By N.J. Mastro | On January 17, 2025 | Updated June 15, 2026 | Comments (0)
In the 2021 historical novel The Personal Librarian, authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray illuminate the story of Belle da Costa Greene, private librarian to financial mogul J.P. Morgan.
Her expertise and passion were foundational to the beginnings of the Morgan Library and Museum, a cultural gem that continues to thrive in New York City.
This overview of The Personal Librarian novel and its real-life subject is reprinted from the website of N.J. Mastro, with permission. Photo at right is from The Morgan Library & Museum. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On January 16, 2025 | Comments (0)
In pondering whether certain classic women authors should or shouldn’t be cancelled for holding abhorrent views I’m not advocating for or against; just musing on this vexing question.
Recently, Lynne Weiss, a contributor to this site, asked me what I’m going to do about Alice Munro. Given the magnitude of Munro’s recent posthumous controversy, I told Lynne I’m not going to do anything. I never got around to reading anything by Munro, truth be told, so it will be easy for me to continue to ignore her.
Then, in the past week, I keep seeing news stories about a certain male author who is getting into more and more trouble More women are coming forward with allegations. I don’t want to say who it is, since he’s still living. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On January 3, 2025 | Updated January 7, 2026 | Comments (0)
At the age of twenty-three, Viña Delmar (born Alvina Louise Croter, 1903 – 1990) became an overnight sensation with her bestselling “Banned in Boston” novel, Bad Girl. Reprinted here is an interview with the young author from 1928, the year of its publication
The controversy over her novel, whose heroine, Dottie, was far from being a “bad girl,” didn’t hurt Viña’s reputation, but served to sell the book, which became a bestseller, and not long after, a well-received early “talkie” film.
Viña would go on to be a playwright and screenwriter active until the 1970s though she has been all but forgotten. No stranger to the entertainment business, she traveled around the U.S. with her parents, Ike and Jennie Croter, Jewish vaudeville and Yiddish theater performers. After dropping out of school at an early age, she found herself more suited to writing than being in the limelight. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On December 11, 2024 | Updated December 12, 2024 | Comments (0)
For those of us who love (or make that obsessed with) books, novels about books, bookstores, and libraries are the icing on the cake. Reading about books and bookish people in fictional narratives, might seem odd, but for the devout bibliophile, it makes perfect sense.
Presented here is a selection of contemporary novels whose stories are centered around bookstores or libraries. What could be cozier reading on a chilly day accompanied by a warm drink, a blanket, and a four-legged friend or two? Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On September 3, 2024 | Comments (0)
In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell walked into The New Yorker’s midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse.
This towering but behind-the scenes figure in the history of 20th-century literature finally gets the first-rate biography she deserves in The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker by Amy Reading (Mariner Books, September 3, 2024; thanks to Mariner Books for supplying the content of this post).
In The World She Edited, Amy Reading brings to life the remarkable relationships White fostered with her writers and how these relationships nurtured an astonishing array of literary talent. Read More→
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