Dalva by Jim Harrison
An unsentimental portrait of a part-Indian farmer's daughter from a writer who remains fiercely committed to the great outdoorsIf the reader is in any doubt at all during the opening pages of Jim Harrison's 1988 novel Dalva as to whether they're in the...
Overlooked classics: July, July by Tim O’Brien
This tale of a 30-year college reunion subtly unpicks the way the ageing process alters a generation's dreams of changing the worldTim O'Brien is best known for his cluster of early novels about the Vietnam war and his 1973 memoir about his own tour of...
Shelf help
Tom Cox's bookshelves were less about him than about a stranger he subconsciously imagined would one day visit his house – and so began the great sortI reorganised my book collection a couple of weeks ago. I'd been meaning to do this for three or fou...
Overlooked classics: Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell
This just the kind of precise, considered masterpiece you'd expect from the writer-editor who nurtured Cheever and UpdikeJust as top sport coaches are often top because they're better at teaching sport than playing it, great editors don't often write g...
Overlooked American classics
Unlike the TV series of the same name, this is a sadly underrated story about the men of the old WestDid the American TV producer David Milch read Pete Dexter's Deadwood before creating the 2004 HBO drama of the same name? Milch claims he didn't, but r...
My father the superhero
A first marathon attempt at 58 years old wasn't enough. He had to run the entire distance wearing a cape. Then again, Michael Cox has never done things by halves"DO YOU WANT TO WATCH ME RUN AROUND THE FIELD?" said my dad (who is in the top 10 loudest m...
World’s Fair by EL Doctorow
A pioneering mix of memoir, fiction and history, this is an unforgettably vivid evocation of a vanished New York"I imagined houses as superior beings who talked silently to one another," writes EL Doctorow in his sixth novel, World's Fair. Looking back...
Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
The story of an austere idealist, this novel takes in both claustrophobic family drama and the wider public stageThough he's most certainly written more than three great novels (his duet of sad, sad books about small-town life and death, Affliction and...
Overlooked classics of American literature: Eddie’s Bastard by William Kowalski
A warm-hearted saga that reads like the beginning of a career to rival John Irving's has been left unaccountably unlovedPlenty of people write novels at the age of 28 – zeitgeisty novels, slight novels, novels locked in place by their precocious yout...
Overlooked American classics
Russo's only campus novel, its hugely endearing characters make underachievement curiously appealingRichard Russo is best-known for writing novels about small-town American life: a string of under-read (in the UK, at least) barfly classics, set in blue...
Overlooked classics of US literature
In the first instalment of our new series, Tom Cox reconsiders a tale of small-town rivalry that nearly escalates into all-out warIf Thomas Berger is known at all in the UK it's for his 1964 novel Little Big Man, in which a 121-year-old caucasian looks...
Overlooked American classics