Wuthering
Expectations

In case yesterday’s invitation was a bit abstract, here is my current sense of a twenty-play Elizabethan Not Shakespeare syllabus that I wou...

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to do.  I’ve been wanting to return to the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe and...

First, my poor email subscribers missed some of the installments of my newsletter about Anthony Powell.  If this keeps happening I will have...

Nicholas Jenkins – I did not register his name at all for the entire first novel, but I know it now – goes to school, gets a job in publishi...

My writing here is often about what surprised me or did not.  So let’s have that about the first four novels of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to ...

In France, at the Lyon public library, I was surprised to bump into so many romans fleuves , whatever those are.  They were notable on the s...

I should make that the new official slogan of the blog.  It is from p. 614 of Finnegans Wake , one of the books I recently read. FICTION ...

More keys.  As Anna Livia Plurabelle says or thinks or dreams at the very end of Finnegans Wake , “The keys to.”  She is falling asleep so s...

I am too tired to write about  Finnegans Wake which is a good state for writing about this dream novel where characters keep falling asleep...

Over the last month I read Finnegans Wake (1939).  I first read some bits of it in college, in a Norton Anthology of British Literature , a...

I will write about two newly published translations of Spanish novels that comprise an amusing stunt by Open Letter Books.  They are Attila ...

FICTION The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904), Arthur Conan Doyle – My emergency book, the book on my phone, for when I need to read in th...

Another remarkable Russian novel finally made it into English last year, Andrey Platonov’s Chevengur , written in 1929 but not published unt...

I read Andrey Platonov’s novel Chevengur (1929) not too long ago and the collection of stories Soul (1935-46) last month.  Here we will ha...

Wolf Solent has pressed his beautiful young wife against an ash tree, presumably as a prelude to sex, but he begins rubbing the bark: ‘Hum...