A Delightfully Frenetic Cult Classic
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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.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
- The island nation whose history reflects America’s
- How Ross Douthat’s proselytizing falls short
- The dangers of philo-Semitism
- “Santa Filomena,” a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sasseen’s list of unearthed gems focuses on 20th-century titles—her newest pick is Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, an apocalyptic French novel from 1995, which has recently been blowing up on BookTok. I’d like to add my own, more recent selection to the pile: Women, by Chloe Caldwell. When it was first published in 2014, it made a splash—it was praised by Lena Dunham—but a very small one. It was out of print for years, but not quite out of circulation, passed around among queer women who loved it until Harper Perennial reissued it late in 2024.
Women is demented—which I say as high praise. I read it in a single, frenetic gulp, alone in a Manhattan bar, desperate to finish it before meeting a friend. Its plot is simple: The unnamed female narrator has her first romantic entanglement with a woman, Finn, and it is as toxic as it is all-consuming. Unsurprisingly, things end badly (the pair are a poor match, and Finn has a long-term partner she won’t leave). But while the affair is happening, it’s electric. The narrator unlocks new modes of feeling and of understanding herself. She discovers things about her sexuality, but also about sex itself; this is a delightfully explicit book. Recalling the affair once it’s dissolved, the narrator is extraordinarily honest about her past naivete. During the relationship, “the quick transitions between bliss and hell, between our fights and apologies, are so extreme, so jolting … Finn seems to be able to stomach it,” she confesses. Emotional wisdom develops only after the fact. A few lines later, she observes that, “in retrospect, I think I may have been testing her, pushing her, trying to scare her away.”
This openness gives Women its charm. Our narrator is adrift, willing to try anything that feels good. She escapes her hometown and starts over in a new city; goes to therapy, where she learns about “boundaries”; takes dubiously sourced herbs for her health. But she acknowledges that none of this is as exciting, or addicting, as the rush of being with Finn. When their connection crumbles, she feels unmoored. Still, she has been left with something very important: She’s been inducted into a queer world that was previously hidden from her, lying just beneath the life she thought she had to live. Women is a cult classic because it captures how coming out can alter your fundamental sense of self. While that can be terrifying, it opens new doors, which all lead to new destinations.
Six Older Books That Deserve to Be Popular Today
By Rhian Sasseen
In recent years, these titles have found themselves justifiably rescued from oblivion.
What to Read
Women’s Barracks, by Tereska Torrès
Considered not only the first lesbian pulp novel but the first paperback-original best seller in the United States, Women’s Barracks, like Robinson Crusoe and Pamela, bills itself as a true account but is actually fictional. Based on the author’s experiences serving in the U.K.-based Corps of French Female Volunteers during World War II, the story depicts the lives of a group of women living together in their assigned barracks in London during the Blitz. Torrès’s narrator acts primarily as an observer, describing the various dramas, personality clashes, and intra-corps romances taking place around her. While few of the women consider themselves lesbians or bisexuals, and the book does not seem to have been widely read among contemporary queer women, it is a foundational text within the genre of lesbian pulp fiction. Still, the novel is thoroughly enjoyable even without knowing its historical context. Its cast of characters is fascinating: The women come from all classes and life circumstances. Some are patriotic volunteers; others are just trying to survive. Though they take their jobs as secretaries, telephone operators, and typists seriously, they also find ways to relieve the stress of life during wartime. They throw parties and share their escapades with one another. Despite the narrator’s occasional moralizing (added in at the insistence of the book’s original publisher, the author has explained), the novel’s relationships feel true to the complexity of both its characters and its era. — Ilana Masad
From our list: Six cult classics you have to read
Out Next Week
???? Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star, by Mayukh Sen
???? The Dream Hotel, by Laila Lalami
???? Dream Count, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Your Weekend Read
Control. Alt. Delete.
By Megan Garber
The memory holes of 1984, dull as they are, are also warnings. They are always there, always available, always ready to consume new bits of history’s paper trail. The White House transmits its warnings, though, through the fog of endless ambiguity. Its DEI order, as a practical matter, is a mandate with few clear rules. Had Black History Month, for example, just been made illegal? How could one tell? What was to be made of the fact that executive agencies banned it from their calendars while the executive himself hosted a BHM event? The questions lingered, in essence unanswered. The order used imperative language but implied the conditional tense, casting readers—the country at large—to live in the blank space of the could.
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