"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/?...

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/?...

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?

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/?...

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

“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/?...

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/?...

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

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

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...

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

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/?...

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.

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/?...

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

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.

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

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/?...

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/?...

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

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.

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/?...

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

The Week@theweek.com · last wk.

From the French Revolution to early aviation, writers continue to draw inspiration from the past. These nine classics are some of the best historical fiction novels of all time. the-week.visitlink.me/icduOw

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.

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/?...

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/?...

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

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...

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/?...

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).