Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill, Esta Spalding & Linda Spalding, Editors: Lost Classics: Writers On Books Loved And Lost, Overlooked, Under-Read, Unavailable, Stolen, Extinct, Or Otherwise Out Of Commis

Because so much of the world's cultural heritage has crumbled to dust, it's not unusual to encounter people who swear they remember some Saturday-morning cartoon or low-budget drive-in movie that no one else can recall. Even more common are forgotten books: those limited-edition poetry collections, quaintly outmoded history texts, fever-dream modern novels, or comforting children's fictions which made such an impression that their readers can't understand how friends and acquaintances, let alone the general public, missed them. Since 1998, the Canadian literary journal Brick has been compiling authors' reminiscences about little-known books, and more than 70 of these brief essays comprise Lost Classics, a paean to books that possessed at least one person before falling through the cracks of the canon. Novelist Carole Corbeil waxes wistful about a bound collection of the French magazine Bernadette, and the serialized story that first made her understand that she would someday be looking back from the future at her then-present self. Journalist Charles Foran considers a posthumously published novel by Flann O'Brien, and weighs whether artists can have any confidence in their best and most personal work. Essayist Wayne Johnston offers two rare histories of Newfoundland, and wonders whether scantly documented territories inspire untrustworthy documents. Throughout Lost Classics, one theme recurs: the idea that crumbling volumes contain long-absent truths and/or palatable lies, and that their discovery can alert readers to long-suspected but never-named connections. Some of the odder choices—a surreal kiddie story about animals who live on postage stamps, or an untranslatable encyclopedia of made-up items—are so fantastical that the book's detailed bibliography is necessary to quell the suspicion that they never actually existed. The appendix invites readers to go on a bookstore scavenger hunt, as do the discourses by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Jeffrey Eugenides, John Irving, and Michael Ondaatje, who lay out their reactions to their selections without recounting too much of the books' plots. Cumulatively, Lost Classics celebrates library sales and dank used-book stores, institutions which satiate desires beyond even the convenience of the Internet, since those desires don't exist until an unusual dust jacket catches the eye, lighting a path to the unknown.