Getting beneath the skin of family affection is the primary profession of 6 out of 10 novelists.

The Wreck Out on the Highway: Six novels about fatal auto accidents and their consequences. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Talk about strange bedfellows! The Duckworth edition of The Trap, Book 8 of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, included an ad for Barbara Cartland's first novel, Jig-Saw, on the front flap of the dust jacket.

The mystery of breakfast: "All these people who had just spent six or more utterly solitary hours, unconscious or dreaming (of what?), wholly alone, wholly and unbrokenly themselves, now coming back to consciousness and the world again..." (from Makeshift by Sarah Campion, from Boiler House Press)

In March 1933, Franz Schoenberner walked out of Germany with a backpack and a little bit of cash to avoid arrest by the Nazis. The Inside Story of an Outsider (1949) tells of the next eight years, which he spent as an outsider, a refugee kicked from country to country. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Oriana Fallaci, 1960 (L). Little-known fun fact: she and Clarice Lispector (R) were identical twins separated at birth.

In Bunk (1923), first-time novelist and former ad man W. E. Woodward attempts to juggle satire, fiction, and philosophy. He achieves some wildly inventive tosses, but too many balls drop on the floor in this tale of an author, his protagonist, and their odd adventures. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Every cat we've ever owned 30 minutes before mealtime.

Kathleen Sully's Skrine opens with the title character killing a woman for a pack of cigarettes. He finds just one—and no matches. The grim, raw power of this post-apocalyptic novel places it among some of the bleakest, most nihilistic in all literature. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Remembering the poet Theodore Roethke, who died on this date in 1963.

Across Paris (1950) contains some of Marcel Aymé's finest short stories, some of which have left an indelible mark on French culture. Yet among most English readers, his name means nothing, when it should be as familiar and appreciated as Queneau's or Simenon's. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Here's a bit of that scene from Two Seconds. It is truly stunning.

Eddie Selover@eddieselover.bsky.social · 5d ago

Edward G. Robinson's breakdown at the end of #TwoSeconds is one of the finest pieces of acting I've ever seen. The sheer size of it, the daring is huge, almost to the point of absurdity. Yet his control is so delicate, so sure, that he pulls you in rather than pushing you away. Masterful. #TCMParty

Driving directions before Google Maps. In 1901, Rand McNally published illustrated turn-by-turn directions for driving from New York City to Chicago. You can browse them at the Internet Archive: archive.org/search?q...

And So Did I by Malachi Whitaker was recently reviewed in the London Review of Books!

Victor Hugo's Choses Vues (Things Seen), first-person accounts of events in Paris, 1838 to 1885, has been called “the only great classic of journalism.” Yet we've never had a complete English translation of it. What are we missing out on? (Covers edited for adult content) neglectedbooks.com?p=8273

Our next release in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press is a major event: the first new edition since the 1980s of Gale Wilhelm's We Too Are Drifting, the landmark 1934 novel that was the first open and unapologetic treatment of lesbian relationships in American literary fiction.

Mine, of course. If not everyone else, at least a few more people outside my immediate family.

Sophia_Nyx 🏳️‍⚧️@sophianyx.bsky.social · 6d ago

Name a book you wish everyone else had to read.

“A ‘love for books’ does not have to mean a choice between weird parasociality and excruciating dryness.” So true. Which is why I choose both. From www.currentaffairs.o...

Frances Bellerby spent years disabled and in pain from a spine injury. Nerve endings are always close to the surface in her stories. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Last checked out from the University of Rochester library in 1953. This is what reading off the beaten path looks like. (The book is A Tale of Internment by Livia Laurent, 1942)

It seems unlikely that another book like Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey will ever be published. Strachey and Frances Partridge knew each other for 70 years, at their best and worst, and Partridge tells Julia's story with intelligence, love, humor — and exasperation. neglectedbooks.com?p=5621

The best book I ever bought in an airport. It's a poem, it's 400 pages long, and it beats the crap out of anything on the bestsellers table. neglectedbooks.com?p...

John Franklin Bardin is a famously little-known author whose name draws a blank for most and lights a sparkle in the eyes of a few. But few of the few have ever tried his last and strangest novel, Purloining Tiny (1978), which oughta come with a coupon for psychoanalysis. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Writers! Why be humble? Why not put this on the title page of your next novel?

Utterly simplistic horses__t. Each one of these requires a commitment of time and energy to goals that are fundamentally at cross-purposes to those of the other two. God, I hate the Self-help Comic Universe.

Oscar Schisgall wrote over 4,000 magazine stories and novels, including the Liberty serial "I Married a Nazi." My Spidey sense for formulaic fiction started tingling when I started reading Schisgall's "Swastika," and despite the new title and a Knopf logo, I discovered why. neglectedbooks.com/?...

The 2026 Pilgrimage reading group is going strong, but it's time to look ahead to 2027's group. I took a poll on Substack with some of the opinions. [Wafer-Thin Books < 150 pages]. Which option sounds most interesting to you?

Forget the North Beach or Greenwich Village: the place where America's misfits and kooks met each other in the 1950s was in the personal ads in the back of the Saturday Review.

Livia Laurent was herself a refugee from the Nazis. After the start of World War Two, she was interned with thousands of other "enemy aliens" on the Isle of Man, an experience she wrote about in A Tale of Internment (1942) neglectedbooks.com/?...

A cartoon from 1936 that just busted me up.