sturgis’s Belchamber

The Leonard Lopate Show

August 25, 2008

Howard Sturgis was good friends with Edith Wharton and Henry James, but his novels were never as popular as theirs. His 1904 novel Belchamber traces the demise of a family of English aristocrats. Edmund White, who wrote the introduction to the New York Review of Books reissue of Belchamber, tells us why Sturgis deserves a place alongside his more famous friends.

Underappreciated: Gregor von Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

The Leonard Lopate Show

August 11, 2008

In Gregor von Rezzori's semi-autobiographical satire, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, the narrator looks back on a lifetime of fascination with and hatred of Jews. Elie Wiesel has said that Rezzori's voice "echoes with the disturbing and wonderful magic of a true storyteller." Deborah Eisenberg, who wrote the introduction to the New York Review of Books edition of the novel, joins us to explain why this book should be on your summer reading list.

Underappreciated: Mercè Rodoreda

The Leonard Lopate Show

August 04, 2008

We continue our Underappreciated summer reading series with a look at Mercè Rodoreda, who wrote The Time of the Doves in exile after Franco's regime began to suppress her native Catalan language and culture. A powerful story of a young shopkeeper living through the Spanish civil war, it’s considered by many to be the best Catalan novel of all time. Author Sandra Cisneros tells us why it should be more widely read.

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