The 15 Best Literary Rediscoveries of 2024

Every year, publishers big and small devote time and resources to searching out lost classics, out-of-print gems, and ahead-of-their-time authors, and bringing them back into the world. This year, some of my most rewarding reading experiences came from work first published 10, 30, or 80 years ago. Here are my 15 favorite rediscoveries of 2024.

Did you know that the creator of Moominland illustrated Alice, the Cheshire Cat, the Queen of Hearts, and all the other denizens of Wonderland way back in 1966? Never before published in an English-language edition, the results are whimsical, stylish, and utterly delightful.

Just after World War II, the soon-to-be-indispensable New Yorker artist Saul Steinberg—you know him best for his iconic cover, "View of the World from 9 th Avenue" —published his first collection of drawings. A compendium of mind-bending cartoons and sketches from the front, the book was an instant sensation and remains remarkably vivid and entertaining today, thanks to Steinberg's ever-inventive pen line. "Jokes were replaced by ideas," Liana Finck writes in a new introduction, "elegantly pinned down and illuminated."

Though I went to the University of North Carolina, I never took a class with the poet James Seay, who taught there for decades, an avuncular figure in the English department. This collection of decades' worth of essays is a worthy introduction to a writer who's been thinking deeply about life in the South his entire career, and the 10-year-old piece " One Corner of Yoknapatawpha " is worth the entire price of admission. Resituating William Faulkner's fictionalized Mississippi in the frame of Seay's own family history, the essay digs deep into the invented landscapes that define American literature. It's an essay with dirt under its fingernails, and I'm thrilled it's back in print.

The bespoke graphic design press Standards Manual has faithfully reproduced the mammoth three-ring binder created by DC Comics in 1982 to govern the look of its superheroes for all future licensing. When you think of comic-book characters like Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, the images that leap to your mind come straight from this book—that is to say, straight from the art of the legendary José Luis García-López, whose sharp, vivid characters leapt off the pages of this corporate exercise in IP control straight into America's subconscious.

The cantankerous sci-fi visionary Harlan Ellison torpedoed his own career so many times—he once mailed a dead gopher to his publisher—that it seems like reissues have forever been reintroducing him to readers. (I first encountered his work 30 years ago, thanks to a totally different collection attempting to reclaim his crown.) But the stories remain as shocking, subversive, and righteous as ever, just as their creator was, right up until his death in 2018. Read them and join the cult of people who love Ellison, hate him, and can't believe the shit he pulled off.

Yes, that Hugh Laurie, Dr. House himself, published a zippy, funny espionage novel in 1996, back when Americans knew him only as Bertie Wooster, if they knew him at all. Laurie has long threatened a follow-up, which I find unlikely at this point, but The Gun Seller is great all on its own: a funny, absurdly plotted diversion with a laugh on every page—and a cool, exasperated hero Laurie clearly wrote with his own onscreen persona in mind.

This effervescent comedy—the story of Oliver, a precocious, ambitious, gay, Black teenager in 1950s small-town Michigan—was a kind of rebellion against the kind of "struggle" expected by the literary establishment in 1965. What readers did not expect from a young, Black, gay novelist, writes Van Dyke's nephew Erik Wood in a new introduction, "was that he should take his worth for granted, that he should shrug off the gay thing with nonchalance, or acknowledge racial hostility without a flash of rage, or that he'd choose the drawing room over the street, parody over satire, camp over tragedy, Rachmaninoff over the blues."

This indispensable collection of essays from the visionary author is the definitive work on genre, definitive in part because Le Guin refused to consider it definitive: The book was published in 1979, and she revised it in 1989, reconsidering many of her arguments and, in one remarkable case, annotating her essay "Is Gender Necessary?" to note all the things she'd once written that she had come to entirely disagree with. This new edition, with a thoughtful introduction by Ken Liu, should remind readers that the questions we're grappling with now, about identity, empathy, and appropriation, are eternal.

This short, grubby novel of sexual and literary obsession was published in 1982 but takes as its subject the Berkeley of the 1970s, in all its freedom and squalor. There's no way, really, to explain what makes this loathsome story so perfectly eye-opening—you have to experience the self-satisfied, increasingly panicked voice of its antihero, Harold Raab, recording his desperation in the notebook that's the only thing this so-called writer can write. The feel-bad read of the year!

Never reprinted after its publication in 1976, this collection of photographs is bifurcated: The first half features elegant portraits of familiar and unfamiliar faces from post-Stonewall New York, including Divine, Susan Sontag, and Charles Ludlam. The second half portrays arresting mummified corpses in an Italian catacomb. The subject of the book, Benjamin Moser writes in a new foreword, is time: "time that strips, that erases, and that kills; the time that has killed most of the people in this book, half a century after Hujar photographed them." But time has also transformed this once obscure artist into a hero, decades after his death from AIDS, and that's another story of this remarkable book, especially upon its republication, Moser points out: Time "can also revive the dead."

"Princess Esmerelda," as the unforgettable narrator of this unclassifiable novel calls herself, is an Upper West Side bohemian who feels herself about to embark on a "radiance," as she calls her manic episodes, which previously have caused her to sleep with anyone she meets, leap around the city naked, and be committed to the mental ward. This 1979 novel sends us careening into the princess's world, watching through our fingers as the bad decisions pile up, yet admiring, in a way, her determination to be the person she is. "In my opinion," she tells us, "radiance is my own and my business and too precious to part with in this world."

The incomparable writer Lore Segal died this fall at the age of 96. Parents who are fans of wry portraits of life in bygone New York should rejoice at the republication of her wonderful 1970 picture book, which is both a time capsule (those pants the father wears!) and a treasure of weirdo imagination. In three charming stories, little Mitzi hails a taxi on her own, catches a cold, and stops a presidential parade. Pincus' earthy drawings of Mitzi's family, friends, and neighbors, with their thick ankles and finely detailed faces, are endlessly fascinating, too.

The cartoonist Barbara Shermund was a mainstay of the early New Yorker, contributing more than 600 cartoons and nine covers to the magazine in its formative years. Yet for decades her work was entirely forgotten; histories of the era referred to her as "a pretty girl not long in from California," a specialist in "cartoons about dumb blondes," or "Barbara Sherman." So hail to the heavens this essential corrective from comics historian Caitlin McGurk, who tells Shermund's story through careful research and reporting and—just as importantly—reprints scores of Shermund's breezy, clever, ahead-of-their-time cartoons. In one, an enthusiastic bookseller hands a new tome to an older lady, dressed to the nines, with a pitch that's even funnier when we know how little it applies to its author: "She leaves home and leads her own life—within reason, that is."

This furious feminist classic by Egyptian doctor, activist, and polemicist Nawal El Saadawi is just as vivid and shocking today as it was when it was a flashpoint of debate on its first publication in 1973. The chronicle of one woman's short life, told from the prison where she awaits her death sentence, Woman at Point Zero is both jeremiad and character study, a narrative with undeniable propulsion that's also meant to stop you in your tracks. It "comes at the reader like an assault," writes Selma Dabbagh in a new foreword, calling it "one of the best examples of effective political fiction ever produced."

Plucked from the New Yorker typing pool in 1960 to publish her first short story in the magazine, Elizabeth Cullinan became a crucial mid-century Irish American writer, telling careful, closely observed tales that both epitomized the "New Yorker story" and pushed beyond those narrow bounds. Cullinan died in 2020 , her work long out of print, and the return of her second volume of short stories is an invitation to seek out the work of an author who "dared to challenge the Irish-American male tradition," writes Angela Alaimo O'Donnell in a new introduction, and whose stories "assume that women's lives matter just as much as men's."