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Neglected Books

@neglectedbooks.com

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Brad Bigelow, writer in Missoula, MT Author, Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts (Jan 2026) Editor, Recovered Books series @ Boiler House Press: www.boilerhouse.press/recovered-books Editor, neglectedbooks.com. Champion of reading off the beaten path.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 24m

"We are all going to die," says the GOP. "But poor people should die first."

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 34m

"Saturate the bridgeworks!" Walter Catlett, to Sheila Terry, in Big City Blues (1932) — I will have to put this toast to use soon. Yes, that's Humphrey Bogart, in his seventh feature film.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 46m

"Two can play that game, Laura Branigan!"

Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 55m

So Far...So Good...So Eighties...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 5h

If you're interested in finding genuinely neglected books, try poking around in the poetry section of a good used bookstore. I did back in 2016 and discovered the work of Helene Mullins, which spoke to one then nearing sixty, and with a parent nearing death.

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Reposted by Neglected Books

Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 12h

Ordered these from the publisher in the UK just 7 days ago and they've already turned up down here. Nice! More Recovered Books from Boilerhouse Press and @neglectedbooks.com and they haven't let me down with anything in this series yet.
#booksky📚💙
#books

And So Did I, by Malachi Whitaker.
Solitary Confinement, by Christopher Burney.
Trance by Appointment, by Gertrude Trevelyan.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 22h

How to write a newspaper story.
From Reporter by Meyer Levin (1929).

(They still teach this in journalism school, right?)

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 23h

Not many titles on the non-ghostwritten Hollywood memoir shelf.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 23h

I gave a class on Pre-Code gangster movies last week and was looking for a good way to close it. Scanned through Manhattan Melodrama, saw this scene, and knew it was just the thing.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 23h

I haven't read it, but I will look for it at the U Montana library -- which should have it, since she was a Montana native.

Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 1d

John Dillinger was killed outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago after seeing Manhattan Melodrama on July 22, 1934 — just weeks after Hollywood made the Production Code mandatory. William Powell's speech here unintentionally marks the end of the Pre-Code glamorization of gangsters like Dillinger.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 1d

Old but classic:
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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 1d

Way back in 2007, Will Schofield, now owner of @50wattsbooks.bsky.social in Philadelphia, shared the list of 20 then-obscure and out-of-print books that helped win him an editorship at @pauldrybooks.bsky.social:

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 1d

Shame on anyone still attempting to use Twitter for discourse: it's solely for discord now.

Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 1d

Oh, he'll still be miserable and a sorry bitch there, too.

Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 1d

Available now, the latest in the Recovered Books series from @bhousepress.bsky.social. Available in the US from @asterismbooks.bsky.social.

Andrew Crowther @andrewcrowther.bsky.social · 4d

A book I have very much enjoyed this week: "And So Do I" by Bradford writer Malachi Whitaker, a sort of chronicle of 2 years in the late 1930s, first published in 1939 & newly republished. Irreverent, humorous, often startlingly honest, with an undercurrent of existential bewilderment and searching.

The cover of the new Recovered Books edition of "And So Did I" by Malachi Whitaker. A dark green cover, through which two eyes stare out at us.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 1d

He came close — and Lin Manuel Miranda made it into a musical.
youtu.be/xuVip8tDS30

Lin-Manuel Miranda Presents: The Donald Trump Run-On Sentence Musical | GQ

YouTube video by GQ

youtu.be

Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 1d

A book bought solely because I spotted it on the shelf behind Bob and Emily Hartley's bed on The Bob Newhart Show. (I've yet to read it.)

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 2d

"Let's get organized." Harry Holman and a memorable Fern Emmett as an awkward couple — an aging conman and his lodging house's maid. From East of Fifth Avenue (1933), an amiable low-rent riff on Grand Hotel set in a seedy Brooklyn residence.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 2d

So have another Scotch and mutter another curse under your breath. This baby is gonna get read, like it or not.

www.nebraskapress.un...

Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 2d

Every day I worked on this book, I could feel Virginia's "mean lady editor" glower burning the back of my neck. But Virginia, if you hadn't wanted anyone to write about your life, you shouldn't have been so damned smart and funny and resilient.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 2d

Feature writer for the Washington Post at 20; best-selling novelist at 21; partying with Garbo in Hollywood at 24; enduring dozens of rounds of electroshock therapy at 37; restarting her life at 40 as an editor and playing a pivotal role in resurrecting the work of Willa Cather.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 2d

And worse, for the press she worked at for 25 years to publish it.
But good stories deserve to be told, and Virginia Faulkner's story is a great one.

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 2d

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...

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Neglected Books @neglectedbooks.com · 2d

Back in 2019, I used my British Library privileges to read Rosemary Tonks's first novel, a children's story about a flying weathervane called On Wooden Wings (1948). There was little clue in it of the guardedly ironic humor to be found in her mature novels and poems.

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