Nine Books That Came to Fame Slowly

Haruki Murakami’s fifth book, Norwegian Wood, was a sensation in Japan when it was first released in 1987. Despite its success, it wasn’t widely available in English until 2000. The gap between its publication and its popular translation is surprising in hindsight, but few people outside the author’s home country had heard of him until the later English releases of some of his other works. Reportedly, American publishers initially assumed that Norwegian Wood wouldn’t appeal to a wide audience. Once it finally appeared in the Anglophone world, it was a hit all over again, and it ended up selling millions of copies globally.

This is just one example of a well-known phenomenon: Some books and authors are widely read abroad, but find popularity in American markets only decades later. Benjamin Moser’s 2009 biography of the Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, Why This World, helped prompt a sensitive, popular English retranslation project of her works. Even though Abdulrazak Gurnah writes primarily in English, the author was largely unknown to the American public before winning the Nobel Prize in Literature last October, though he was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1994 and has published 10 novels. Now the American publisher Riverhead Books has rushed to acquire some of Gurnah’s new and older titles, such as (2005) and (2001); his recent novel will be in the United States just two years after its initial release. Better late than never.