Before Night Falls
Penguin Vitae editions are easy to love and to gush over. The colours! The foil text! The hardcover, in a comfortable size!
All Book Reviews
Hargrave reads voraciously and diversely — mostly antiquarian and classic books in translation. These are her book reviews.
While she reads more books than she could possibly write about, she does consistently post weekly reviews. New reviews are posted on Mondays.
Looking for one of the books that have been reviewed? Want to find some vintage treasures of your own? Second-hand and used books are unique and eco-friendly, and can be found at your local independent bookseller. If you’re looking for an American bookseller, you can check here. UK booksellers can be found here.
If you’d prefer to buy books online, many vintage and rare editions can be found at ThriftBooks.
Follow Old Paper & Cats on your RSS Feed or Instagram!
All Book Reviews
Close to the Knives
Wojnarowicz is asking us to listen to him crying from his deathbed and the reader cannot turn away.
Goodbye to Berlin
Reading Isherwood brings you into a moment in history, and there’s something really powerful and rare about that.
Airless Spaces
Sometimes books constructed out of vignettes seem to be built on a faulty foundation and have frames that are not enough to withstand the weight of a message or a book. Firestone here has used the flexibility of very short vignettes to construct just what her title implies — an airless space.
The Flowers of Buffoonery and The Beggar Student
I do love a short novel. Not only do they reliably help me out of even the most prolonged of reading slumps, but short novels are where writers really shine. It takes a lot of skill to craft a narrative that is tight but still full of intent and power.
Voices of the Fallen Heroes
When you read these stories, it’s easy to start looking for threads of his eventual fate or at least the mental state that led to it. Are they there? Yes, but they are subtle.
Written on Water
These essays are talks over coffee and catching up after a long week. They are close friends talking about the issues that matter to them and the parts of the past still stuck to the hem of their clothes.
Hollywood Babylon
here’s one thing you have to remember if you decide to take this trip into the past of Hollywood mayhem. Most of the stories here? Not true. As in: ludicrously not true.
I Am Not Ashamed
If you don’t know who Barbara Payton was, you are forgiven. I was actually introduced to her and her book through Eddie Muller’s Noir Alley on TCM, and a screening of Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, a 1950 James Cagney film.
Adventures in the Screen Trade
I came to William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade via last week’s book, Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy. It was actually mentioned in the puffery on the back of that essential book as being another essential book.