I can’t help feeling a certain amount of mistrust when I see In Search of America in a book title. It’s a phrase that’s pompous in its humility. The author poses as one looking for …
About a year ago, I became a publisher. It was an act of desperation. Back in March 2016, as part of my second year of reading exclusively the work of neglected women writers, I took …
The Guardian recently tested the Pavlovian conditioning of the literary corners of the Internet by releasing a list of the 100 Best Novels compiled from the ten-best lists solicited from 172 novelists, historians, memoirists, and …
“Those who read my book, Ex-Mistress,” writes Dora Macy in the foreword to Night Nurse, “will remember that twice I was ill in a hospital — once when I had my baby, and once when …
“Antoinette Spitzer’s heroine in Life Comes to Judith belongs to a comparatively new and, if one may judge by the book sales, an increasingly popular type of amorous adventuress: the young woman on her own,” …
In my research into the source texts (novels, plays, magazine stories) of Hollywood’s earliest sound films — the Pre-Code era, as it’s usually referred to — I have amassed stacks of cheaper hardback novels published …
In August, we’ll be publishing a new edition of Gale Wilhelm’s 1935 novel, We Too Are Drifting, in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press. Despite the fact that We Too Are Drifting is …
One thing that’s fascinated me as an adult is how often the traditional concept of family and reality come into conflict. Tolstoy suggested that all happy families are alike, but from my experience unhappy families …
Next week, Simon Thomas (Stuck in a Book) and Karen Langley (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) will once again host their semi-annual experiment in which bloggers around the world will read and write about books published in …
“So gentlemen prefer blondes, do they?” Jean Harlow’s opening line in Red-Headed Woman (1932) was a double self-jest: a retort to the title of screenwriter Anita Loos’s best-seller, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and a jab at …
There have been plenty of examples where a film bears little resemblance to the novel that inspired it, but it’s hard to imagine any fan of the classic Pre-Code ensemble comedy If I Had a …
For much of the mid-20th century, the Chicago Tribune was America’s biggest newspaper, and for much of that time, Fanny Butcher was its book editor and lead reviewer — which made her one of the …
“I have it on the word of an astute psychoanalyst that Mrs. Philip Lydig is a creature from an antique world,” Harvey O’Higgins, credited by some as its ghostwriter, writes in the introduction to Tragic …
I first came across Eleanor DeLamater’s novel Personals in a survey of recent (in 1932) novels that the critic considered “experimental” in form. Aside from the first two volumes of John Dos Passos’s landmark U. …
This is a guest post by Brooke Binkowski. November Grass Many years ago, I read a beautiful little book written about an unnamed girl (“the girl”) who lived and worked on a ranch and mused …
So many pleasures in an old book. A while ago, I started browsing through a handsome 1926 edition of The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon published by Peter Davies (the Peter of …
“Arthur Train believes in facts” began a 1930 profile of the writer in the Wilson Bulletin. The son of a lawyer, he graduated from Harvard Law, became a member of the bar in both Massachusetts …
I have a book coming out in January. It’s a biography of Virginia Faulkner, a writer even many followers of this site have never heard of. So, a book about a woman nobody’s ever heard …
There were some great books published in 1925. This is not one of them. It is, however, great fun. By his own admission, Mon coeur au ralenti (1924), the French original of Wings of Desire, …
A few days ago, I posted a note on BlueSky: “Dear writers of creative nonfiction: Creative nonfiction is more than just writing about how you’re writing what you’re writing.” It’s an observation that’s neither new …