www.NeglectedBooks.com: Where forgotten books are remembered
Next week, Simon Thomas (Stuck in a Book) and Karen Langley (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) will once again host their semi-annual experiment in which bloggers around the world will read and write about books published in …
A few days ago, I posted a note on BlueSky: “Dear writers of creative nonfiction: Creative nonfiction is more than just writing about how you’re writing what you’re writing.” It’s an observation that’s neither new …
As part of my current project of digging into the source texts of Hollywood Pre-Code movies of the early 1930s, I spent much of February exploring the rabbit-hole of the brief-lived phenomenon of books inspired …
I had the opportunity to give a short talk on neglected circadian novels to the British Association for Modernists’s Ephemeral Modernisms conference recently and I thought it was worth offering here a rundown of the …
Next week, folks around the world will be taking part in a unique collective reading event: #1937Club, the next installment of a semi-annual celebration started some years ago by Karen (Kaggsy) and Simon Thomas. The …
The Seventies were weird. A lot of long-established conventions faltered or were kicked over, a lot of idealistic ventures were launched, often fueled more by hope than resources, and many institutions grabbed desperately at innovations …
I recently spent the equivalent of two days listening to the audiobook version of The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 William L. Shirer’s massive follow-up to …
I’ve long wondered about one of the longest modernist novels ever written, Evelyn Scott’s A Calendar of Sin (1931), an epic of the Reconstruction and after that took two volumes to encompass its over 1300 …
Georges Simenon was one of the world’s most prolific and best-selling authors when he was alive and he remains so today. Few of Simenon’s current readers, however, know that he not only lived in the …
Back in September 2020, I posted an interview with Kari Sund, a PhD student at Glasgow University, in which we discussed five neglected favorites she’d come across while working on her thesis about Hollywood novels. …
In 1955, not long after Dave Brubeck became the first postwar jazz musician to make the cover of TIME magazine, Whitney Balliett, The New Yorker’s veteran jazz critic, commented that novels about jazz had become …
Ever since Daniel Defoe published his novel Colonel Jack (1722), readers have been fascinated by the lives of career criminals. Although, as Defoe spells out in his lengthy original title of the book, his hero …
A tweet about T. J. Bass’s wildly ambitious and imaginative Nebula Award-winning novel The Godwhale (1974) triggered a short discussion of favorite novels from the 1970s. I was struck by how many of them were …
The Glasgow-based independent publisher the Common Breath recently reissued the Great Depression classic of homelessness, Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing, and the initial response of readers has been quite enthusiastic. I think a lot of …
Kari Sund is a PhD student at Glasgow University working on a thesis about the Hollywood novel. She’s following in noteworthy footsteps: the late novelist and memoirist Carolyn See published her own dissertation, The Hollywood …
Diana Trilling started writing weekly book reviews for The Nation magazine in early 1942 and kept at it for most of the next seven years. Collected in her 1978 book, Reviewing the Forties, her reviews …
It only takes a second. One moment, everything’s fine; the next, everything’s shattered. A friend of mine said her father once told her, handing over the keys to the family car, “When you get behind …
As a veteran, I would like to take this day as an opportunity to remember that one of the worst things about a war is the suffering that continues after its end. In the stereotypical …
In the course of this year of devoting my time to reading and writing about neglected books by women, one genre that has particularly captivated me is the autobiography. Like many men, I find women …
In its 1981 tribute to R. V. Cassill, whose pulp fiction I’ve covered over the last year, December magazine included an extensive bibliography of Cassill’s works. I was intrigued by the list of titles reviewed …