My new blog post on MAKESHIFT by Sarah Campion, another terrific novel from the Recovered Books series. readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2026/02/12/m... @neglectedbooks.com

Nothing quite like trying to decipher a note to yourself that reads, "IMPORTANT!" followed by what looks to be "Frzmstj Berpsich Drrmkl."

“When the weak...accept the stereotypes that undervalue them, they permit their rulers to define proper processes of governing ... so that it comes to seem that only one ‘right way’ to handle power exists.” Elizabeth Janeway's The Powers of the Weak: More relevant than ever. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Join me on Wednesday, Feb. 25th at 7PM at Seattle's superb Phinney Books. We'll talk about Virginia Faulkner, Recovered Books, reissuing Pilgrimage, and how taking breaks from studying math in UW's Suzzallo Library led to my passion for championing neglected books and writers.

The Journey by Rose Caylor (1933). In which a 1930s woman novelist (and Ben Hecht's first wife) channels the authorial spirit of Henry Fielding in a book that's got more digression than direction. neglectedbooks.com/?...

When I spotted the title Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! on the yellow spine of an old book, I knew I had to investigate. And then I hit the second sentence of Eileen Winncroft's 1938 novel: “‘Breakfast, poops,’ he murmured in a homosexual Oxford accent.” I read on. neglectedbooks.com/?...

"He sings through his nose!" My mother hated country star Ernest Tubb, BOTD in 1914, so of course my first country album was Ernest Tubb's Greatest Hits. I was lucky enough to see him perform in Gulfport, MS in 1981, shortly before emphysema took him off the road for good after a six-decade career.🧵

Poet Hayden Carruth's one novel, Appendix A (1963), is a good example of an artistic failure that proves as interesting as many other better books, an awkward collage with moments of inspired writing — especially about life in Chicago 60+ years ago. neglectedbooks.com/?...

On Thursday, February 19th, I'll be speaking as part of the National Willa Cather Center's Virtual Author series. Register free to join the discussion at the link.

Tillie Olsen's 1978 book, Silences, was a pioneering study of the obstacles that kept many women writers from the readers and critical attention they deserved. Back in 2015, I looked at some of the still-neglected books included in Olsen's reading lists in Silences. neglectedbooks.com/?...

John V. A. Weaver's second novel, Joy-Girl (1932), tries to be a satire of Hollywood and its star-making machine, but it fails due to numerous construction problems, too many pages of Su'thun dah-uh-lect dah-uh-log being just one. Promising but forgettable. I want my time back.

In the mid-1950s, Angus Wilson called P. B. (Patricia Barnes) Abercrombie “the most interesting of our young women novelists," but when I looked at one of her early novels, Fido Couchant, back in 2018, her work had become utterly forgotten in the decades since her death. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Virginia Faulkner: Writer, Editor and... Ghostwriter? Read an excerpt from VIRGINIA FAULKNER by Brad Bigelow (@neglectedbooks.com) in @literaryhub.bsky.social: bit.ly/3NTLHi4

Two Under the Indian Sun (1966) is an atmospheric memoir of growing up in the Indian Raj by sisters and novelists Jon and Rumer Godden. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Last year on this date, I looked at The Goldfish Bowl (1932), an examination of the fame industry by Mary C. McCall Jr., who went on to become one of Hollywood's most influential screenwriters. neglectedbooks.com/?...

I had the pleasure of talking about the process of writing Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts with Kirk McElhearn for Scrivener's Write Now podcast. Scrivener was invaluable through the many months when the manuscript was just a collection of fragments. www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/write-n...

Back in 2022, novelist Cliff Burns wrote about The Poppy Factory (1989), William Fairchild's evocative and compelling novel about combat in the trenches of the Western Front in World War One. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Heads, Bodies and Legs (1946) was an early mix-up child's book created by Denis Wirth-Miller and Richard Chopping. The two artists, who lived together for over 70 years, entered a civil partnership a few years before Chopping's death in 2008.

Just read this tremendous novella, which is so intense that it demands to be read in one gulp. Out next month.

The Fly, by Richard Chopping (1965). The first few chapters of this novel by a designer famed for his covers of Ian Fleming's original James Bond books are intense with exultant disgust. At length, sadly, disgust turns into tedium. neglectedbooks.com/?...

A new edition of Pilgrimage is now available in the United States asterismbooks.com/product/pilg.... This edition, is based on the first editions of the chapter-volumes. @neglectedbooks.com

Joan Butler was the penname of Irish novelist Robert William Alexander, whose comic novels gave those of P. G. Wodehouse a run for the money for over 30 years. Now, they're probably as much sought after for their dust jackets as for what's between the covers. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Once in a while, you luck across a book where something as simple and unique as the narrator’s voice hooks you from the start. This was my experience with Josephine Carson’s 1957 novel, Drives My Green Age, about an orphan girl growing up in 1930s Kansas. neglectedbooks.com/?...

The cover of our Recovered Books/@bhousepress.bsky.social edition of Jane White's 1967 novel, Quarry, was drawn by White's son Martin Brady and does a wonderful job of conveying the ominous violence lurking in this tale of three bored teenagers who decide to kidnap a young boy.

