February 25: Brad Bigelow on Virginia Faulkner

On Wednesday, February 25, 2025, at 7 pm, Phinney Books is hosting a rare author event. We’re welcoming Brad Bigelow, a longtime long-distance friend of the store, who will be visiting from Missoula, Montana, to discuss Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts, a biography of a writer and editor who left a glittery, boozy literary life in New York for a second career in the Midwest, where as an editor at the University of Nebraska Press she, among other things, helped reestablish Willa Cather as one of the great American writers.

Hers is a mostly forgotten life that spans much of American 20th-century literature, which makes her a fitting subject for Brad, who has turned a side project during his globe-trotting career for the U.S. Air Force—the website Neglected Books, which has unearthed hundreds of literary works mostly lost to the past—into a second career of his own as a writer and editor. He has republished many of his discoveries in the Recovered Books series for Boiler House Press—including Phinney Books recommendations like MacDonald Harris’s Mortal Leap and Gertrude Trevelyan’s William’s Wife—and recently brought out a new edition of Dorothy Richardson’s legendary four-volume modernist classic, Pilgrimage. (You know how much we love a series of republished lost classics here!)

We’ll hear from Brad about the literary life of Virginia Faulkner and the writing of his first book after a lifetime of reading, and also about the labor of love of finding forgotten literature and doing the heavy lifting of bringing it back into print and finding an audience for these neglected gems. And I’m sure we’ll hear about the origin story of his reading passion, which began when he was an undergrad math major at the University of Washington and would distract himself from his studies by wandering through the stacks at Suzzallo Library, pulling out books he’d never heard of, including an early favorite, Other Ranks by W.V. Tilsley.

Please join us! And if you’d like to order a copy of Virginia Faulkner, click on the cover below.