M. J. Fitzgerald's story collection, Rope Dancer, is full of Möbius strip-like stories that will remind you of dreams or nightmares or the stuff that makes post-modernist fiction fun. I found her story "Creases" so striking I included a link to a PDF in the article below: neglectedbooks.com/?...

Hey authors! When's the last time someone asked you to sell tires like Goodyear asked Katharine Brush back in 1937? Slacking off maybe?

Mamdani is going to impose "Sherry" law, under which everyone will have to come out tonight.

Like many small investors prior to the stock market crash of 1929, Nellie Rimplegar (Mary Boland) struggles with the concept of buying on margin. From Three-Cornered Moon (1933), in which the idle rich Rimplegar family struggles with another concept: poverty.

In Search of Virginia Faulkner. How I came to write my first book, Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts, coming in January from the @univnebpress.bsky.social. It all began 17 years ago on NeglectedBooks.com. neglectedbooks.com?p=10900

Just three weeks to the release of Sarah Campion's Makeshift, the next title in @bhousepress.bsky.social's Recovered Books series. Makeshift follows Charlotte Herz, a young Jewish woman from Berlin in 1919 to New Zealand in 1937, via England, South Africa, and Australia. 🧵

Herbert Clyde Lewis's third novel gets a top of the column notice. On December 7th, 1941. @bhousepress.bsky.social (Boiler House Press) will be reissuing Season's Greetings as a Recovered Book in November 2026, with an introduction by @kathleenmrooney.bsky.social. A terrific Christmas novel.

"Sure, I'll sell myself. Who wants to buy me?" Eily Malyon as a desperate woman at the end of her resources, a glimpse of how far the Great Depression could push people. From Night Court (1932), an underrated account of corruption in the NYC courts and police.

The Buzzards, Janet Burroway's 1969 novel about an American presidential campaign, is a fine book about the toxic cocktail that results when you mix family dynamics, political ambition, and relentless media coverage (and seems so innocent now). neglectedbooks.com/?...

A killer epigraph. From Muse-Echo Blues by Xam Wilson Cartier.

The other night, I went to see Mel Brooks' first feature, The Producers, on the glorious big screen at Missoula's gem, the Roxy. And I was reminded how the credit sequence -- the music, the editing, the acting, the timing -- announces to the audience: "You're going to see one TERRIFIC movie, folks!"

In his review of Joan Colebrook's All That Seemed Final (1941), Robert Hillyer wrote that the author "avails herself of the economy of the modern narrative without sacrificing the depth—the underpainting—of the old. I should not like to have missed this novel." neglectedbooks.com/?...

The Illinois Short Fiction series published by the U. of Illinois Press between 1975 and 1993 gave dozens of mostly first-time writers a chance to publish collections.🧵

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me," F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote Ernest Hemingway. Here, from Coming Out Party (1934), is a small example. Even today, those figures are eye-watering.

Louis Auchincloss published 60+ books in 60+ years, most of them while a working lawyer. He was the Simenon of what used to be called the American Establishment: Groton, Yale, the City Club., Wall St. Yes, his books followed a formula: but it was a good one neglectedbooks.com/?...

Classic novels as nurse novels, a short thread. My Ántonia.

Someone with more graphics skills than I should redo classic novels as nurse novels--e.g.,

Get me a nurse novel, Stat!

Here, in its entirety, is Charles Laughton's episode from If I Had a Million (1932). No commentary is necessary.

Hilde Spiel's 1961 novel The Darkened Room reads like she were trying to exorcise the Central European culture she grew up in. Yet she ultimately returned to Austria and reassimilated into its literary world. A perplexing but fascinating book. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Random cover from my TBR pile: A Likeness to Voices by Mary Savage From the back cover: Do Witches Like Dry Martinis? ... Go to analysis? ... Live in suburbs? ... Join the P.T.A.? ... Make Love? DO THEY!!

Robert Barrat lectures Richard Barthelmess on money. From Heroes for Sale (1933), a film about late-stage capitalism long before that phrase became commonplace.

100% hard agree. Sterile Sun is incredible and deserves to be reissued. Another author who, if she had been a man, would still be in print.

To an extent that puts better-known writers such as Steinbeck to shame, Caroline Slade wrote for the dispossessed, exploited, and impoverished women of the 1930s and 1940s. neglectedbooks.com/?...

he indigenous stereotype aside, I miss the spirit of this ad: "We think our product is pretty good, but honestly, if you disagree, then it's probably on us. We promise to try harder next time. Our bad."

