www.NeglectedBooks.com: Where forgotten books are remembered
Posts and articles about neglected books and authors gleaned from the vast digital farmlands of the Web.
Leanne Phillips wrote to alert me to her September 2020 piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books on Ghosts on the Page: Alice Cary’s “Hagar: A Story of To-Day” and Other Lost Books. In …
In a piece titled “Paperback reprints: the anatomy of literary survival,” Nigel Cross analyzes how a relatively few books manage to survive past their first print runs, and his diagnosis runs true to my experience …
An uncredited leader titled “Out of Print” published in the April 14, 1961 issue of the Times Literary Supplement opens with the announcement that Christopher Burney’s Solitary Confinement (1952) was being reissued in a new …
In this year of reading the work of women writers, I should take a moment to note the remarks of Isabel Paterson, whose 1933 novel, Never Ask the End, was one of the earliest neglected …
Link: http://netnebraska.org/basic-page/learning-services/lost-writers-plains A new series of radio shows, along with a free accompanying ebook, featuring the lives and works of eight neglected writers of the American Plains, has just been released by Nebraska Educational Telecommunications. …
Source: http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmMercury-1940aug-00495 California conservative and entrepeneur Ron Unz has set up a website, unz.org, with PDF versions of articles from over 100 American periodicals from the 20th century, ranging from The Abolitionist, a mimeographed newsheet …
Patrick Kurp brought my attention to a posting in Michael Dirda’s column/blog on the website for The American Scholar, the magazine of Phi Beta Kappa. In “Out of Print,” posted in early August, Dirda writes, …
Source: Rachel Cooke, “The 10 best Neglected literary classics – in pictures,” http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/gallery/2011/feb/27/ten-best-neglected-literary-classics, The Observer, Sunday 27 February 2011 The always-watchful Robert Nedelkoff passed along this link from last month. Noting the BBC’s dramatisation of …
Patrick Kingsley, “The art of slow reading,” The Guardian, Thursday, 15 July 2010 I missed my weekly late Friday afternoon ritual of scanning through Arts and Letters Daily and printing off 6-8 of its featured …
Source: “Classics lost and found: Authors pick the modern classic they would like to revive,” The Independent (UK), 30 July 2010 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/classics-lost-and-found-authors-pick-the-modern-classic-they-would-like-to-revive-2038673.html “According to the poet Ezra Pound, literature is the news that stays news. …
In scanning through W. J. West’s The Quest for Graham Greene, I came across a reference to the Century Library, one of Greene’s initiatives while he was an editor with Eyre and Spottiswoode in the …
I came across a synopsis of H. L. Mencken’s literary criticism from the ten years he wrote and edited The American Mercury with George Jean Nathan. Mencken was one of the magazine’s regular book reviewers, …
Source: “Neglected Books: the list,” at http://www.tor.com.vhost.zerolag.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=58654 SF novelist Jo Walton put out a call for recommendations of “authors that should be getting the sales and the attention and yet remain obscure” on the SF/fantasy …
Source: “The Best Books You Haven’t Read,” from The American Conservative, 1 December 2009 issue (http://amconmag.com/article/2009/dec/01/00018//). Kevin Michael Derby passed along the link to this article, in which 15 conservative writers, critics, and academics offer …
Obooki’s Obloquy recently published the list of titles from a 1916 book, One Hundred Best Books by the sometimes-neglected British novelist, John Cowper Powys. While many of the titles are tried and true standards of …
Source: http://www.abebooks.com/books/rare-scarce/most-wanted-out-of-print.shtml?cm_mmc=nl-_-nl-_-h00-mstoopB-_-link1 From Abebooks.com: Bookfinder.com’s annual report of their most-requested titles from searches made from July 2008 to June 2009. A real mix of the obscure, the intriguing, and the utterly uninteresting (Mailer’s “Marilyn”–gimme a …
Source: “Under-Appreciated Novels,” http://birnbaum.themorningnews.org/2009/08/11/under-appreciated-novels.php, 11 August 2009 Robert Birnbaum, The Morning News’ book blogger, recently decided to engage in some of “the anguished hand-wringing that accompanies intoning the cruelty and myopia of the rest of …
Thumbing through issues of The Saturday Review while in the U.S. this summer, I came across an interesting item. A review by George Dangerfield of Isabel Paterson’s last novel, If It Prove Fair Weather, which …
I recently finished listening to the audio book of Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life. Although I can’t imagine anyone finishing it and then thinking, “You know, I want to know even more about John Cheever,” …
Head Butler, AKA New York City writer and editor Jesse Kornbluth, took a moment from featuring books, movies, music, and other products of today to recognize the merits of Michael J. Arlen’s 1970 memoir of …