Minor works, major joy: Why we should read authors’ lesser-known texts

Not every literary treasure announces itself with a full-page review or a Booker Prize shortlist. Some arrive quietly, tucked into the back of collected editions or discovered decades after their author’s death.

These are the misfit texts: the ghost stories, experimental fragments, and one-off essays that never quite made it into the canon but hold a strange power all their own. They’re small, sometimes imperfect, but full of clues. In them, we catch glimpses of writers unguarded, playful, or restless, working things out before the world was watching.

Hidden Pages: Graham Greene and the joy of literary discoveries

I love a literary discovery like the newly found short story by Graham Greene, Reading at Night. It adds an intriguing footnote to a major literary life. Published in Strand Magazine, the piece is a ghost story of sorts—spare, eerie, and lightly comic. It’s a small thing, a curiosity, but it opens up new angles on Greene’s creative instincts.