“To a true collector,” the German philosopher Walter Benjamin noted in his 1931 essay “Unpacking My Library,” “the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.” This is an apt way to describe the many lives a single volume may live. On its initial printing, it may receive a flurry of attention from readers and reviewers—or none at all. Some titles go straight from best seller to well-loved classic, with no dip in demand; others, though popular in their author’s lifetime, may quickly fade into obscurity.

And then there are the “rebirths” Benjamin described: the second acts, rediscoveries, and renewals that bring older works back into circulation. Happily, unfairly forgotten treasures are in vogue. Major publishers and small presses are reissuing novels long out of print, exhuming unpublished manuscripts from celebrated writers, and championing unpopular works dismissed for their abstraction or difficulty. Reading can offer the delightful opportunity to find your present-day thoughts, worries, and emotions in a book published before you were even born. These books may also change how you think about the past, or feature prose you’d never encounter in contemporary life. The following titles are only a small selection that have, in recent years, through the efforts of obsessive editors and fans alike, found themselves justifiably rescued from oblivion.

The Maimed, by Hermann Ungar, translated by Kevin Blahut

“A sexual hell” is how the German writer Thomas Mann apparently referred to Ungar’s debut novel, The Maimed, first published in German in 1923. The tense, terse novel follows a hapless bank clerk, Franz Polzer, as he finds himself drawn into a sadomasochistic affair with his landlady. The Maimed brings Franz Kafka’s work to mind, but it is more sexually explicit on the page and made all the more claustrophobic by the introduction of Karl—a childhood friend of Polzer’s who may or may not have been his lover, and who is dying of an unnamed degenerative disease. As Polzer’s affair turns more and more violent, a murder occurs, as well as a mystery: Who is responsible for the killing? With its swirl of erotic anxiety and its ambiguous ending, The Maimed heralded the beginning of a promising literary career that, like Kafka’s, was cut short when Ungar died in his prime, in 1929, at age 36.

Fish Tales, by Nettie Jones

“You’re not crazy to me,” one character tells the narrator of Fish Tales, a 30-something Black woman named Lewis Jones. “You’re daring. Most people cannot even imagine life the way you live it.” That life includes nights out on the town in 1970s Detroit and disco-fueled Manhattan, copious amounts of cocaine, and sexual encounters both outlandish and, at times, demoralizing. This frenetic novel, first acquired by Toni Morrison and published in 1983, has become something of a cult classic, and it’s easy to understand why: It approaches relationships with raw and unvarnished honesty. A new edition forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April promises to bring additional audiences to Jones’s sharp, fast-paced look at the highs and lows of the human heart.

I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman, translated by Ros Schwartz

First published in 1995 and recently reissued by the Bay Area–based small press Transit Books, the science-fiction novel I Who Have Never Known Men, written by a Belgian psychoanalyst, has received a surprising amount of attention on social media. BookTok contains hundreds of videos of readers discovering and discussing Harpman’s haunting feminist dystopia. Told from the perspective of its young and nameless female narrator, the book follows a group of 39 women of various ages who spend their days imprisoned in an underground bunker, which is patrolled by a mysterious series of male guards. After an accident sets the women free, our protagonist finds herself suddenly wandering through a wasteland and learning, from the other women, about the world as it existed before the vault, which she has no memory of. Together, they reconstruct elements of society: devising a system of time-telling through counts of the human heartbeat, rediscovering the existence of organized religion. What stands out most is the philosophical approach Harpman takes as she renders the familiar strange.

The Long-Winded Lady: Notes From The New Yorker, by Maeve Brennan

The woman wandering the city alone has become something of a popular, even glamorous, figure. She’s a variation on the 19th century’s flaneur, seen in contemporary works such as Olivia Laing’s 2016 memoir, The Lonely City, as well as reissued novels such as Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, from 1979, and Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife, from 50 years before that. The characters in those books would find common cause with the Irish writer Maeve Brennan, who from 1954 to 1981 wrote missives for The New Yorker under the pen name “The Long-Winded Lady,” a woman who witnessed all kinds of behavior from New York’s denizens at all hours of the day. The columns in this collection, first collected in 1969 and reprinted in 2016, depict, in finely rendered strokes, the minutiae of close-quarters living. “There were no seats to be had on the A train last night,” one begins; still another starts in a bookstore and veers off, at the end, into a meditation on Balzac’s favorite food (sardine paste, apparently). At a moment when the atomization of interpersonal relationships is at the forefront of public discussion, Brennan’s winsome, melancholy-streaked portraits of city life hold particular resonance.

Mr. Dudron, by Giorgio de Chirico, translated by Stefania Heim

The relationship between the artist and their audience has been analyzed and fetishized by critics ad nauseam, but Mr. Dudron provides a fresh perspective from the artist’s point of view. This previously unpublished novel by the Greek-born Italian painter de Chirico, written fitfully over decades, doesn’t have much of a plot, instead unfurling as a series of anecdotal conversations among artists and meandering, essayistic theories of painting. In lieu of a digestible arc, the reader gets a peek inside the head of de Chirico, whose off-kilter paintings of empty city squares in the early 20th century would go on to strongly influence the Surrealists. “A work of art should never force the viewer nor the maker into an act of reasoning, or criticism, or exposition,” de Chirico writes, per one early translation; instead, “it should provoke only satisfaction … that is, a condition in which reasoning no longer exists.”

