Fortunately, publishers are always working to satisfy our cravings for a good read, and if the current crop of offerings seems lacking, they can always delve into the past and reissue works by authors we've never heard of. For whatever reasons -- the elusive fluctuations of a free market economy, perhaps -- a lot of great books fall into musty oblivion, never to be read again, their authors just names in a phone book ...

But then, the best measure of a good book is how well it stands the test of time … and if it still reads well after all those years of forgetting it even existed, well, we owe it to ourselves to read it -- and rediscover a new favorite along the way.

Desperate Characters
by Paula Fox
First published to much acclaim in 1970, this novel, and the author's precise use of language, has re-emerged to influence a new generation of writers. Set in Brooklyn some time in the '60s, the story follows a middle-aged couple's struggle to make it through a weekend without succumbing to the world's self-destructive influence. Tightly plotted around the most ordinary of events -- a cat bite -- Fox lures us into a world we know only too well with frightening clarity. If you enjoyed The Great Gatsby, you might appreciate this one.

Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
On the brink of out-of-print limbo, Vintage Books has seen fit to come out with a new edition of this modern classic (possibly in light of the emergence of suburbia as the topic du jour). Originally published in 1961 and nominated for the National Book Award, Revolutionary Road is a deceptively simple tale about a couple living in suburbia -- back when it was where everyone wanted to go -- and the gradual dissipation of their hopes and dreams. The vision is bleak, but more than balanced by clear writing, immediately identifiable characters, and fully realized story. Long considered a writer's writer, perhaps it's time, however posthumously, for Yates to earn a wider audience. The Collected Stories of Richard Yates has also recently become available, revealing his mastery of the short form as well.

You Can't Win
by Jack Black
First published in 1926, You Can't Win is the autobiography of a turn-of-the-century American outlaw, that in spite of, or because of, the author's social standing, presents an amazingly clear-eyed, generous, and eminently wise view of life. Best known as William Burroughs' favorite book, this long-time underground classic unveils a remarkable portrait of the waning days of the wild west, particularly San Francisco around the time of the 1906 earthquake; a fascinating view of a subculture entirely left out of the history books; and a remarkably progressive retort to the lock-em-up attitude toward criminals that so disastrously prevails these days. A new afterword summarizes the events of Black's life after the initial publication of You Can't Win.

Castle Keep
by William Eastlake
An odd, sometimes bizarre, often hilarious, and ultimately moving and tragic story about war as pure absurdity. Its most obvious comparison is Catch-22, but Castle Keep stands on its own as an American classic in the literature of war. Based on the author's actual experiences, the narrative follows a group of American soldiers camped in a Belgian chateau near the close of the Second World War. As with Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, each chapter is told from the perspective of an individual character. Meditative, bawdy, slapstick, poetic, and profound, Dalkey Archive has done us a great favor by reissuing this forgotten classic as part of their American Fiction series.

Read an excerpt!

Angels on Toast
by Dawn Powell
One of America’s best unknowns -- though she has always maintained a small, but devoted following -- Powell experienced a much-deserved resurgence in the early 1990s, paralleling New York City (the setting of her more popular novels) during the Giuliani administration. Breathlessly entertaining, Angels on Toast follows the lives of two businessmen who hurtle toward everything they want at whatever cost, and in the process, drag a wide cast of characters down with them. It is a testament to Powell’s skill that the reader feels a measure of virtuousness commensurate to the amount of laughter expelled.

Norwood
by Charles Portis
This quick, hilarious novel is a genuinely entertaining introduction to Portis' comic brilliance. Imagine Evelyn Waugh as a southerner writing a “Seinfeld” episode while sipping Mint Juleps on a hot July afternoon -- all afternoon -- and you'll have no trouble following the meandering narrative of sweet, befuddled Norwood out of his small east Texas town to New York and back again, along the way stumbling into a small cast of deliciously loose screws. Enormously deadpan and full of sneaky wit, once you've laughed your way through this book, you won't care that it may have been about nothing at all -- which may be the author's point.

Captain Blackman
by John A. Williams
Captain Blackman is the first book to be published in Coffee House Press's Black Arts Movement reprint series. This formally inventive, if not experimental, novel in which fantasy merges with history, is at heart a meditation on the role of African Americans in the U.S. military. As such, the novel follows the story of Captain Blackman, a U.S. soldier seriously wounded during the fighting in Vietnam, who then spends the remainder of the novel drifting in and out of consciousness, all the while hallucinating himself as a soldier in each of America's wars from 1775 to 1975. Historically accurate yet richly imagined, this is an important work deserving renewed attention.

Teitlebaum's Window
by Wallace Markfield
Another reissue in Dalkey Archive's impressive American Fiction series, Teitlebaum's Window is a lavishly comic send-up of every solemn Jewish family saga ever written. Simon Sloan records this story of growing up in Brooklyn in his "Journal-Diary." He takes the reader through the 1930s and 1940s as he interacts with the people in his life: Clare, Maxine, and Helene, the women with whom he spends his adolescence; Malvena, his mother who was so consumed with motherhood that she ate certain foods to enrich the flavor of her milk; Teitlebaum, the kosher deli owner in whose window Simon and the reader are informed of the various happenings of the times. A huge, extravagantly real and comic and life-embracing novel. As one reviewer put it in 1971, "In effect, Wallace Markfield has taken traditional American-Jewish novel and stood it on its head .... The rhythms of the language (Yiddish slang), normally so strange, are stranger still; and the characters -- whom we expect to be either eccentric or volatile or an inflammable combination of the two in this genre -- are here extended to the point of sheer lunacy."

