Germans Love David Hasselhoff/Literature

Real Life Examples

 * The series of children's novels A Series of Unfortunate Events became popular in Canada long before they were in the U.S., and they were significantly more popular there.
 * Omar Khayyám is by far the best-known Persian poet in the English-speaking world, due to Edward Fitzgerald's famous translation of his Rubáiyát. Although he's also well-liked in Iran, the likes of Ferdowsi, Sa'di, Hafiz and Rumi are usually considered superior, although almost unknown in the West.
 * Most of them were very well-known in France and Germany during the 18th and 19th century, and inspired several German poets. But since English translations couldn't really carry on, these poets were forgotten after a while.
 * In an interesting historical usage of this trope, while Edgar Allan Poe is considered to be a great writer today in the US (or at least acknowledged for his poetic merit and his creation of the mystery genre), during his lifetime he was much more popular in Europe than he ever was in America. The very well-received french translation by poet Charles Beaudelaire helped a lot (and is still the go-to french Poe translation over a century later).
 * Another historical use would be the immense popularity of the Arabian Nights in Europe and America after they were first translated. While not hugely unpopular in the Middle East, the tales that came into Western knowledge were often not of massive importance and were actually looked down upon at several points in history. The popularity of translations, however, soared through the roof, having a huge influence on European and American writers and accumulating devoted fans and even fan societies.
 * France was pretty much the only place where Philip K Dick achieved much fame as something more than a cult writer, until the last few years of his life. Possibly because the themes of his stories tended to dovetail with the ideas of then-current French postmodernist philosophy.
 * Jennings, a series of humorous English children's books set to a boarding school, were fairly successful in their native country but were (and are) overshadowed by the more famous Just William stories by Richmal Crompton. They became hugely popular in Norway under the name Stompa. The Norwegian translations of the books spawned four feature films and a radio sitcom series in the fifties and sixties. Reruns of the radio episodes are still being broadcasted regularly, by popular demand.
 * Given that there's been manga, anime and video game adaptations of the Australian fantasy book series Deltora Quest, it must be mighty popular over there.
 * The Lord of the Rings became so extremely popular in Sweden in the 1970s that their national non-commercial TV made a film of the first half of Fellowship of the Ring (it was pretty bad, suffering from too much cheap blue-screen technology). Interestingly, the trilogy was translated already in 1958 but spent the 1960s in relative obscurity.
 * The Canadian novel Anne of Green Gables is very popular in Japan. There's even an anime based on it. The touristy areas of the real province of Prince Edward Island tend to have signs written in Japanese underneath English ones, also.
 * The anime was dubbed to Persian and it was reran twice because of its popularity amongst teenagers. Albeit the source material was not very well received there.
 * The Irish novelist Darren Shan's horror works are apparently popular amongst female Japanese teenagers. Go figure. His vampire series even had a manga adaptation.
 * How Steel Was Tempered, a classic example of Socialist Realism, was removed from school syllabi as soon as the USSR kicked the bucket and quickly became Deader Than Disco in Russia. In China, it is still popular enough to warrant a miniseries (!).
 * Frances Gordon (calling herself 'Bridget Wood') wrote a series of fantasy novels about psychic Celts and animal rape. It's mostly porn, gore and Gorn with a generous helping of bestiality. In the Netherlands, the (badly) translated books were marketed as YA and became one of the most popular fantasy series for teens for a while. Gordon even dedicated one of the books to her teenaged Dutch readers at one point.
 * Warrior Cats seems to be much more popular in America than in its authors' home country of Britain, though that may be because the publisher is based in the US. There have actually been more books released in foreign languages than there have in the British editions. The books are quite popular in Taiwan, which translates the books rather quickly - the books come with trading cards there, and there's an official fanclub, which gives them exclusive merchandise such as mugs. The series is also pretty popular in Germany, which has an official message board, is also translating the books at a rapid pace, has audiobooks, and is the only country outside the US (not counting a single day-long event in the UK) that has had the author tour there.
 * Frank McCourt's autobiography Angela's Ashes was better received in America (where it won a Pulitzer) than in Ireland, undoubtedly due to its less than glowing depiction of Limerick. Ironically, much of its international popularity was likely thanks to the late 90's surge in Hibernophilia.
 * Austrian author Thomas Brezina is quite well known in his home country, but extremely popular in China (especially The Tiger Team), where he managed not only to get into the Top 10, but at some point was the Top Ten -- yep, all of the ten most popular books were his ones.
 * Israeli humourist Ephraim Kishon, while relatively well known in his home country, was (and to some extent still is) a huge name in Germany.
 * Czech writer Milan Kundera is hugely popular in Mexican intellectual circles. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is rather common in some high school curricula over there.
 * British writer Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider series is popular in the United States (in a similar manner to the James Bond books as Alex Rider is basically a teen Bond) despite its British context, and spawned many imitations by writers from America and other countries.
 * In 1872, a British author named "Ouida" (Marie Louise de la Ramee) published a book called A Dog of Flanders. It's a sentimental Tear Jerker set in impoverished rural Flanders about a boy and his dog. It faded from memory rather fast and is now quite obscure in the Western world... but a Japanese diplomat loved it, brought it back to his home country, and now it's considered a classic of Western children's literature there. The novel even draws Japanese tourists to Belgium (and Antwerp in particular), where they are moved to tears by the cathedral (it has to do with the infamous ending), leading Belgians to wonder what the heck is going on. (This also fits under "Anime and Manga," since the anime adaptations are part of the reason the story is so popular.)
 * While he may have lived there and based many of his books in Rhode Island, a surprising amount of Rhode Islanders have no idea who HP Lovecraft is.
 * On that note, France really loves Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos (and other similar pulp authors, to a degree). A 3-Door Stopper omnibus of his entire collected writings is perrennially reprinted since the 80's at least, and at any one time several publishers have a number of short story collections in print; for at least a decade (before Lovecraft's renewed popularity and the advent of Project Gutenberg) it was easier to find his books in french bookstores than in american ones. There's even a publisher, Nouvelles editions Oswald (NeO for short) which specializes in late 19th/early-to-mid 20th century pulp authors, which runs collections of the works of Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E Howard (also Lord Dunsany and Edgar Rice Burroughs), which are long out of print (or rarely reprinted) in english. Strangely enough, this can be at least partly traced to the high popularity of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing in the hexagon (see the Tabletop Games section), which made french geeks curious about the rest of anglo-saxon pulp literature.
 * The Australian novel Tomorrow, When the War Began was selected by the Swedish government in 2000 as one of the books most likely to inspire a love of reading in young people, and financed its translation and distribution to every school-age child in Sweden.
 * This trope was likewise inverted with the cold reception that the books received when they were released in America.
 * German philosopher Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West is popular among a small group of people (but consider that nowadays few people read Spengler in general) in Russia who like him because he predicted that in the future, a new culture might develop in Russia and bring the country (probably) to greatness.
 * Les Misérables was extremely popular among Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War, due to their identifying with the book's doomed rebellion. Some even took to calling themselves "Lee's Miserables."
 * Uncle Toms Cabin was incredibly popular in England when it was first published there. One article at the time reported that "its sale has vastly exceeded that of any other work."
 * Although it doesn't quite fit the trope, as it was also extremely popular in the US, outselling every book with the possible exception of The Bible.
 * Brazilian author Paulo Coelho is quite popular in most places that are not Brazil.

In-Universe Examples

 * Briefly discussed in the first Billy Chaka book, Tokyo Suckerpunch, when Billy catches part of the latest single from an American band (so he assures the reader) called "Boring Toaster" on the radio.