Wuthering
Expectations

The magazine writers of New York City in the 1840s, the people Perry Miller chronicles in The Raven and the Whale , were obsessed with the s...

I mentioned Perry Miller's 1956 The Raven and the Whale (1956) yesterday. It's a marvelous account of the literary luminaries of Ne...

Let's see, how else did Poe spend his time, besides writing his own poems and tomahawking those of others? Coming up with hoaxes, of cou...

Mr. Poe, sharpen that tomahawk. It's time for a round of Poe's Greatest Hatchet Hits. From a review of The Coming of the Mammoth - T...

I have been organzing Poe's works by genre, I now see. My default is chronology, but that doesn't work for Poe. He's always doin...

Poe, in his reviews of poets' books, always included an enormous quantity of the verse he was reviewing. A ten page review might contain...

"The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge." Poe, in most ...

I had known for a long time that Poe had written three stories starring C. Auguste Dupin. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), ...

I'd had no idea, before plowing through the Library of America Poetry and Tales , how many comic stories Poe wrote. Of 68 tales and sket...

Just recently, I polished off both Library of America volumes of Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales , and Essays and Reviews , about 2,800 pa...

Tevye's oldest daughter, in "Today's Children," turned down a proposal by a rich man to marry a poor tailor. The next daug...

Tevye the Dairyman actually is a book of short stories that functions as a novel. A timetable of original publication dates will clear thin...

I want to write about - no, advocate - Tevye the Dairyman (1910, sort of). It's so good I won't be able to do it justice. It's ...

Don Quixote is a satire on romances. Don Quixote has his brain addled by tales of knights and heroes, but discovers that the world has chan...

My "Currently Reading" pile has spun out of control. It's all the fault of my Yiddish literature project. There are so many go...

Another reason I don’t just read Important Classics is that so many not-so-important books are so good. Everyone knows this already, I know....

José de Alencar short novel-like book Iracema (1865), is an early classic of Brazilian literature, or so I am told. Few readers will see it...

Since I have been commending myself for my exemplary humility, I will take the opportunity to explain the internet icon I have been using fo...

So yesterday I made a list of the most famous 19th century books that I have not read. I did not list any Asian books, because to my knowled...

Prof. Novel Reading has been playing the Humiliation game, in which she confesses to the most glaring omissions in her lifetime reading. Fo...