William Gaddis, in the closing pages of his colossal 1955 novel “The Recognitions,” inserts a brief scene that manages to be at once rancorously funny, brazenly self-referential, and spookily prescient about the critical fate that lay in store for his work. A book reviewer and a poet meet in a tailor’s shop; both are sitting pantsless while they wait for their respective garments to be adjusted. The poet notices an unusually thick book under the critic’s arm and asks him if he’s reading it. No, says the critic, he’s not reading it, “just reviewing it.” He complains that he’s getting paid “a lousy twenty-five bucks for the job” and that “it’ll take me the whole evening tonight.” He then tells his acquaintance that he hopes he hasn’t gone and bought the book. “Christ,” he says, “I could have given it to you, all I need is the jacket blurb to write the review.”

Though the name of the book is never mentioned, it’s fairly obviously “The Recognitions.” It’s as though Gaddis was already convinced, before he even completed his nine hundred and fifty-six-page début, that the novel was going to be treated with contempt or indifference by the literary press, and had decided to work in this gag as a sort of futile, preëmptive revenge on the critics who would never get far enough into the text to notice. His apparent pessimism was borne out: the book was reviewed quite widely, but the overwhelming majority of reviews were either dismissive of its blatant ambition or frustrated by its length and frequent impenetrability. As the novelist William H. Gass put it in his introduction to the 1993 edition of the book, “Its arrival was duly newsed in fifty-five papers and periodicals. Only fifty-three of these notices were stupid.”

The tone of Gass’s introduction might seem unusually truculent, but it’s more or less the standard when it comes to the topic of “The Recognitions” and its treatment by American critics. Upholders of the book’s honor tend to be unambiguous about its status as a criminally underrated masterpiece; the literary establishment of the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties, they argue, slept on a classic (in some cases perhaps literally). Over the last half-century or so, however, the book—a vast exploration of the themes of fraudulence and authenticity in art and human relationships—has come to be regarded as a foundational postmodern novel. Rick Moody, for instance, called it “one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century,” claiming that he “read it and reread it with the same reverence I reread ‘Moby-Dick’ or ‘The Scarlet Letter.’” In an essay for the magazine in 2002, Jonathan Franzen described it as “the ur-text of postwar fiction,” and acknowledged that he’d named “The Corrections,” his own third novel, “partly in homage to it.”

With this history, “The Recognitions” has just been reissued by Dalkey Archive Press, a small independent publisher that specializes in innovative fiction. In particular, the press has a strong association with the American postmodern avant garde, having published the likes of Gass, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, John Barth, David Markson, and Gilbert Sorrentino. Given the importance of “The Recognitions” for so many of these writers, it’s arguable that Dalkey Archive has always been a kind of spiritual home for Gaddis anyway.

The press has also republished a book called “Fire the Bastards!” to coincide with the Gaddis reissue. It’s a unique text. Originally published in 1962 under the name Jack Green, the book is essentially a seventy-nine-page harangue against the critics whom he saw as having utterly failed to recognize the greatness of “The Recognitions.” Green was the publisher of, and sole contributor to, a literary periodical called “newspaper” (the aversion to capital letters is carried over into the text itself). Green was the pseudonym of a New Yorker named Christopher Carlisle Reid, who apparently quit his job as an actuary after reading “The Recognitions” in order to become a freelance proofreader—a pungent irony, given his approach to the written word (there’s a piece about Green and the confusions around his identity at the Paris Review Daily). He dedicated three whole issues to attacking the novel’s reviewers, both as a group and as individuals, and it’s these indictments that make up the text of “Fire the Bastards!” Here’s how the book opens: