Recovered Books aims to meet three essential goals in the service of the interested reader:

 

• To bring forgotten and often difficult to find books back into print for a new generation to enjoy.

 

• To introduce readers and researchers to these under-appreciated writers and encourage them to expand their notions of canon.

 

• To present exquisitely designed books that are - above all - exciting and interesting to read.

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Recovered Books is about offering remarkable and memorable reading experiences.

 

Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis, our inaugural title, is one such experience: a wonderfully tragi-comic parable of isolation and abandonment which, despite becoming something of an international phenomenon since it was first featured on Neglected Books - our collaborator in the series - over a decade ago, and having achieved critical and popular success with translations into Dutch, Hebrew and Spanish, was still essentially unknown in English.

 

Since then, it has reached a new readership:

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"Brilliantly conceived and executed, Gentleman Overboard unfolds as a wry study of extremity and isolation ... in a spirit of absurdist fantasy [that] in some ways looks forward to the discomfiting philosophical comedy of Samuel Beckett."

- Ian Thomson, Times Literary Supplement

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"Gentleman Overboard is a bewitching novel, a true gem, rich with the kind of soulful bitter-sweetness you'd find in later period Brautigan."

- Bookmunch

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With features also in The Daily Telegraph and others. We followed that success with the equally well-received Pull Devil, Pull Baker by Stella Benson - a book that anticipates by decades in various ways the 'new non-fiction' school and work of writers such as Geoff Dyer, W. G. Sebald, Maggie Nelson, Ben Lerner, Chris Kraus, Miranda July and others who flicker creatively between fiction and fact - and Time: The Present by Tess Slesinger, a collection of short stories from the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, Tess Slesinger, who was one of the most innovative and original short story writers of her generation.

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Our latest titles, The Sanity Inspectors by Friedrich Deich and Quarry by Jane White, offer no less enthrallingly relevant stories, from writers unfairly or unfortunately forgotten, in which to immerse yourself.

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If you would like to read more about how Recovered Books came into being see the account on the Neglected Books site.

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See also announcements in The Bookseller and the initial Press Release.