Lost Classics

August 20, 2001
In Lost Classics: Writers on Books Loved and Lost, Overlooked, Under-read, Unavailable, Stolen, Extinct, or Otherwise Out of Commission, assembled by Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill, Esta Spalding and Linda Spalding (editors of the Canadian literary magazine Brick), 74 writers honor books that hang in the world by a thread, if at all. Contributors include the editors; Margaret Atwood on Hjalmar S derberg's Doctor Glas, which caused a scandal in Sweden in 1905; Anne Carson on Dhuoda's Handbook for William, dating to the 840s, wherein an exiled wife imparts "actics of survival... in this world and the next" to her hostage son (whom she never saw again); and Robert Creeley on David Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible, "an extraordinary record of... the last of the fifties."

June 1, 2001
Have you ever had a special book that captivated you in your youth only to find, when you're older, that it is long gone? If you have, this collection will help to revive those feelings. The editors, all of whom are editors of Brick: A Literary Journal, have assembled a collection of essays by writers who reminisce about the books they cherished and that transformed them but are now largely forgotten. The essays include Ondaatje on Sri Lankan filmmaker Tissa Abeysekara's Bringing Tony Home, Margaret Atwood recalling Doctor Glas, and Russell Banks writing about Too Late To Turn Back, a travelog by Barbara Greene, cousin to Graham Greene. Many of the short chapters include a picture of the cover of the book under discussion, which adds to the delight of this collection. Every book lover will want to cuddle up with these magnificent recollections of lost classics. Recommended for all libraries. Ron Ratliff, Kansas State Univ., Manhattan

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2001
Inveterate readers always want to hear about other inveterate readers' favorite books, and the more obscure the book, the better. This outcome of a project of the Canadian literary magazine "Brick" is an inveterate reader's delight. In it 73 professionally inveterate readers--novelists, poets, playwrights, and essayists--discuss books they cherish but that almost no one they know has read or, perhaps, even heard of. Out-of-print novels, lesser-known books by famous authors, children's books whose contents are better remembered than their titles, single books of poems by poets long since immortalized in collected editions, travel books, titleless ephemera (the typewritten "smut" a friend handed a 12-year-old C. K. Williams), a set of essays about the "real" classics (Kenneth Rexroth's "Classics "Revisited), and a few pretty well known books "(Lost Horizon," "The Old Wives' Tale)"--such are the choices of Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, John Irving, Alan Lightman, Russell Banks, and their confreres. So don't weed out those old shelf-sitters yet! This dandy book may lengthen their circulating life spans. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)