Wuthering
Expectations

The real masterpiece of Actions and Reactions , I thought, was “With the Night Mail,” a science fiction story about a mail run from London t...

Rudyard Kipling’s Actions and Reactions (1909) is the weakest of his short story collections that I have read, and I think that I just have...

Some easier Kipling, Rewards and Fairies (1910).  It’s a book for children, so I hope it’s easier. What children, though.  In each story ...

Maybe one more day of incomprehension, to finish off the week.  A different kind of bafflement, though.  I completed, in the page-turning se...

It covers a period of two days; runs to twenty-seven pages of large type exclusive of appendices; and carries as many exclamation points as ...

“Would some one mind explaining to me the meaning of every other word you’ve used,” I said.  “What’s a trackless ‘heef’?  What’s an Area?  W...

What a shame that there is not a recent edition of Rudyard Kipling’s collections of short stories, annotated – in some cases, heavily annota...

No, one more note on Kipling, a tentative one on his poems, his verse as he always called it.  I made an attempt on the 1940 Rudyard Kipling...

A last note on The Day’s Work , on a story that is not quite one of the best but interesting – fascinating – in its own odd way.  It gives a...

“The Bridge-Builders” leads off The Day’s Work .  Kipling is building a gigantic bridge across the Ganges this time, rather than a ship’s en...

She delighted in hearing men talk of their own work, and that is the most fatal way of bringing a man to your feet.  (“William the Conqueror...

The shell that arrived by way of the Chief Engineer’s cabin was some five inches in diameter, with a practice, not a bursting, charge.  It h...

In a given book of short stories, how many of the stories should be from the point of view of a horse?  A narrow reader, my answer would be ...

To prepare for a big novel about fairies I thought I would read an earlier books about fairies, Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906...

I don’t know if A. S. Byatt’s Oxford Book of English Short Stories is truly eccentric or if I am imposing a pattern suggested by her clever...

This is a bibliographic post about Just So Stories .  Useful and nicely illustrated. On the one hand, there is no reason to fuss over gett...

At time the Jungle Books were clearly books for children, at times something else.  The animal and origin fables in Kipling’s   Just So Sto...

I cannot escape the feeling that writing too much about Kim after reading it once, or making too strong of a claim about it, is a mistake. ...

Kipling packs in the characters, the rush of life, all kinds of sensory detail, place names.  And languages, too.  He enjoys scenes where ch...

The Grand Trunk Road scenes in Kim are spectacular.  They are so full of variety, of life, that they seem to sprawl outside the bounds of t...