If I don't get another 10,000 followers in the next week, I'm taking this back!

A most unexpected response from the second clerk in the Missing Persons Bureau in this scene from Among the Missing (1934).

Ten years ago, @kateem.bsky.social and I were among the few to have worked our way through Dorothy Richardson's 13-volume novel, Pilgrimage, so we decided to sit down (virtually) and share reflections on the experience. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Posting this because some time before I die I'd appreciate someone else knowing why I enjoy saying, "Why ... you ..." in a surly voice when being told bad news. From the great Bob & Ray: just one of their many unforgettable recurring characters.

I just finished teaching a six-week class (for 50-plus aged students) on The Great Gatsby, which turned out to be a blast. But for those of you who do this sort of professionally: what do you do with all the extraneous materials and information afterward? Hope to teach it again someday?

Four RCA Victor Musical Smart Set albums (as in albums of 78s, not LPs)

Back in 2019, Rosemary Tonks's The Bloater (1968) was a legitimately neglected book, but thanks to Backlisted Podcast, most of Tonks's deftly comic novels are back in print. neglectedbooks.com/?...

The Boxman Cometh. Five years ago today. Preparing to move back to the US after 20 years. Often wish we'd had another option.

"You don't know it yet, but you've been retired." Gangster Chester Morris learns that Joan Blondell is taking charge, having outgunned him with the best weapon of all: brains. From Blondie Johnson (1933)

“The first 36 pages of The Monkey Puzzle excited me more than any first novel I have read for years,” wrote the Telegraph’s reviewer. “Here, I thought, is a real winner.” Sadly, Veronica Hull should have trusted herself and ignored the men around her—starting with A. J. Ayer. neglectedbooks.com/?...

O Hitler's a non-smoker and Churchill smokes cigars and they're both as keen as mustard on imperialistic wars. But your Uncle Joe's a worker and a very decent chap because he smokes a pipe and wears a taxi-driver's cap. "Ballad of the Taxi-Driver's Cap" by Hamish Henderson

"Sergeant, I'm bringing you the lay of the land." Director Raoul Walsh enjoyed slipping a few double entendres into the dialogue of The Cock-Eyed World (1929) — something that would have been much harder to pull off with silent film titles. With El Brendel and Victor McLaglen.

The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell (1945) was among Storm Jameson's novels that seem to have been fictional autobiographies focused on her complicated relationship with her shipbuilding family from Whitby in Yorkshire. Despite some lyrical passages, it's too often tedious. neglectedbooks.com/?...

"I play a game called Impossible to Imagine: Impossible to imagine a Penelope Fitzgerald character who is evil. Impossible to imagine a J. M. Coetzee character having fun. Impossible to imagine a Shirley Hazzard character who needs the lavatory." Michelle De Kretser

Much as I adore Ann Dvorak, I have to say that her dancing is very much of the school of Joan Crawford: certainly, um, vigorous. (Also, I'm guessing that her outfit is not historically accurate for World War One frontline entertainers). From Sky Devils (1932)

On Burt Bacharach's birthday, here's a rare and stunning performance of his song "Make It Easy on Yourself" by the great Sam and Dave. youtu.be/QYctCsA4PTE?...

Although not that successful as a piece of fiction, Antoinette Spitzer's Life Comes to Judith (1931) illustrates how widely abortion was used as a method of birth control a hundred years ago — and not just by unmarried women. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Has anyone traced the rise of feminism in country music, starting with Kitty Wells' “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”—her answer song to Hank Thompson's "The Wild Side of Life"? If not, there's a good and necessary story to be told. 1/2

Menace (1934) makes me deeply regret that Hollywood never made a series featuring the great character actor Halliwell Hobbes as butler/secret agent.

Malachi Whitaker and Gay Taylor must have had great fun writing The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, a prolific Victorian novelist whose moral superiority was grounded in her firm belief that she was simply better than everyone else. neglectedbooks.com?p=6174

Judicial Measurements, from The Paris Law Courts: Sketches of Men (1884). "M. Bertillon, who is a man of essentially simple mind ... established three great general classes, each distinguished by the stature of the individuals measured: short, middle-sized, and tall."

Remembering my mom from her high fashion days on Mother's Day. Easter Sunday 1958. She stuck with hats for going to church for another ten years.

Another Present Era (1990) by Elaine Perry, who passed recently. A remarkable Pynchon-esque futuristic dystopian novel that weaves a fascinating tapestry of history, race, climate change, and economic injustice. (Thanks to Michael A. Gonzales for this discovery.) neglectedbooks.com/?...

This perfectly captures my mother's mood in her last year. In her last days, she lay still, as if imitating being dead would speed the arrival of the real thing. From The Colour of the Times: The Collected Poems of Raymond Souster (1964)

There was a time when people heard a gunshot and ran *toward* it. Actually, by 1930 standards, this is a pretty busy bit of editing and crowd choreography. From Laughter (1930) with Nancy Carroll.

Something about traveling by train offers a perennial formula for good fiction. Time spent on a train is sort of a hiatus from everyday life. No surprise, then, that so many novelists have been attracted to the setting. Here are ten #WaferThinBooks set on trains. waferthinbooks.com/2024/02/18/t...