A fun review of Constance Tomkinson's memoir of life as a chorus girl in 1930s Europe, Les Girls, recently reissued by @slightlyfoxed.bsky.social.

Joan Jukes's “On the Floor," the interior monologue of a disabled young woman who falls and can't get up, was selected as one of the best British short stories of the 1930s. And then it and she disappeared. You can find a PDF of this fascinating story at the link below: neglectedbooks.com/?...

- Calculus of Variations - Number Theory - Differential Geometry - Quantum Physics - Remote Sensing from Space ... from all of which I know remember essentially nothing now. But they kept me in a scholarship.

"I like this book uncommonly well," wrote publisher Alfred A. Knopf in a rare ad whose copy he wrote himself. It was for Peter de Polnay's debut novel, Angry Man's Tale (1939). A Hungarian Jew who transformed himself into an English gentleman, De Polnay wrote over 80 books. neglectedbooks.com/?...

For connoisseurs of the Internet Archive, an image that gets the heart racing.

Somehow I don't think "Bend Down, Sister" was really meant as an ode to the benefits of dieting. An early but trademark example of Busby Berkeley's choreography, from Palmy Days (1931), with Charlotte Greenwood as the Amazon.

Many thanks to editor Tim Schaffert for including "The Dream Bien Meublé," my account of Virginia Faulkner's awkward attempt to psychoanalyze Willa Cather through what we'd today call close reading, in the latest issue of Prairie Schooner. prairieschooner.unl.edu/issue/winter...

The renaissance of Gertrude Trevelyan's work continues. Out today from Storie Effimere: Appio e Virginia, an Italian translation of Trevelyan's first novel, Appius and Virginia. It joins translations into German, Spanish, and Turkish. Fingers crossed for more to come.

Young Woman of 1914 is the first of Arnold Zweig's World War One tetralogy (best known for The Case of Sergeant Grischa). Unlike his Austrian confrere Stefan, Arnold tended to be a bit ham-fisted in his prose, but this is a surprisingly delicate and enlightened novel. neglectedbooks.com/?...

These dust jackets designed by Peter Rudland are probably better than the books themselves, I suspect. Happy to be contradicted by anyone who's actually read one.

Poverty Row studios were always on the lookout for ways to cut corners. Trick #257, from Alias Mary Smith (1933): Why create a whole fake newspaper? Just paste your headline on top of an old issue of Variety (betrayed by a headline about vaudevillians Olsen & Johnson just below the fake one).

Many of my daylight hours in childhood were spent outside running like with other kids like a pack of feral dogs. Parents used to have a much higher risk threshold...which wasn't an entirely good thing. 1/2

Buona lettura!

From the Desk of @neglectedbooks.com: In Search of Virginia Faulkner VIRGINIA FAULKNER tells a story of a Nebraska-born writer with uncompromising standards who shaped a life under challenging conditions.

In William's Wife, Gertrude Trevelyan takes us step by step through Jane Chirp's metamorphosis from an ordinary young woman in service to a queer figure haunting the streets of London, bag in arm, scavenging for food and firewood. A work of uniquely unsettling power. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Here's a cool instrumental called "Mabuk Laut" by the Indonesian girl band the Flower Girls. "Mabut Laut," originally done by the 1960s Indonesian girl band Dara Puspita, is a cover of the Ventures' tune "Fugitive," itself a cover of "The Fugitive" by the Fugitives (NYC). www.youtube.com/watc... 1/2

Say what you like about Shirley Temple, but sometimes she got her adult castmates to up their game. As in this scene from Now and Forever (1934), where she manages to get father Gary Cooper, an inveterate swindler and thief, to find his long-lost conscience.

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.unl.edu/bison-books/...

Kenneth Fearing should be as well-known as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler—but for his poetry, not his novels. No poet ever captured the hard-boiled diction and attitude like Fearing did in poems like “Payday in the Morgue,” “Cracked Record Blues,” and "St Agnes' Eve." neglectedbooks.com/?...

At Sea by Arthur Calder-Marshall (1934) A honeymooning couple rows out to sea for a swim. What could go wrong? Look at this beauty. 92 years old and it's immaculate. And affordable, because it's yet another neglected book that no one else is looking for.

I had the pleasure of visiting Nebraska Public Media's Friday LIVE show last week and taking a few minutes to talk about my book, Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts, and why I'm a champion for reading off the beaten path. youtu.be/g711incVhIE?...

John Barrymore demonstrates the art of making an entrance. From Reunion in Vienna (1933), with May Robson. 1/2

I'll be appearing at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago on Thursday afternoon this week, reading from and discussing my book, Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts. I hope a few of my friends in Chicago can join us. www.semcoop.com/event/brad-b...

I'll be appearing at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago on Thursday afternoon this week, reading from and discussing my book, Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts. I hope a few of my friends in Chicago can join us. www.semcoop.com/even...

Six years ago today, I looked at Virginia Faulkner's first novel, Friends and Romans (1934), "A Comico-Romantic Novel" that is full of her signature wisecracks...and also a few insights into the early years of Italian fascism—not knowing I would soon be writing her biography neglectedbooks.com/?...

Is it true that some people can walk into a hardware store and not experience an intense attack of impostor syndrome?