Twilight Sleep, by Edith Wharton

“Mrs. Wharton,” reads a line in The Atlantic’s review of her 1927 novel, Twilight Sleep, “has never really descended from that plane of excellence which since its beginning has characterized her work.” Implicit in this observation: until now. Although contemporary reviewers might not have appreciated Twilight Sleep as much as they did Wharton’s previous books, her 17th novel offers an updated, Jazz Age–variation on a familiar, Wharton-esque theme: social ruin. In Roaring ’20s New York, Pauline Manford, the book’s heroine, inoculates herself from life’s unpleasantries—including her second husband’s affair with his stepson’s wife, Lita—with a busy social calendar, but when disaster strikes and the affair is discovered, not even Pauline’s unblinking devotion to rationality, truth, and progress can soothe her emotional reaction. Named after the drug cocktail given to women in the 20th century to ward off the pains of childbirth, which brings to mind the anesthetized attitude of some of its characters, Twilight Sleep was republished in late 2024.

It was like a party at the end of the world. Before TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, pulled the plug on the app last night—getting ahead of the official ban in the United States, which took effect today—the app’s most devoted users were going overboard. I watched someone with their hand up a Kermit puppet having (or maybe just performing) an emotional breakdown over the app’s impending demise, the frog’s mouth gaping toward the ceiling on livestream. Duke Depp, who first went viral on the app for doing a striptease to Akon’s “I Wanna Love You” while dressed as Willy Wonka, gyrated on the floor to “WAP.” Earlier this week, Meredith Duxbury, Lexi Hidalgo, and other high-profile creators revealed that some of their most successful content had been built on half-truths—one actually didn’t use as much makeup as advertised; another had actually done only half the workouts they’d talked about on their channel. You’re mad about it? Nothing you can do now! TikTok’s over.

Or at least, it was for a second. President-Elect Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social account that he’ll sign an executive order after he’s inaugurated tomorrow to help bring TikTok back online. TikTok said today that it is “in the process of restoring service” already.

[Read: The case for brain rot]

Still, assuming that it does actually come back for good—Trump’s plan is far from a sure thing in the long run—TikTok may never be the same after this. Social media is a delicate thing; too much downtime means users can divert their attention elsewhere, and too many attempts to curate the culture can destroy its magic altogether. Last night, I took in as much of it as I could before the shutdown. What would it look like when the internet’s brain-rottiest app died—when all of the app’s users knew well in advance that the thing was on its way out? For nearly six hours, I mainlined TikTok’s feeds. It was like Cabaret through the kaleidoscope of the infinite scroll.

Many users held a funeral of sorts, dancing in all black. The Next Level Chef breakout TikTok star Tini made her viral mac and cheese for the occasion. Fancam editors posted smash-cut compilations of highlights from the app’s near-decade run. People shared the creators they would miss the most, the people they wanted to thank for being part of their TikTok journey. Adam Ray Okay, a TikTok star known for his disheveled and brash character, Rosa, dressed up as her one last time, complete with stripes of bronzer and misplaced false lashes, to say goodbye to the app.

The app slowly began to lose functions throughout the evening: Comments froze and the refresh button lagged. Posting videos became difficult. Nervously, I exited the app and went back in. Comments reappeared. I breathed. Watched another video. A pixelated shark superimposed onto stick-figure legs walked through a void, set to “It’s Quiet Uptown” from the Hamilton soundtrack.

[Read: The difference between TikTok and free expression]

In my favorites folder, I scrolled through the hundreds of audio clips I’d bookmarked over five years. The very first clip was a lo-fi remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hot Girl” that I saved in 2020. I was in college when I first started using the app, downloading it to learn the “Blueberry Faygo” dance, and now I am haggard at the age of 26. Much has changed—I moved to a new city, began my career, experienced heartbreak for the first time, and posted through it all. The Pedro Pascal fancam edit cradled me after I experienced my first layoff. The dense-bean-salad girl wiped my tears when I felt like I was about to teeter off the edge at the grocery store. Chloe Ting’s two-week challenge got me through lockdown with her promises to help her followers attain an itty-bitty, teeny-tiny waist and a gigantic, earth-shattering butt.

Everyone’s experience with TikTok is, famously, individual: The algorithm seems to know us better than we know ourselves, or so the cliché goes. But the app has also meaningfully shaped aspects of our culture and politics, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, as with any social platform. Many people found community on TikTok. BookTok transformed the publishing industry; creators encouraged viewers to support indie booksellers and caused books sales to skyrocket. It played a political role: “TikTok teens,” with help from K-pop stans, flooded Trump’s 2020 Tulsa, Oklahoma, rally with fake ticket bookings just to mess with him. Reporters like Bisan Owda provided unique, on-the-ground reporting about life in Gaza. TikTok’s feeds pushed huge amounts of body dysmorphia, prejudice, and alt-right lines of thought—the app has also been a prime suspect in the decline of attention spans, the rise of hyper-consumerism, and the general deterioration of media literacy. Such a consequential app deserved a major fade-out. Perhaps a soft vignette or fade to black, or a final curtain over the whole thing. Maybe a rolling-credits song or a bagpipe solo to play us out.

We didn’t get that, of course. Just a pop-up notification as I was midway through a video. This is the nature of TikTok, and really the internet overall: always shifting; here today, gone tomorrow. And then, maybe …