How rumors not only spread, but grow. From American Madness (1932), a good film that falls short of greatness from Hollywood's usual weakness for jamming a happy ending into otherwise bleak plot lines.

André Malraux by Gisèle Freund, 1935 On the Frenchness scale 1-10, this photo is an 11.

Virginia Faulkner was smart as a whip, funny as a heart attack, unfiltered in her cigarettes and opinions, and utterly uninterested in talking about herself. So the last thing she would have wanted was for someone to write her biography. www.nebraskapress.un...

“Then he served it to me with a nod as if to say, 'This, young man, is a martini.'” The only martini recipe I ever follow. Trust a veteran NYC bartender.

"I made Lincoln free the slaves." Veteran editor Robert McWade struggles to match the enthusiasm of his idealistic new publisher, Cary Grant. From Thirty-Day Princess (1933), a genuine rom-com before its time.

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, he could be just as magnificent a storyteller. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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 here who had to carry the project over the finish line.

Lyda Roberti shakes her moneymaker with Jack Oakie in this little musical interlude from Dancers in the Dark (1932). Roberti appeared in just a dozen feature films, dying of a heart attack at the age of 31 in 1938.

Roger Sale, a fondly-remembered University of Washington professor, reviewed hundreds of novels in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1979, he selected 15 “Neglected Recent American Novels" for The American Scholar: neglectedbooks.com/?...

Has anyone ever done a study of serialized novels from the 1920s and 1930s? I've searched for a number of writers like Evelyn Shuler (author of Dangerous Cinderella) in JSTOR and several other sources and found almost nothing. Surely these weren't all forgettable.

You can't tell me that Marilyn Monroe didn't learn a thing or two from Alice White. A gem of a scene from Employees' Entrance (1933), with Warren William and Albert Gran.

"Droning on and on and getting more and more pleased with himself and emphatic ... and nothing behind it." Dorothy Richardson presages Donald Trump. From Chapter IV of Pointed Roofs, first chapter-volume of Pilgrimage.

Susan Kale was the pseudonymous author of The Fire Escape, a memoir of life in London as a prostitute and S&M enabler, and a character who seems to come straight from the pages of a Patrick Hamilton novel. neglectedbooks.com/?...

We were doing great up to this post. Since then, just two sets sold. Booksellers, consider stocking a set. Customers will want one if they're going to take part in the great Pilgrimage read of 2026! readingpilgrimage.com

Ruminator Finds was a short-lived series of books reissued by the legendary (and late) Ruminator Books in St. Paul, Minnesota. You can read about the dozen titles (mostly memoirs) in the series here: neglectedbooks.com/?...

I'm a bit skeptical of the talk of Pre-Code Hollywood as an era of female liberation and empowerment. Here, from Female (1933), for example, after demonstrating Ruth Chatterton's business acumen and sexual predation, she chucks it all to become a housewife to ... George Brent?

I’m feeling blue so will recommend a book. neglectedbooks.com/?p=332 I see @neglectedbooks.com is onto this too! I’m immersed in the middle volume now: forbidden romance, gambling, duels, riding to hounds, Hungarian politics, the doom-laden years prior to WWI, forestry, aristos. This book has it all

The first review of my forthcoming book, Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts: www.publishersweekly.com/9781496230621

Harold Nicolson's The Age of Reason (1961) was one in a series of popular histories called “The Mainstream of the Modern World" written by the likes of Alec Waugh and John Dos Passos: in other words, better entertainers than historians, great for anecdotes if not facts. 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.

Ruth Chatterton signals ex-football star Johnny Mack Brown that she's in the mood for a little horizontal pep meeting. From Female (1933)

Sarah Campion's Makeshift was published in 1940 and disappeared in seconds. And it would have remained unknown forever, probably, had I not stumbled across a copy on @archive.org and been immediately consumed by its narrative. I'm eager to see what other readers think of it.

After 50+ years of scouring used bookstores, I've memorized the catalog of the Modern Library, so I was surprised some years ago when I came across an ML edition of Christopher Morley's Human Being (1934). It proved a fascinating tale of an everyday life in New York City. neglectedbooks.com/?...

In 1977, the Times Literary Supplement asked writers to nominate the most underrated and overrated books & authors of the past 75 years. Philip Larkin's nomination of Barbara Pym led to the rediscovery of her work. See all the underrated candidates here: neglectedbooks.com/?...

"The customer is always right," we hear saintly Loretta Young muttering under her breath. The life of a department store clerk, circa 1932. From Play Girl, directed by Ray Enright.