Wuthering
Expectations

How about one more novel where the protagonist moves around all the time.   Mostly within one city, Peking, in this case, Rickshaw by Lao S...

I. J. Singer’s Yoshe Kalb (1932, tr. from the Yiddish by Maurice Samuel) is another novel about wandering, contemporary with Narcissus and ...

After the inventiveness of Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and the first big chunk of The Man Without Qualities (1930), it was a surprise to ...

A number of people are readalonging or have readalonged Henri Bosco’s 1948 novel Malicroix , newly translated by Joyce Zonana.   I’ve mentio...

Argentinean Doom begins when Argentinean literature begins, with The Gaucho Martín Fierro , “the 1872 epic gaucho poem by José Hernández,” “...

Caravana de Recuerdos is for some reason encouraging people to read some literature from Argentina this year – a “full year of “’the strain...

The Makioka Sisters begins in late 1936 and ends on April 26, 1941.   It was published in three parts from 1946 to 1948.   The beginning was...

The Makioka Sisters (1946-8), Junichiro Tanizaki’s UNESCO-stamped novel, was a puzzler.   It has two conceptual levels.   One of them took ...

Lately I have read a number of novels that depend on Big Historical Ironies.   The Big Irony is a big part of the point of the novel.   I me...

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (1994, tr. Stephen Snyder 2019) is a conceit-heavy fantasy about a novelist who lives on an anonymous island...

The title of Mes Amis ( My Friends , 1924) is ironic.   Our narrator, poor Victor Baton has no friends.   In each of the short sections of ...

Since I was complaining that I read too many great books, I will poke at a couple of not so-greats I recently enjoyed. The pleasure in Eve...

Bookish Twitter now and then has a cathartic freakout about someone or another destroying a book for some reason or another.   Living, as I ...

This is a piece about how readers change.   And about food. The long dinner chapter of To the Lighthouse (1928), Chapter XVII of “The Win...

Seven Japanese Tales (1970, tr. Howard Hibbett) by Juichiro Tanizaki.   Four of the “tales” are short stories from the 1910s and 1920s, pre...

I read only a few new books last year, but two of them starred Fools - the capital F kind – Kehlmann’s Tyll and Marly Youmans’s The Book of...

One of the new books I read last year, Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll (2017 in German, 2020 in Ross Benjamin’s English) was from the future.   I ac...

Robert Macfarlane’s Underland (2019) is as good as everyone says, so what do I need to say.   It’s a travel book where the locations are ca...