Notes on the Underground: a side event on underappreciated literature

[TaylorH]

Hi book enjoyers,

I am pleased to announce Notes on the Underground, a challenging side event focused on underappreciated books and literature. The set will consist of 10 packets of 20 powermarked toss-ups. This set is about 25% done, and I hope to have the set finished by fall/winter 2024.

What do I mean by "underappreciated"? I am mostly using this term in the emic context of (mostly college/open) quiz bowl, rather than the world at large. In this set, I am hoping to highlight texts/authors/themes/genres that haven't been too prominent in academic quiz bowl questions in recent years. The types of things I plan on writing about are best illustrated by a list of question topics to expect:

-Second- or -third-tier works by major QB canon authors.
-First-tier works by lesser-known or extra-canonical (but still real-world notable) authors, including "shadow canon" authors common in older quiz bowl questions but rare in more contemporary ones.
-Books often republished as "classics" in series like Penguin Classics, Oxford World Classics, NYRB, etc, that get some buzz in the literary world but haven't yet gotten much traction in QB.
-More genre fiction than usual for QB, including underrepresented genres like crime, historical fiction, romance, western, thrillers, etc.
-Literary aspects of "great books" that might more often be seen in other QB categories like science, thought, or history.
-Geographic and/or temporal literary movements/scenes/trends not yet captured by previous QB questions.
-Major literary award winners that haven't shown up much in QB.

Due to the extra-canonical nature of many of the set's questions, players should expect it to be quite hard, in line with many of the literature questions in the TELEOLOGY series. There is no explicit geographical distribution for the set, and the set does not seek to be truly representative of global literature(s), only topics I feel naturally drawn to. As such, there will be a slight skew toward Anglophone literature, and folks should expect proportionally fewer European/"World" topics than usual, based on nothing other than my personal reading habits. Though all major eras of literature will be represented, folks should expect an abundance of questions focusing on 20th-century works and authors.

The genre-based per packet distribution is below. Note that all questions in the genre-specific categories will be on single authors or works. All common links or extra-textual questions will be covered in the "Cross Genre/Common Links" category.

4 Long Fiction
4 Poetry
2 Short Fiction
2 Drama
2 Non-Fiction
6 Cross Genre/Common Links

See y'all towards the end of the year. Until then, happy reading!

[Cheynem]

I was hoping this would be a post expressing admiration for a lost literature side event, but this is pretty neat too.