Dacia Maraini: A Voice for Silenced Women
I first came across the work of Dacia Maraini during the year of #WaferThinBooks, when I read Isolina, her reconstruction of the murder of a poor pregnant young woman in Verona. I was drawn to …
Green Forest, by Nathalie Sedgwick Colby (1927)
Nathalie Sedgwick Colby was hardly a typical first-time novelist when Green Forest appeared in the spring of 1927. Not only was she making her debut at the age of 52, but she was the wife …
Bunk, by W. E. Woodward (1923)
At one of the Dumbles’s Cosmic Evenings (their term), W. E. Woodward, Bunk’s narrator as well as author, hears a man proclaim, “We are now conducting de-bunking operations on a rather large scale.” What is …
Swastika, by Oscar Schisgall (1939)
Had I bothered to do a bit more research, I wouldn’t have read Swastika. But a couple of reviews that lauded its realism and immediacy suckered me in, as did its premise: an American woman …
Listening to Herbert Clyde Lewis
Herbert Clyde Lewis listened to unheard people. In his first novel, Gentleman Overboard, Henry Preston Standish falls off a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Unnoticed, his fall seals his fate: by the …
So Little Time, by John P. Marquand (1943)
It’s a little hard to believe now how important So Little Time was to John P. Marquand’s career. He’d already won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 1937 epistolary novel, The Late George Apley, …
Talking Picture, by John Heygate (1934)
I usually do a little research into an author before preparing an article, but in the case of John Heygate, I thought the few facts I already knew — that his affair with Evelyn Waugh’s …
Glorified, by Dorothy Wegman (1930)
As a novel, Glorified is nothing special. Molly Robbins narrates her story from childhood on the upper West Side of Manhattan through her working life starting at the age of 14 to finding the man …
Who Owned This Book? Helen Welshimer
After tracing the inscription in my copy of Gertrude Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia through the remarkable life of its owner, Elizabeth Seeber, years ago, I often look into the person behind the name written in …
The Road: In Search of America, by Nathan Asch (1937)
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 …
Publishing Pilgrimage
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 Slippery Subject of Best Book Lists
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 …
Night Nurse, by Dora Macy (Grace Perkins) (1930)
“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 …
Life Comes to Judith, by Antoinette Spitzer (1931)
“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,” …
Miss Hard-Boiled, by Jane Dixon (1930)
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 …
Why Gale Wilhelm Stopped
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 …
The Kindness of Strangers, by Stanley Baron (1961)
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 …
Some Neglected Candidates for the 1961 Club
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 …
Red-Headed Woman, by Katharine Brush (1931)
“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 …
Windfall, by Robert Andrews (1931)
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 …