Neglected Books

Whole chunks of bureaucracies and other large organizations would grind to a halt if executive summaries disappeared. Barking out, "Just cut to the chase!"is taken as a sign of decisiveness, not a symptom of limited knowledge and short attention span. As we can see in practically every headline now.

With a total of one review of my book, Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts (or, as bookstore browsers call it, "Who? By Who?") two months after publication, I wouldn't mind getting just a smidge closer to being reviewed to death.

It is almost 500 pages longer, or more than 2½ times more paper. The paper inside M&D is more expensive than the cardboard outside Shadow Ticket. The most confounding thing about current book prices isn't that they're so high but that if they followed inflation, they'd be even higher.

Anne Goodwin Winslow was 68 when she wrote her first book, The Dwelling Place, an amused, affectionate, poetic tribute to the home outside Memphis where she grew up and to which she returned after decades of travel as an Army wife. It makes you wish you could be her guest.

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I will be fascinated to see the audience's reaction. I'll bet a handful of people have seen it lately. It's on DVD, but not remotely on interest to anyone but completists.

It's a slow night in LA two weeks from now and you're thinking, "Boy, I wish there was a special screening of an obscure 1930s screwball comedy we could go to. And if there was a special talk to go along with it, that would be fantastic!”

Well, folks, I'm here to help you out. And there'll be cake!

"The first thing we do, let's fire all the lawyers who know anything about the laws of armed conflict." Donald I, Part II, Act IV, Scene 2

In the Absence of Magic, by Ernst Pawel (1961). The biographer's only novel, a portrait of a popular historian and narcissist as seen by his psychiatrist. "The most thoroughgoing analysis of evil for many a long slap-happy day," wrote John Davenport (in an odd choice of phrase).

Roddy Ho is a hacker. Back when the US cared about rules of engagement and the law of armed conflict, a lot more than a band of cowboy hackers was required to deliver military cyber effects.

He's the comedic equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard.

I was once described as "the Orville Wright of cyber warfare" in an official (unclassified) Air Force report.

"Rapscallion!" Berton Churchill expands Warren Hymer's vocabulary in Kid Millions (1934), one of the more enjoyable Eddie Cantor movies (made so by the relative absence of Eddie Cantor in many scenes).

Today's #BookMail: Proofs of Ethel Mannin's An American Journey, with an introduction by @joannapocock.bsky.social. Coming in May in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press @bhousepress.bsky.social. A trip across America by bus in 1965, full of uncomfortable parallels with America in 2026

Actors were making a couple dozen movies a year back then. Of course they had to talk fast: the assistant director of their next film was usually standing off camera waving, "Hurry up! Hurry up!"

No Goodness in the Worm by Gay Taylor is a lightly fictionalized memoir of Taylor's affair with the writer A. E. Coppard. But it's definitely a post-affair account: "Miss Taylor ... views man dispassionately and finds him, on the whole, dispensable."

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It varies. They came out simultaneously from both, McNally was first with Ex-Wife. McNally has definitely published far more titles by now, though.

Lucy Scholes is the primary link between the two publishers. McNally started after Faber relaunched its rediscoveries list, but there are a fair number of duplicates between the two lists.

Except...a lot of the credit goes to Faber, which published many of these first, and then McN followed with a US edition.

One Way Passage. Just sayin'.

The Department of Violence with No Wussy Rules of Engagement Hoo-Ah Bring It On Aren't My Tats Cool Bro Can I Get a Chest Bump I Am So Jacked Now Praise Jeebus!

How huge was this album?

My dad had it — and he never bought an album that a dozen people he knew didn't already have.

Oh dear, it's a McNally Edition. There must be something beyond a young girl's strange, erotic journey*, etc. ... I hope.

*Seinfeld reference

Kudos for digging up a long-forgotten novel—but also... this sounds a little too eww-y in the age of Epstein and #MeToo.

I have huge respect for anyone who can write a solid review in 400 words or fewer. They used to be a staple of the book sections of many newspapers (two endangered species, sigh).

I've suffered for art. Now, you can suffer, too.

The @lrb.co.uk continues to impress me. I dropped my NYRB subscription to add it and have no regrets. Only downside: no reviews under 5K words. (Just kidding. No, not kidding.)

I'm copacetic with this.

"How utterly detestable mannishness is ; so mighty and strong and comforting when you have been mewed up with women all your life, and then suddenly, in a second, far away, utterly imbecile and aggravating with a superior self-satisfied smile because a woman says one thing one minute and another the next. Men ought to be horsewhipped, all the grown men, all who have ever had that self-satisfied smile, all, all, horsewhipped until they apologise on their knees."

Don't hold back, Miriam. Tell us what you really think.
(From Honeycomb, chapter-volume 3 of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage)

It's a shame that William Haines was forced out of the movies. From the films I've seen, he never just phoned it in.

Another bit of William Haines's untethered comic mania from The Girl Said No (1930). He must have exhausted everyone on the set.