Feats of Obscurity

One of the great pleasures of reading widely as a writer is building a personal canon. It can be a hell of a lot of fun to find books out there in the library of babel that resonate with you and whatever your philosophy of art and life may be. But it takes some guts to wander into the back of beyond. Not everyone is going to have infinite patience with you when, after your third gin rickey, you sweatily implore them to read this life-changing novella by some hermetic jerk who only wrote in Esperanto.