21 Brilliant Books You’ve Never Heard Of

GQ magazine recently published a list of 21 Brilliant Books You’ve Never Heard Of, asking

Ever come across a book – on a nightstand in an Airbnb, in a box of your mom’s college junk, on a shelf at a friend’s Bachelor viewing party – that’s so energizingly rip-roaring, so envelopingly world-building, that you can’t really believe you’ve never heard of it before?

It’s an interesting list and, despite the allegation explicit in the title, contains some names – if not books – that we’re sure will be familair to SF Gateway readers.

Pulitzer Prize-wining author Junot Diaz, for instance, picks the great Samuel R. Delany – although not for any of his groundbreaking SF; rather Diaz nominates Delany’s autobiography, The Motion of Light on Water.

Russel Hoban’s Riddley Walker (SF Masterworks hardback) is the choice of 2015 Booker Prize-winner Marlon James.

And the father of Cyberpunk, William Gibson, chose Jack Womack‘s Random Acts of Senseless Violence (SF Masterworks paperback | Gateway eBook), a book of which he’s said in the past ‘If you dropped the characters from Neuromancer into Womack’s Manhattan, they’d fall down screaming and have nervous breakdowns.’

So, how did you score on those three?