The Scene
by Clarence Cooper, Jr.
Originally published in 1960, The Scene is a harrowing, unflinching foray into the stark, ferocious underworld of pushers, junkies, and detectives. "The Scene" is (60s) jargon for the place where everything is going on -- where dope, women, or any other commodity can be bought or sold. It's a world populated by characters like Rudy Black, a pusher known to give shots of battery acid disguised as heroin if anyone is stupid enough to rat on him; Black Bertha, a secret informant, living just one step ahead of her suppliers and the narcs, dreaming of a way to make a life for herself and her two young daughters; Frankie Wysocki, a 17-year-old novice, about to discover the demons and delights of addiction; Virgil Patterson, one of the few black men promoted to narcotics detective, determined to prove his worth, who has no idea the toll working the scene will eventually have on him. Scorching and explosive, full of the vibrancy and rhythms of the streets, The Scene landed like a bomb when it first appeared in 1960, and prompted The New Yorker to compare Cooper to William Burroughs.

Read an excerpt!

Nothing
by Henry Green
With a little patience, the reader will quickly adjust to the rhythms of one of English literature's most unique, and until recently, nearly forgotten novelists; and in the process enjoy an utterly and unabashedly charming and delightful novel. Years after having an affair that almost ruined their respective marriages, Jane Weatherby and John Pomfret are reunited when their children decide to get married despite questions regarding their possible kinship and the fact that they have almost no money to their names. Afraid that Mary Pomfret and Philip Weatherby are destined for the working-class, Jane and John attempt to stall the development of the wedding plans by having endlessly witty conversations about, well, nothing. This gives Jane -- a shrewd, resourceful widow -- the opportunity to embark on a scheme to lure John away from his current love interest. As the plot advances through discussions filled with misdirections and omissions, Green demonstrates that there is nothing like the spoken word to conceal one's true intentions, yet at the same time reveal everything. One of Green's final novels, Nothing is a worthy addition to the varied tradition of English literature that includes Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh. Fans of Austen, Forster, and Wharton should also be rewarded. Green's masterful description of the novel's centerpiece alone -- an as-if-you-were-there party -- is worth the price of purchase (from your local indie bookstore, of course!).

We
by Yvegeny Zamyatin
Before Brave New World and 1984 -- both of which are brilliant, timeless imaginings of dystopian futures -- there was, and thankfully still is, Zamyatin's We, a novel which far surpasses both Huxley's and Orwell's admirable efforts. In fact, with each passing day, Zamyatin's imagined world rings with greater and greater prescience. In the One State of the great Benefactor, there are no individuals, only numbers, where life is an ongoing process of mathematical precision, a perfectly balanced equation. Primitive passions and instincts have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now, with the creation of the spaceship Integral, that frontier -- and whatever alien species are to be found there -- will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason. One number, D-503, chief architect of the Integral, decides to record his thoughts in the final days before the launch for the benefit of less advanced societies. But a chance meeting with the beautiful I-330 results in an unexpected discovery that threatens everything D-503 believes about himself and the One State. Haunting and lyrical, We was written between 1920 - 21, and accurately predicted the horrors of Stalinism, if not more. This beautiful, dream-like masterpiece is much deserving of a wider readership.

The Music at Long Verney
by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Until her death in 1978, Sylvia Townsend Warner published some 30 books, among them seven strange and exquisite novels, and ten collections of short stories. Yet today, very few people have even heard of her. The Music at Long Verney, published by Counterpoint Press, collects 20 of Sylvia Townsend Warner's best short stories, spanning a half-century from 1929 to 1977. Warner's stories are crowded with irrepressible characters and even more animated objects and incidents, about romantic love and the mysteries of marriage; artists who speak the truth even as they distort reality; gardens and houses and very fine things, and those who fancy themselves their owners. The centerpiece of the collection is a series of five linked stories about an eccentric establishment, the Abbey Antiques Gallery, and its memorable proprietor, the urbane Mr. Edom. Some of these stories are hilarious, others hauntingly lyrical, but all are incomparably witty and original. Journey into one of literature's finest imaginations with The Music at Long Verney.

The Space Child's Mother Goose
by Frederick Winsor, Marian Parry (Illustrator)
Originally published in 1956, this quirky, long out-of-print classic comes in the guise of a children's illustrated book, but should appeal, now that it's been rediscovered by Purple House Press, to a much broader audience. With delightful line drawings by Marian Parry reminiscent of those found in Stanislaw Lem's timeless sci-fi novels, Frederick Winsor's rhyming verses bring a wide variety of scientific theories, thought, and spirit to life.

Probable-Possible, my black hen,
She lays eggs in the Relative When.
She doesn't lay eggs in the Positive Now
Because she's unable to Postulate How.

Printed on wonderfully thick paper, to withstand countless re-readings, The Space Child's Mother Goose will delight, confound, and edify the egghead inside all of us.s