On this date in 2021, Ann Kennedy Smith wrote about two neglected books about women at Cambridge: What I Remember by Mary Paley Marshall and A Suppressed Cry, Victoria Glendinning's biography of her great-aunt Winnie Seebohm. neglectedbooks.com/?...

This was a quick turnaround project inspired by @joannapocock.bsky.social's Greyhound. I'm delighted to have her support in bringing this fascinating book back to print. Coming out May 31, available to pre-order now.

The Bickersons was a radio/TV show that featured Don Ameche and Frances Langford as a couple who did nothing but ... bicker. When I first heard them on their LPs, I found them like fingernails on blackboard, but now I find they're pure comic gold.

"I can't make money. I don't know how to work." Philips Holmes playing the classic wastrel to Irene Dunne's virtuous chorus girl in The Secret of Madame Blanche (1933). When's the last time Hollywood gave us a good wastrel? Surely they're not extinct.

Thirty years after she served with the Scottish Women’s Hospital mission to Russia during World War One, E. M. (Eliza Marian) Butler wrote a brief but penetrating fictional memoir, Daylight in a Dream, in which she addressed her errors of youth with the wisdom of a lifetime. neglectedbooks.com/?...

"This is not the kind of story someone tells to pass the time, and it is not the kind of story you listen to to pass the time." My new blog post on Friedrich Torberg's brilliant novella, VENGEANCE IS MINE. Translated by Stephanie Gorrell Ortega. readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2026/05/07/v...

I remember my astonishment when I suddenly realized that the camel saddles my parents used as footrests might actually be saddles for camels.

Edward Brophy & Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards as a fine pair of Brooklyn mooks hauled into a rural French jail. After they meet with bon vivant Reginald Denny and those three French girls in the cell next door, the cast of Those Three French Girls (1930) has been assembled. Hilarity ensues?

The Reading Pilgrimage 2026 group has been a wonderful experience so far. Earlier this week, the novelist Amy Shearn joined to talk about her own discovery and love of Dorothy Richardson's remarkable work. Recordings of all our meetings to date can be found on YouTube.

The great poet Louise Bogan considered Abbie Huston Evans the most neglected American poet of her time. Little in the last 60+ years has changed that. Yet few poets have had Evans's capacity for patience and ability to see things from the long view. neglectedbooks.com/?...

I don't know if my post-retirement dreams are representative, but one thing I've observed is that the half-life of petty work conflicts is a lot longer than I would have thought.

A celebration of the incredible LP covers from the Czech label Supraphon. Music: Orchestra Beat (1968) by the Ferdinand Havlik Orchestra.

This is not how I expected this interaction between Fredric March, a house-crashing composer, and Leonard Carey, the penthouse's proper English butler, to go. From Laughter (1930).

Fire Sermon (1971) and A Life (1973), by Wright Morris. The last weeks of Floyd Warner's life, as he travels back to his hometown in Nebraska and exorcises demons that have haunted his life. As with Cather, the simplicity of Morris's surfaces hide great depths of complexity. neglectedbooks.com/?...

The complete run of Discovery (1953-55), a paperback magazine that aimed to “fulfill the terms of the American writer’s perennial vision of a magazine: large audience, fair pay, and the freedom to write as he pleases.” You know this was doomed to fail. neglectedbooks.com/?...

After 20 years of writing a book blog, I feel comfortable offering one piece of advice regarding novels: If your plot synopsis runs longer than four paragraphs, it's too long.

"Be difficult!" Ilka Chase instructs Marian Davies how to hook a sugar daddy in The Florodora Girl (1930). The irony is that Chase was then married to Louis Calhern, a bit of a philandering wastrel at the time, while Davies had hooked one of America's biggest sugar daddies, William Randolph Hearst.

I called Louise W. King "The Would-Be Wodehouse of Queer Greenwich Village," but perhaps Would-Be S. J. Perelman would be a better title, for like Perelman's, King's quirky comic tales are best consumed in small portions rather than as whole books. neglectedbooks.com/?...

I love the closing line from an account of an attempted kidnapping in Nebraska in 1889. In all the commotion of the event, the girl's mother somehow managed to note that the kidnapper "appeared to be an Italian"??

Jobyna Howland auditions Robert Woolsey to be husband #6 (or is it #2?) in Hook, Line and Sinker (1930). These Wheeler & Woolsey comedies are beginning to grow on me: there's a certain charm in the pair, even if their jokes are often straight out of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang.

Charlotte Salomon's Life or Theater? An Autobiographical Play (1943/1981) is packaged like a coffee-table art book, but I see it more as an autobiographical graphic novel of a German Jewish family caught up both in psychological traumas and history. A stunning book. neglectedbooks.com/?...

I brake for covers in Gill Sans.

The Guardsman (1931) is the best of the very few screen appearances by the legendary acting couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, a spoof on actors' pretensions made all the better by the contrast between Lunt's florid performance and Zasu Pitts's down-homey manner.

Jane Dixon was considered the top newspaperwoman in Jazz Age New York, but when she turned to fiction with Miss Hard-Boiled in 1929, she took no risks and stuck to the well-worn formulas of newspaper serials: short chapters, constant plot developments, "megaphone" prose. neglectedbooks.com/?...