Wuthering
Expectations

Lockwood the lodger is much like the first-time reader. He's completely lost before Wuthering Heights has even properly begun. We'r...

"I could not bear the employment. I took my dingy volume by the scroop, and hurled it into the dog kennel, vowing I hated a good book. ...

Tourmaline, or the Doorkeeper (1853) is hardly a favorite of mine, but it has a Modernist feel to it that is especially interesting, so I...

Adalbert Stifter's stories - all six that I've read, at least - feature eccentric bachelors and semi-bachelors. The priest in Limest...

The Hungarian steppes of Brigitta . The island on the mountain lake in The Recluse . The limestone hills of Limestone . The Saharan ruin fol...

Limestone, or the Poor Benefactor ( 1848/1853) is something close to typical Stifter. It's narrated by a surveyor, assigned to map an i...

And it's about time. NYRB has re-published the old Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Mayer translation of Adalbert Stifter's Christmas n...

Adam Bede has a plot, although I haven't bothered to mention it so far, mostly because I don't care much about it. But about two-th...

I have been getting stuck on the harvest party, near the end of Adam Bede . That party is actually a structural sequel to a remarkable long ...

Just a little piece of the Harvest Party chapter of Adam Bede , since the day seems to have slipped away from me: "A grin of delight br...

How many great writers lack a sense of humor? Very few, I think. I'd pick out Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Mann, let's see, Yukio Mis...

George Eliot is at the "centre," F. R. Leavis tells me, in a Foreword included in the Signet Classics edition of Adam Bede , ...

Or at least the narrator of the story White Nights (1848) is, at least for a while. He's a young social misfit, a St. Petersburg flaneu...

Well, funny. Or at least he writes in a comic style. Let's try a passage - Golyadkin, The Double 's man with a double, has just deci...

Poor Folks is, like many first novels, stuffed with other books. For example, right in the center of the novel the main character, a copy c...

Fyodor Dostoevsky's first two novellas, Poor Folks (1845/ 1846) and The Double (1846), are full of surprises, at least to me. Poor Fol...

There was an Old Man of Quebec, A beetle ran over his neck; But he cried, 'With a needle, I'll slay you, O beadle!' That angry O...

The Kabuki-za theater in central Tokyo is a good example of an institution that's both old and not so old. The theater dates to 1889, b...

The Japan Lady Isabella Bird visited in 1878 is gone. One can visit it in books and pictures, but there's almost nothing else left. Worl...

Isabella Bird's trip to Japan was a consequence, indirectly, of the outcome of a Japanese civil war. Although Bird was in Japan just ten...