From Library Journal
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 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Anecdotal, revealing, nostalgic, brief, insightful ... more than 70 nuggets of literary gold, a bibliophile's gleaming treasure trove.... Lost Classics is a warming and beautiful act of memory and homage." —Ottawa Citizen
“A delightful companion…wonderfully wide-ranging, charmingly designed and hugely entertaining.... [Lost Classics is] a collective conversation about reading that matters.” — The Globe and Mail
From the Inside Flap
The editors of Brick had the idea of celebrating the new century by asking contributors to the much-loved journal for short essays about their favourite "lost classics": books they treasured and would love to pass on to friends, but that are, for all intents and purposes, forgotten. The next issue contained 32 such essays - pithy, witty, passionate, surprising - which led to the idea of soliciting more, and celebrating again with a book.
In Lost Classics you will find Margaret Atwood on sex and death in the scandalous Doctor Glas, first published in Sweden in 1905; Russell Banks on the off-beat travelogue Too Late to Turn Back by Barbara Greene - the "slightly ditzy" cousin of Graham; Robert Creeley, who admits that his choice - David Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible - was never quite found, let alone lost; Helen Garner on the delightfully sinister Australian children's epic, The Journey of the Stamp Animals. You will also find Derek Lundy on two square-rigger sea tales by Frank T. Bullen; Sarah Sheard's hilarious ruminations on Down and Out in the Woods: An Airman's Guide to Survival in the Bush; as well as Wayne Johnston on two lost classics of Newfoundland; Ronald Wright on William Golding; Susan Musgrave on A.E. Housman; Jane Rule on Lucrecia P. Hale; Bill Richardson on a children's book for adults by Russell Hoban; Rudy Wiebe's moving appreciation of The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes; Harry Matthews on the rarest book he ever stole, and much, much more.
Lost Classics includes approximately 80 contributors, with brief biographies of each, including an introduction and lost classics by the Brick editors themselves.
From the Back Cover
"Anecdotal, revealing, nostalgic, brief, insightful ... more than 70 nuggets of literary gold, a bibliophile's gleaming treasure trove.... Lost Classics is a warming and beautiful act of memory and homage." —Ottawa Citizen
“A delightful companion…wonderfully wide-ranging, charmingly designed and hugely entertaining.... [Lost Classics is] a collective conversation about reading that matters.” — The Globe and Mail
About the Author
Brick contributing editor Michael Ondaatje's most recent book is the novel Anil's Ghost; managing editor Michael Redhill's first novel, Martin Sloane, will be published in January 2001; contributing editor Esta Spalding's latest book is Lost August, a collection of poems; editor Linda Spalding is the author most recently of The Follow. Esta Spalding lives in Vancouver; the other Brick editors live in Toronto.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
A book that we love haunts us forever; it will haunt us, even when we can no longer find it on the shelf or beside the bed where we must have left it. After all, it is the act of reading, for many of us, that forged our first link to the world. And so lost books — books that have gone missing through neglect or been forgotten in changing tastes or worst of all, gone up in a puff of rumour — gnaw at us. Being lovers of books, we've pulled a scent of these absences behind us our whole reading lives, telling people about books that exist only on our own shelves, or even just in our own memory. This is what was on our minds one rainy afternoon in Toronto, as we sat around a dining-room table where the four of us, every few months, make manifest a sporadic but long-lived magazine called Brick: A Literary Journal.
By 1998, when we conceived of the "Lost Classics" issue, Brick had become a neighbourhood, full of essays and interviews that in turn became an international conversation: writers caught weeding, caught chatting over fences, full of chagrin and sometimes surprised to recognize each other after a season's quiet. So it felt natural to begin by asking some of our long-time contributors to tell us the story of a book loved and lost, books that had been overlooked or under-read, that had been stolen and never retrieved, or that were long out of print. We wanted personal stories and they began to pour in.
"Back in 1983, the novel received a fair amount of well-deserved attention..." John Irving wrote of The Headmaster's Papers, with a note of premonitory despair. Margaret Atwood described a Swedish novel, a tattered paperback found in a second-hand bookstore. "On the back of my copy are various encomiums, from the Observer, the Guardian, the Sunday Telegraph, the Glasgow Herald — 'a masterpiece,' 'the most remarkable book of the year,' and so forth. Still, as far as I know, Doctor Glas has long been out of print, at least in its English version."
Helen Garner recalled meeting the author of a beloved childhood book, unknown by anyone she knew but that she remembered vividly. "A real Australian person had written it!" she noted triumphantly. "We corresponded. I asked if she had a spare copy. She said she had only one left, but would lend it to me if I promised to return it. In due course it arrived. I hardly dared to open it. But when I did, out of its battered pages flowed in streams, uncorrupted, the same scary joy it had brought me as a child, before everything in my life had happened."
Before everything had happened. Before even the beloved book was entirely lost. The "Lost Classics" issue, as we called it, struck a chord that kept sounding long after publication. Essays continued to pour in on longed-for books of poetry, children's stories, travel diaries, novels. Why not a book of lost classics? More stories. More lost love.
Some of the newer essays describe a child's love affair with literature that is the beginning of a writerly discipline. The young reader discovers a place to enter another world and uses it as escape. Or, refuses to come out. As Robert Creeley says, "When young, I longed for someone who would talk to me and, often as not, that person was found in a book." If childhood stories are where we learn about plot, rhythm and narrative, they also teach us morals, while explaining the darker side of human nature. We read them when we are most susceptible and over the years they continue to inhabit and sustain us.
The essays we have selected for this collection are such memories of reading: they are that dialogue with the mind of an absent other, that conversation both silent and shared, that moment when a reader seems to have found the perfect mate. But loving is a unique torment if the beloved isn't known to friends, family, the unwilling listener who must be convinced. Many versions of lostness are investigated here. There is the book that disappears from the house during a divorce, and a lost manuscript that becomes a cult classic. There is the writer who commits suicide after finishing his work, and a reader who exhumes it from the remainder bin. There are the missing libraries of India and a book that survived in spite of the odds. The essays we've chosen come from all over the world and the books are of every kind. But lost books are like dying languages: the fewer the people who remember them, the greater the risk that they will disappear for good. When, for whatever reason, a book that means much is lost, there is the need to write a eulogy, an explanation, a defence.
Perhaps this anthology maps the inner lives of its contributors. Perhaps we are set in our ways through the books that we've loved. The book mentioned to a young Harry Mathews at a grown-up cocktail party, for example, infected his imagination so seriously, that many years later, he tracked it down. And stole it. The primer called I Want to Go to School, published by the People's Publishing House of China, set Anchee Min in the direction of her writing life. One book enumerates a system of imaginary knowledge. Another causes a journey. There are lost survival manuals and lost warnings.
Like the magazine itself, our anthology is a conversation. Michael Helm remembers a book of poetry by Philip Levine, while Levine remembers another book of poetry. Eden Robinson writes about awakening to science fiction as a teenager in Kitamaat Village. Others write of Shangri-La and Islandia. Rudy Wiebe describes the strange foretelling of his sister's death. Russell Banks discovers a lost companion to Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps, and Cassandra Pybus writes of a lost partner to Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Caryl Phillips conjures Orson Welles; W. S. Merwin digs up an archeological classic; and Nancy Huston recalls a knell unheard. And, reminding us of the whole enterprise of writing in the first place, Laird Hunt quotes Borges on "a certain class of objects, very rare, that are brought into being by hope." A perfect description of this anthology about books we have loved and lost and loved again. —The Editors, Brick: A Literary Journal
