Wuthering
Expectations

Balzac retroactively organized the pieces of his evolving “Human Comedy” into big categories, some obvious, like “Scenes from Parisian Life,...

I suggested to The Argumentative Old Git that Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony has a lot in common with Goethe’s Faust, Pt. II , and...

American and Irish fantasies last week; French this week, beginning with the Gustave Flaubert’s semi-novel, his obsessive folly, La Tentatio...

Two more fantasy books that are exact contemporaries with The Circus of Dr. Lao .  Real period specialists read a lot of third and fourth an...

To the left, we see the back cover of the 1964 Bantam edition of Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935), which I purchased for $...

Steven Millhauser won a Pulitzer for his novel Martin Dressler (1996) and somewhere around that time I read a review that must have impres...

I fear I need a system, a structure, to get writing again.  What if I work backwards?  Let’s see, what is the last book I finished.  Oh no, ...

“The great Gaboriau said, didn’t he? – ‘always suspect that which seems probable, and begin by believing what seems incredible.’” “If he s...

What I read in November, in list form, with light opinionation.  No idea what good this is to me, except psychologically, and I doubt that, ...

One last gesture towards German Literature Month: Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1941) and Galileo (1947), both read in...

Young Joseph (1934) is the second novel of four in Thomas Mann’s biblical YA fantasy series Joseph and His Brothers .  It is the cute littl...

Some interesting things in or about Joseph d’Arbaud’s The Beast of Vaccares (1926). The framing narrator, a young Camargue cowboy, is giv...

We all enjoyed our trip, several months ago, to the Rhone River delta, the Camargue, when we poked around in in Henri Bosco’s Malicroix (19...

When I was first learning to root around in literature, Vintage International was the publisher with the spines that caught my attention.  T...

John Gunther’s memoir Death Be Not Proud (1949), the account of his teenage son’s illness and death from a brain tumor, was one of the smal...

John O’Hara wrote  Appointment in Samarra in 1934, but it is set in 1930.  The main character in 1930 is just about O’Hara’s age in 1934, c...