Neglected Books

“All of us, probably, have some favorite unfashionable author." In 1970, the biographer Michael Holroyd wrote about some of his favorites for The American Scholar magazine: neglectedbooks.com/?...

There were some great books published in 1925. Maurice Dekobra's Wings of Desire is not one of them. It is, however, full of Circassian beauties, wealthy widows, opium dens, and mysterious figures of international intrigue. Can James Patterson match that? I thought not. neglectedbooks.com/?...

In The Novel Now (1967) and 99 Novels (1984), Anthony Burgess not only covered the well-known British and American novels since 1939 but also wrote about numerous still-neglected ones. Read excerpts about these here: neglectedbooks.com/?...

Here's Louise Beavers in Party Husband (1931) with one of the very few (only?) references to menstruation in a 1930s Hollywood film.

Is From This Foundation (1949) a novel? Once I discovered that Thomas Brackley was really Dawson Jackson, a poet who walked in the footsteps of William Blake, I began to approach it as an exercise in imagination, a plea for the reader to see our essential connectedness. neglectedbooks.com?p=11638

Reporter by Meyer Levin (1929) Meyer Levin's first novel drew on his experience as a reporter in Chicago and is full of gangsters, molls, street talk, and lurid headlines. It also shows that he'd read and fallen in love with Joyce's Ulysses. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Brasil!

365 Days is an anthology of flash fictions inspired by news stories from 1934. Kay Boyle and her then-husband Laurence Vail invited over 200 writers to contribute, but you can see who ended up carrying the project to the finish line.

C. G. L. Du Cann's The Young Person’s Complete Guide to Crime (1929), has a bit of the flavor of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary -- with painfully apt definitions such as: SEX-OFFENDER: A male. neglectedbooks.com/?...

George Foulser demonstrates the art of smoking down to the last flake of tobacco on the cover of his memoir, Seaman's Voice.

Five years after starting with Herbert Clyde Lewis's little masterpiece, Gentleman Overboard, the Recovered Book series from Boiler House Press keeps chugging along. We don't get the exposure that fancier series get and we're happy if we can sell 300 copies instead of 3,000. But we're still at it.

Short story collections are notoriously tough to sell and always have been. That's one reason I devoted the year of 2017 to reading and writing about nothing but them. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Disappointed with your groove yield? Next season, plant Disco Seeds!

Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan, assembled from Bogan's work by Ruth Limmer is, IMHO, one of the great American autobiographies. Unfortunately, Bogan's literary executor considers it a pasted-together mess, so we won't see it in print again. neglectedbooks.com/?...

A scene on any true Pre-Code film lover's list of fantasies: Warren William and Edward Everett Horton in a fistfight. From Smarty (1934)

The Reading Pilgrimage 2026 group is on the 10th of the 13 chapter-volumes of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, so it may be a little late to join. But starting on March 1, 2027, we will be reading the #WaferThinBooks of Henry James. To join or follow along, sign up at waferthinbooks.com.

Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock (1958) was the third novel by Neil Bell I read, and it convinced me that much of his art, if you can call it that, consists in never turning down a story, whether relevant to his plot or not. Unfortunately, the man was no Laurence Sterne. neglectedbooks.com/?...

The good news: Les éditions du Chemin de fer has just published a new French translation of the first two chapter-volumes of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. The bad news: This is the cover. Ten bucks if you can figure out the French title of Backwater (chapter-volume 2).

A snippet of Maurice Chevalier's first number in The Love Parade (1929), his first musical, directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Compare this to just about any other performance from that year and you'll see why Chevalier hit the screen like a skyrocket.

Last year, I looked at Creative Nonfiction Before Creative Nonfiction — seven mostly neglected examples of the techniques of creative nonfiction being used long before the term was invented. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Hell is a windowless hotel conference room furnished with stackable chairs.

Random cover from the TBR pile: Land Without Heroes by G. F. Green (1948) Stories of the tough, poor north of England. @AlanBeard4 wrote on Goodreads: "Violence, hardness, poverty. Love is a luxury, early death is normal, work is hard. The writing coiled tight."

"In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo." Only in the case of Isa Glenn's Transport, it’s round and round the women go, talking of every other soul trapped on a hot, slow steamer from San Francisco to Manila. neglectedbooks.com/?...

October 17, 1984, outside a closed Delco auto parts factory in Dayton, Ohio. My housemate at the time was named Phil, so, yes, much jesting ensued.

In April 1922, 25-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his publisher, Charles Scribner II, with a list of 18 backlisted novels he thought Scribner's should reissue. He included his own (and then only) novel, the best-selling This Side of Paradise. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Random cover from the TBR pile: Paris Gazette by Lion Feuchtwanger (1940) A satirical but sympathetic portrait of the Jewish/German expat community in Paris, this novel came out in April 1940. Weeks later, Feuchtwanger and others like him were prisoners in a Nazi internment camp.

As fiction, Carl Marzani's The Survivor (1958) is only partly successful. As insight into the remarkable life of its author, an American radical who clung to his beliefs even when he risked prison or worse, it's one of the best things I've ever found in a $1 book bin. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Random cover from the TBR pile: The Fair to Middling, by Arthur Calder-Marshall (1959) The children of the Winterbottome School for Incapacitated Orphans visit the fair and discover capacities in themselves they never imagined.

One day in the late 1920s, Barbara Starke walked out her front door and proceeded to hitchhike across the United States and back, managing to avoid any of the myriad ways this could have gone terribly, terribly wrong. Parents should tell their teens this is a work of fantasy. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Random cover from the TBR pile: The Bird of Paradise by Lily Powell (1970) Won the James Tait Black Award for best novel, but long out of print. "There's a little of Sybille Bedford, a little of Simone de Beauvoir, but lots more whipped cream than in either" wrote Kirkus Reviews.

Boy, has it been that long since Mad Men debuted? After watching the first season back in 2009, I posted two articles with over a dozen suggested novels and nonfictional accounts of the world of Madison Avenue in the 1950s and 1960s: neglectedbooks.com/?... neglectedbooks.com/?...

The one place where whites and blacks mixed as equals in Pre-Code Hollywood was prison. Here, in Paid (1930), Joan Crawford finds herself showering alongside Louise Beavers.

This time back in 2019, I was rediscovering the pleasures of access to a good university library. The Memoirs of a Ghost by G. W. Stonier (1947) was an early find: a Blitz victim wanders around London in his afterlife. Less a ghost story than a soliloquy to a city. neglectedbooks.com/?...

There's nothing quite like getting mail from a stamp dealer.

Eight years ago, I wrote about the first of Gertrude Trevelyan's remarkable & utterly neglected novels, Appius and Virginia, a dark, unique tale of species in collision. I'm happy that it led to Trevelyan's rediscovery—and will be coming out in 2028 from Boiler House Press. neglectedbooks.com/?...

The first film version of The Maltese Falcon, released in 1931, is usually disparaged in comparison with John Huston's 1941 version, but for me, Ricardo Cortez comes closer to the true cheesy spirit of Dashiell Hammett's character than Humphrey Bogart. This is the true Pre-Code Sam Spade.