www.NeglectedBooks.com: Where forgotten books are remembered
If we are to believe Jean-Paul Aron, we owe the rise of French cuisine and the invention of the restaurant to the guillotine. For when the French Revolution dispatched hundreds of noblemen and women, it …
This is a guest post by Detlev Fischer that draws upon his Reading Matter project on Substack. When I mentioned in a comment to a post on Neglected Books’ Substack my Reading Matter project, which …
“This touching friendship between you two,” a bitter-spirited teacher asks Irving Chemnitz, a colleague at Starrett, a Manhattan high school. “What is it — sort of an Oscar Wilde business or what?” In the case …
The open stacks of the Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington provided the richest part of my undergraduate education. I did most of my studying there and took all-too-frequent breaks to browse in the …
At eleven o’clock at night the tenement stairs are dark. Sandy linoleum stairs scraped by the feet of children. Up the stairs and down the stairs. Ma give me bread and butter. Ma look what …
I first came across the work of Dacia Maraini during the year of #WaferThinBooks, when I read Isolina, her reconstruction of the murder of a poor pregnant young woman in Verona. I was drawn to …
Nathalie Sedgwick Colby was hardly a typical first-time novelist when Green Forest appeared in the spring of 1927. Not only was she making her debut at the age of 52, but she was the wife …
At one of the Dumbles’s Cosmic Evenings (their term), W. E. Woodward, Bunk’s narrator as well as author, hears a man proclaim, “We are now conducting de-bunking operations on a rather large scale.” What is …
Had I bothered to do a bit more research, I wouldn’t have read Swastika. But a couple of reviews that lauded its realism and immediacy suckered me in, as did its premise: an American woman …
Herbert Clyde Lewis listened to unheard people. In his first novel, Gentleman Overboard, Henry Preston Standish falls off a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Unnoticed, his fall seals his fate: by the …
It’s a little hard to believe now how important So Little Time was to John P. Marquand’s career. He’d already won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 1937 epistolary novel, The Late George Apley, …
I usually do a little research into an author before preparing an article, but in the case of John Heygate, I thought the few facts I already knew — that his affair with Evelyn Waugh’s …
As a novel, Glorified is nothing special. Molly Robbins narrates her story from childhood on the upper West Side of Manhattan through her working life starting at the age of 14 to finding the man …
After tracing the inscription in my copy of Gertrude Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia through the remarkable life of its owner, Elizabeth Seeber, years ago, I often look into the person behind the name written in …
I can’t help feeling a certain amount of mistrust when I see In Search of America in a book title. It’s a phrase that’s pompous in its humility. The author poses as one looking for …
About a year ago, I became a publisher. It was an act of desperation. Back in March 2016, as part of my second year of reading exclusively the work of neglected women writers, I took …
The Guardian recently tested the Pavlovian conditioning of the literary corners of the Internet by releasing a list of the 100 Best Novels compiled from the ten-best lists solicited from 172 novelists, historians, memoirists, and …
“Those who read my book, Ex-Mistress,” writes Dora Macy in the foreword to Night Nurse, “will remember that twice I was ill in a hospital — once when I had my baby, and once when …
“Antoinette Spitzer’s heroine in Life Comes to Judith belongs to a comparatively new and, if one may judge by the book sales, an increasingly popular type of amorous adventuress: the young woman on her own,” …
In my research into the source texts (novels, plays, magazine stories) of Hollywood’s earliest sound films — the Pre-Code era, as it’s usually referred to — I have amassed stacks of cheaper hardback novels published …