www.NeglectedBooks.com: Where forgotten books are remembered
Looking about for a good book to offer as my contribution to the 1952 Club, I was a bit daunted by the gulf between the extremely un-neglected candidates (Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Steinbeck’s East of …
In late 1931, the budding literary journal Prairie Schooner informed its readers that “Miss Eunice Chapin, formerly of Lincoln” (and formerly of the University of Nebraska, where Prairie Schooner was based) had published her first …
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 …
Mary C. McCall, Jr. (given the Junior by her mother, Mary C. McCall, as a flex against the patriarchy (her father specifically)) was a busy and well-paid writer of magazine fiction when she decided to …
I should start with an apology — two of them, actually. First, I apologize for not posting here for the last two months. I recently submitted the manuscript of my book, Virginia Faulkner: A Life …
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 …
“Your time’s your own, and don’t you forget it, my girl: for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you can do what you bloody well choose,” Eva Wotton reminds herself at the start …
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 …
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 …
Marguerite Duras is hardly a neglected writer, having at least a dozen books currently in print in English and having kept a number close to that in print since first hitting her stride with English …
“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. …
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 …
“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 …
This is a guest post by Dr. Sarah Lonsdale. On the final page of Mightier than the Sword (1912), a novel about journalists and newspapers, the protagonist dies a lonely death in the middle of …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Harlem native Michael A. Gonzales has been on the trail of neglected Black writers for a number of years, first with his feature The Blacklist for Catapault and now with CrimeReads. More recently, he was …
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 …