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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 16h

Little Apple, a story of revenge centered around the Russian Civil War is a good example of Leo Perutz's particular magic, his pure narratives. There is always something pulling the reader along but never quite within reach. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 21h

Kenneth S. Davis attempted to do for FDR what Robert Caro is (still) attempting to do for LBJ. Unlike Caro, though, he had two handicaps: a sometimes Victorian prose style; and a predilection for fiction. And yet, at times he could be just as magnificent a storyteller. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 28/09/2026

Franz Schoenberner was beaten and left paralyzed from the neck down by a couple of New York thugs. You Still Have Your Head: Excursions From Immobility is his attempt to understand the good and bad that could come from the experience and his slow recovery. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 28/09/2026

"Let's admit it: we are among the beasts." Jean-Paul Aron's The Art of Eating in France (1975) is a savage history of food in Paris in the 1800s. By killing off the nobility, the French Revolution sparked the rise of the restaurant--but that wasn't the end of the violence. neglectedbooks.com/?...

A glutton, from Paris à Table by Eugène Briffault (1846).

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 27/09/2026

"One rarely comes across a book that has both guts and charm, but this one has," Langston Hughes wrote of Helen Bevington's When Found, Make a Verse of. "The people who discovered it then loved it ... a going-back-to-book to open almost anywhere for sheer pleasure." neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 27/09/2026

Decades before the term bibliomemoir was coined, Sheila Kaye-Smith invented the genre with All the Books of My Life (1956), in which she told her life through the books that inspired, irritated, and frightened her. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 26/09/2026

You know a great thing about Montana? With nothing more than a MT driver's license, you can check out books from any state university library. Just walk in, select the ones you want, stop by Circulation, and walk out with them. Amazing. Do other states do this?

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 26/09/2026

Imagine Don Draper out of a job. For months. A year. Allen R. Dodd's memoir, The Job Hunter, recounts the humbling experience of a once-hailed ad man having—unsuccessfully—to find work. A white-collar classic that belongs on the shelf next to Heller's Something Happened. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 25/09/2026

Fred Allen and Guy Kibbee (a story from Fred Allen's Letters). In 1953, two young writers, Ed Simmons and Norman Lear (yes, that one) wrote asking to form a Fred Allen Fan Club. It was meant as a joke and Allen understood it as such. His reply is classic: 1/5

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 25/09/2026

“I lost touch with Russia for almost two years,” Konstantin Paustovsky writes in Southern Adventure, the fifth volume of his superb autobiography, The Story of a Life. Though his idyll in the Caucasus is, by his own admission, a hiatus in his life, it’s a memorable excursion. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 24/09/2026

At the Green Goose, by D. B. Wyndham Lewis, is a collection of the monologues of Professor Plodsnitch at his favorite pub, the most absurd things to appear in a newspaper before the Irish Times started publishing Flann O'Brien's Cruiskeen Lawn column. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 24/09/2026

For over four years, Detlev Fischer has been creating a novel entirely from text sourced from 100 English-language novels published in 1982. He generously shared reflections on six of the less well-known novels he drew upon. neglectedbooks.com/?... 1/2

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 23/09/2026

No blurbs for the John Day Co. (in 1927).

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 23/09/2026

On this date in 2023, I offered ten #WaferThinBooks (under 150 pages long) of nonfiction selected from the pages of NeglectedBooks.com. I'm pleased to say that two (Malachi Whitaker's And So Did I and Christopher Burney's Solitary Confinement) have since been reissued. waferthinbooks.com/2...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 22/09/2026

Doing some research, I stumbled onto a big half-page ad for an act known as the Watson Sisters from a 1944 issue of Variety. "The One and Only Original" it proclaimed. I had to know more about the Watsons. And what a career they had, I learned. Come, let's wander down this rabbit hole! 1/6

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 22/09/2026

Miss Abby Fitch-Martin, by Kataryn Loughlin (1952). A fascinating portrait of a Puritanical monster who did everything she could to deny material and emotional comfort to her orphan nieces. Grim but gripping. #SpinsterSeptember neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 21/09/2026

Boy, talk about your entertainment value. Look at all you could get for 15 cents at the City Theatre in New York in 1941. Live acts. The dancing Cityettes. A Radio Band. Molly Picon and the Mills Brothers. Two selected feature movies. Streaming sure sucks in comparison.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 21/09/2026

Neglected Circadian Novels: Novels set within a 24-hour period are a mostly post-19th Century phenomenon. There's many more to this sub-genre than just Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway. Here are a dozen or so I mentioned in a talk for the British Ass'n for Modernist Studies in 2024 neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 21/09/2026

TIL that the Ouija board got its name from... Oui (French) and Ja (German) I suppose you all were just keeping that to yourselves.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 20/09/2026

Writing up a short post about this book, I realized that @rlspang.bsky.social probably has much more to say about it than I do. A lively read, but I feel like I missed a bateau full of cultural in-jokes.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 20/09/2026

It's true: I don't know how many more I can afford!

