A Delightfully Frenetic Cult Classic

Sometimes a great book just doesn’t get its due, at least at first. As many readers may know, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was initially published to a reception that ranged from lukewarm to scornful. Today, the book is considered a classic; The Atlantic selected it as one of the past century’s great American novels. But many fantastic books that receive an initial thumbs-down fall into obscurity. Fortunately for readers in 2025, as Rhian Sasseen points out this week, “unfairly forgotten treasures are in vogue.” Small and large presses alike have been revisiting older texts. NYRB Classics publishes translated, ignored, or undersung works between Instagrammable covers, and New Directions runs a “New Classics” book-of-the-month subscription service; bigger imprints, including Penguin Classics and Picador, are also releasing new editions of out-of-print books.