Recognised classics and bestsellers tend to hog the literary limelight. But dedicated readers know there are plenty of great books out there that don’t necessarily get the attention they deserve.

There is a particular pleasure in an unexpected recommendation or new discovery, so we asked some literary experts to nominate their favourite obscure book. We were looking for lost treasures, works they think deserve to be better known – and they gave us some excellent responses.

Do not google “Joe Theismann broken leg”! All it will bring you is grainy 1980s footage of the beloved Washington Redskins quarterback getting his tibia snapped horizontal. It is a cursed image. Stay away!

You should, however, read Chris Bachelder’s fourth novel, The Throwback Special (2016), which was serialised in The Paris Review, but remains underread in Australia.

The premise alone won’t explain why: for the 16th year in succession, 22 middle-aged men gather at a crappy hotel to reenact the play that ended Theismann’s NFL career. That’s it!

And yet it’s more than enough for this book about obsessive male ritual that is itself obsessive about details. Over the 24 hours covered in the plot, everything from how the men snore (“like a cartoon hound”) to what turns them on (illustrated mothers in picture books) is excavated with dry Beckettian wit.

While their distinctive travails are each spotlighted (one’s voice is too high, one’s wife doesn’t like their shoes, one’s son keeps hurting the family cat), the characters eventually merge into a collective voice producing “waves of masculine sound, the toneless song of regret and exclamation”.

It’s all as gruesomely compelling as a certain grainy video on the internet: I can’t stay away.

Alex Cothren is the author of Playing Nice was Getting Me Nowhere.

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki is the author of two of my favourite novels, The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi and The Makioka Sisters, which need no rescuing from obscurity. However, I would like to recommend his essay-novella Arrowroot (1937), which has been eclipsed by those well known works and his slighter stories of sexual intrigue.

This first-person account of a trip taken with a childhood friend to the mountains of Yoshino in 1912 has the weirdly hallucinatory quality of haiku. The houses’ overly white paper screens and a local delicacy, persimmons ripened in cellars until they are as translucent as jade, conjure the remoteness of this place, with its centuries of local crafts, half-forgotten legends, and fox-lore.

As the story unfolds, the narrator’s friend Tsumura, an orphan, reveals that he is searching for a connection with his dead mother, who was sold from this district into Osaka’s pleasure houses. And so it gradually becomes clear that Tanizaki’s true subject is his terrible longing. At the heart of Tsumura’s search is a family relic, a drum made out of two fox skins, which, when struck, summon their orphaned fox-child.

It’s hard to think of a more piercing metaphor for a child’s yearning for a lost parent, or a sadder novel.

Delia Falconer’s latest book is Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a Time of Beauty and Loss.

Evan Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook (1995) is the great lost maximalist novel of the 1990s. It deserves a........

© The Conversation