The Young Immigrunts, by Ring Lardner (1920)
This is a guest post by David Quantick. “My parents are both married and ½ of them are very good looking.” This is the story of two very different writers, one an American comic writer …
Wafer-Thin Books
Miss Abby Fitch-Martin, by Kataryn Loughlin (1952)
History is written by the winners, George Orwell said, and this goes for family history, too. After finishing Miss Abby Fitch-Martin, you sigh in relief that the adage is true in this case. If Kataryn …
Five Star Final, by Louis Weitzenkorn (1931)
For the last couple of years, I’ve closed most nights by watching one of the hundreds (thousands?) of early sound movies made in the period commonly referred to as Pre-Code, from the introduction of sound …
The House of Childhood, by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1956/1990)
“Where is the House of Childhood?” A stranger stops the narrator of Marie Luise Kaschnitz’s short novel in the street to ask this question. “What is it? A museum? A school?” The stranger isn’t sure. …
Escape from Berlin by Catherine Klein (Käthe Cohn) (1944)
Catherine Klein stands in Berlin’s Tiergarten station saying farewell to her husband, who’s leaving on a train to Amsterdam, a visa to England in hand. Both Jews, after years of attempts, he has managed to …
A Tale of Internment, by Livia Laurent (1942)
“The tribunal has decided that this young lady is to be interned until further order.” So read the notice delivered to Livia Laurent in July 1940. It was, she writes, “a queer thing” that came …
Verity Bargate and the Revenge for Lies
Verity Bargate wrote three short, savage novels — No Mama No (1978), Children Crossing (1979), and Tit for Tat (1981) — before dying too, too young at the age of 41 just as reviews for …
Five Wafer-Thin Slices of England Going to Pieces
This post also appears on WaferThinBooks.com. There have been plenty of novels about some cataclysmic disaster overwhelming England, but aside from J. G. Ballard’s first three novels about the disaster taking the form of wind …
An Honourable Death, by Iain Crichton Smith (1992)
Iain Crichton Smith is best remembered now as a poet, but he published a dozen novels over the space of 25 years, starting with Consider the Lillies (1968), a now-classic tale of the Clearances of …
The Last Days of Floyd Warner: Fire Sermon and A Life, by Wright Morris (1971, 1973)
Wright Morris is, in my opinion, the least-appreciated great American writer of the 20th century. How under-appreciated? Well, the last book-length critical study of his work was published in 1985 and his only biography, Haunted: The …
The Roundabout by Michael Allwright (1968)
This year, I have been running the Wafer-Thin Books reading group with James Morrison (Caustic Cover Critic) and promised myself that I would take this as an opportunity to be more succinct in my posts. …
The Death of a Nobody, by Jules Romains (1911)
The Death of a Nobody was Jules Romains’ attempt to answer to an apparently simple question: when does a person die? Jacques Godard is a retired and widowed railway engineer who lives quietly in a …
I Want, by Nell Dunn and Adrian Henri (1972)
I Want is a lovely collaboration between the Liverpool poet Adrian Henri and the novelist/playwright Nell Dunn about the forty-some year affair. Upper-class Dolly Argyll and Albert Hodgkin, a Merseyside lad taking a first step …
A Significant Experience, by Gwyn Griffin (1963)
“One of the most ardent pursuits of man is finding excuses to persecute other people.” This chilling observation by Laurie Lee forms the epigraph to A Significant Experience, Gwyn Griffin’s story of the persecution and …
Five A. M., by Jean Dutourd (1956)
A contribution to the 1956 Club. This ought to be one of the rediscovered classics of this pandemic. Like Fernand Gérard Doucin, the narrator of Jean Dutourd’s novel Five A. M., many of us have …
Spillville, by Patrica Hampl (1987)
Reading Spillville is a pleasant way to take a trip while cooped up in lockdown. It’s short, like the trip Patricia Hampl and artist Steven Sorman took in the summer of 1986, driving down from …
The Memoirs of a Ghost, by G. W. Stonier (1947)
One of the pleasures of being back in college after almost forty years is having access to a good university library. I first developed my love of neglected books from wandering through the stacks of …
Gaëtan, or The Stock-Taking, by Edith de Born (1950)
“Gaëtan consists of a 100-page discussion between the wife and the mistress of a Frenchman who has been killed in a car accident,” wrote Julian Symons in his terse review of Edith de Born’s first …
Passage from the Red Sea, by Zofia Romanowicz (1962)
This post belongs in an as-yet uncreated category called “Scarcer than Hens’ Teeth.” According to AddAll.com, there are exactly two copies of Passage Through the Red Sea available for sale, the cheapest starting at over …
My Name is Frank, by Frank Laskier (1942)
I wrote about Frank Laskier’s fictionalized autobiography, Log Book, over six years ago, but it wasn’t until recently that I had the chance to read My Name is Frank, the collection of BBC broadcast talks …