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 20/09/2026

Remember When We Had a Doorman? the veteran residents of a Manhattan apartment house on the decline ask each other. This, Josephine Lawrence's 30th novel, bears the all the signs of her specialty: the real world problems of ordinary people, leavened with good sense and humor. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 19/09/2026

The Day's End (1959), Pamela Bright's account of a week as head sister (nurse) on a woman's cancer ward, is a moving story of life when people are at their most vulnerable -- weak, ill, sometimes near death. One of the best books I read in 2022. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 19/09/2026

On this date in 2020, I looked at 10 neglected books from 1956 (as well as a dozen not-so-neglected ones). neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 18/09/2026

Just think — if you've seen 20 of the movies Joan Blondell appeared in between 1930 and 1935 ... you'd only have 18 more to go.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 18/09/2026

Emanuel Litvinoff's The Man Next Door (1968) is a powerful case study of how hate can turn a "proper" Englishman into a seething cauldron of antagonism and violence -- sadly even more relevant in today's fractured world. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 17/09/2026

War and Peace is a historical novel, too. Just sayin'.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 17/09/2026

It's never been easier to locate and borrow or buy out of print books. Never in the entire history of books. Yet 99.9999% of all book talk on social media is about books that are in print. Centuries of gold awaits. But hardly anyone takes the chance. I just don't get it.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 17/09/2026

Cecil Torr was mostly a reader and a listener, and less often a notetaker, but in his evolving collection of fragments, Small Talk at Wreyland, is one of the great bedside companions of English literature. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 16/09/2026

The Rat, by G. M. A Hewett. From a time when children's books didn't mince words: "Very few rats ever see their father, and a good thing too, for he is just as likely as not to eat one of his own children if food is scarce." Lovely pix, though. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 16/09/2026

John P. Marquand's Thirty Years (1954) could easily have been called The Contractual Obligation Collection, but among the throwaways in this book is some excellent reporting on early signs of the American military-industrial complex at work in World War Two. neglectedbooks.com?p=4815

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 15/09/2026

Free French. In the 1940s, Virginia Faulkner wrote fillers for Town & Country of some *liberal* translations. Here are a few. Learn more in my book, Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts, from the University of Nebraska Press: www.nebraskapress.un...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 15/09/2026

Edgar Calmer lived in the same Paris apartment building as Henry Miller in the 1920s. In his first novel, Beyond the Street (1934), a portrait of a Manhattan high school, Calmer showed that he'd certainly picked up some of Miller's heightened awareness of sexuality. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 14/09/2026

A little musical joke on the cover of Angus Heriot's The Castrati in Opera (if you look closely, you'll see those are exceptionally high notes).

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 14/09/2026

Andrew Graham wrote satires of the British establishment in its late imperial stage, his humor not so much black as an elegantly muted shade of grey, like a suit from a fine Saville Row tailor. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 13/09/2026

I think I figured out why today's kids are not reading.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 13/09/2026

Bad Girl by Viña Delmar (1928). Despite its title, its ban in Boston, & its marketing as a scandalous book, this is a sober, well-paced, & highly realistic account of young marriage and childbirth in the 1930s that was made into an equally good movie. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 12/09/2026

Are you over the age of intellectual consent?

Reader's warning, from The Spoor of Spooks by Bergen Evans

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 12/09/2026

Best title I've stumbled across in a long time.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 12/09/2026

"Based on your listening"?? My last two listens were Billy Budd and the first volume of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. F**k you, Audible's algorithm!

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 12/09/2026

“Darling, are you sure it won't be too much for you?” Mabel Lethbridge’s husband asks when she is pregnant and his father cuts him off without a penny. “Nothing is too much for me,” she replies. Fortune Grass (1934) is the memoir of a woman for whom nothing seemed too much. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 11/09/2026

Midcentury American hotel letterheads, gleaned from the papers of actress/author Ilka Chase.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 11/09/2026

On this date in 2011, I looked at six collections of fables written by modern writers, including the fantastic and funny little tales of the master NYC storyteller Spencer Holst. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 10/09/2026

Dorothy Richardson was usually so poor when she was writing Pilgrimage that every piece of paper counted. Here's a page from the manuscript of Pointed Roofs, the first chapter-volume of Pilgrimage, written on a sheet of letterhead from publisher C. W. Daniel.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 10/09/2026

A lovely launch for Gale Wilhelm's We Too Are Drifting, the newest of the Recovered Books series from @bhousepress.bsky.social, at the Vespiary, a cozy queer-owned bookstore and bindery in Missoula. Talie Wilkinson, who wrote the afterword, reflected on the mystery of why Wilhelm stopped writing.

Talie Wilkinson reads her reflections on why Gale Wilhelm stopped writing in the early 1950s and the absence of evidence in her papers at the UC Bancroft Library.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 10/09/2026

On this date in 2010, I veered away from neglected books to salute the landmark achievement of Nick Sullivan in unraveling William Gaddis's JR and putting personalities to its 100-plus characters (and he did a similar feat for Gaddis's The Recognitions): neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 10/09/2026

The loan history of a long-forgotten book. From ?? 1934 to Dec. 10, 1941. The Hamilton College library copy of Beyond the Street (1934) by Edgar Calmer (who decades later published some trashy novels as Ned Calmer).

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 09/09/2026

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the thought, "Hey, I had this yesterday!" doesn't occur to cats.

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