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With that in mind, I would just go through the list of Nobel Prize winners (or Penn or another major award).
If the popular winners are too well known for your tastes (Ishiguro, Morrison) I am sure the less famous ones will be sufficiently unknown (Pamuk, Mahfouz).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question was "What are some great books that are relatively unknown in the United States?" Although certain 1984 memes (like "Big Brother") are well-known, the book itself is not. Most Americans, if they've read any Orwell, have only read Animal Farm; and other concepts from 1984 (the memory hole, two minutes hate) are completely unheard of... again, because the book is not actually well-known.
Unfortunately, you could argue that it's well known because it's so easy to believe that it's being used as an instruction manual.
Wikipedia has this to say about Mahabharata:
> The Mahābhārata is the longest epic poem known and has been described as "the longest poem ever written".[7][8] Its longest version consists of over 100,000 śloka or over 200,000 individual verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages. At about 1.8 million words in total, the Mahābhārata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or about four times the length of the Rāmāyaṇa.[9][10] W. J. Johnson has compared the importance of the Mahābhārata in the context of world civilization to that of the Bible, the works of William Shakespeare, the works of Homer, Greek drama, or the Quran.[11] Within the Indian tradition it is sometimes called the Fifth Veda.
The Master and Margarita.
Also, this site: http://masterandmargarita.eu/en/ is a great resource if you’re not familiar with 1930s Soviet history and the Gospels (both canonical and apocryphal). Without knowledge of those things you won’t get nearly as much out of the book as you could.
Foreign: * Life: a users manual by George s Perec. * Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal * Auto-da-fe by Elias Canetti Domestic: These are harder because I feel like they’re all pretty well known, but maybe they’re not actually read. Like, known bc people have heard the name, but are not read as much anymore. * Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson * Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon * Blood Meridian by Cormac McC…
Francis Spufford is a brilliant English author who should be more widely known. For the HN crowd I would heartily recommend "Red Plenty" (2010). It's a semi-fictional novel about that brief moment in time around 1959 when the Soviets really thought that the dream of Communism was within reach. The characters (most of them real people) include mathematicians, biologists, party officials, computer designers... There's…
The Master and Margarita.
One of my favorites is "A billion years before the end of the world" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe_(novel) .
Intruders was made into a BBC America series, but his earlier works are much more interesting.
Only Forward, One of Us, What You Make It, or Spares from the nineties are all well written, and all beat any of the suspense he's written as Michael Marshall. He simply seems much better writing near future dystopian sci-fi.