Word: unreadability
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What follows is a recommended reading list of American novelists whose first work has appeared within the last few years. A few are widely read, but none is read widely enough. A few are almost unread, which is their unreaders' loss. This is not exclusively a list of young novelists; youth in novelists is not an asset but a liability which is occasionally overcome. Also, the list omits such excellent writers as J. D. Salinger, Truman Capote, William Styron and Saul Bellow, merely because their first books appeared longer ago than the last few years. The writers...
...broke off a long, fanciful tale titled "How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It's In You and In the Situation," saying that the unread portion might seem "dangerously near a lot of things." Later Frost declined a request to read "Mending Wall" because "it's been used every which way.... It didn't have any politics in it when I wrote it long...
...become a one-man European cultural institution. Today Johann Wolfgang Goethe still is ranked with Homer, Dante and Shakespeare as one of the four great writers of all time. But in Britain and the U.S. he is also one of the most widely unread. The difficulty lies not only in Goethe himself, but in his translators; awed by the intricacy of Goethe's thought, and incapable of reproducing his felicities, they have often seemed to make the translation seem more ponderously German than the original...
...most recent book to attain its majority before it left the publisher's delivery room is A Passion in Rome, by Morley Callaghan, a 58-year-old Canadian, whose work has the compelling attraction, to lovers of literary underdogs, of being largely unread. Alfred Kazin, a critic of high reputation, has called its author "a fine artist," and Edmund Wilson, whose stature is even more Olympian, wrote last year that Callaghan's work "may be mentioned without absurdity in association with Chekhov's and Turgenev...
Aside from stacks of unread pamphlets, federal civil-defense programs for coping with a nuclear attack on U.S. cities have so far produced little more than a warning system. And even that warning system, warned a report buzzing through the honeycomb of the Pentagon last week, is "basically unsound...