Wuthering
Expectations

The French went nuts, in the 1930s and even more so in the 1940s, for adaptations of ancient Greek plays.  I don’t know why.  I have guesses...

These books have to go back to the library. No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories , Jayant Kaikini (2017, tr. Tejaswini Niranjana).   The sec...

Just two Colette books left.  Lots written, a book a year as usual, in the 1930s and 1940s, but I have only read a couple of them. Bella-V...

Colette wrote close to a book a year for fifty years.  It’s a lot of books.  I’m still in the early 1920s, the time of the novels Chéri and...

At some point here Colette begins a long love affair with her 16 year-old stepson – I suppose he does not stay 16 for long – and writers a f...

I should try to go faster than one Colette book a day. Backstage at the Music Hall (1913).   Colette was a touring actress for a while.  ...

On with Colette. The Tendrils of the Vine (1908).   I borrowed the original cover from Wikipedia .   Colette is at this point, and for a ...

Since the Zola novel was dragging on so long, I thought, why not mix in a French book that is light and elegant and short and easy?  Some Co...

Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames was a good novel to read intermittently because of Zola’s taste for the big, chapter-length scene.  I just had ...

For some dumb reason I thought this summer, in the middle of moving across the country, was a good time to pick a nearly 500-page Émile Zola...

  I mean to write shorter, but I usually don’t. *** Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939) by Christopher Isherw...

Portland has, by my standards, an outstanding public library, meaning they have new books but also old books, even in languages other than E...

  Recently, I moved to Portland, Maine, and have settled in enough to see if I can write anything coherent.   The last time I moved, eleven ...

Rooting around my old things, I found this 1971 set of books written and illustrated by Richard Scarry, mostly.  I believe they originally c...

John Horne Burns was not a combat soldier during World War II, but worked in military intelligence and censorship.  For a while his work was...

John Horne Burns’s The Gallery (1947) is I guess one of those lost classics.  Myself, I prefer the found classics, but this one is interest...

For its first few pages, Evelina looks like an epistolary novel, like a Samuel Richardson novel.  “I am, dear Sir, with great regard” (Lett...