Wuthering
Expectations

The heavy white volumes Phaidon publishes in their Art and Ideas series are, physically, among my favorite books. The pages are stiff, thic...

I had a wonderful, really excellent, absolutely top notch week on the Yiddish writer S. Ansky planned. But a comment from Neil of the dang...

I'm as bad as Menakhem-Mendl, her husband - I got carried away by work and have neglected Sheyne-Sheyndl. Sheyne-Sheyndl always starts h...

I spent some time with a bit of Mark Twain yesterday. Sholem Aleichem is sometimes called the Jewish Mark Twain. Cuz they're both funny....

All right, now I have a real complaint about Remarkable Creatures : its author abuses literature. I didn't actually discover this; mia m...

In a sense, I'm not quite the right reader for Remarkable Creatures . Not because I already have the history of science covered - ho ho,...

This will almost be a proper book review. Sean Carroll's Remarkable Creatures : Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species ...

Drinking with Friends Amongst the Blooming Peonies We had a drinking party To admire the peonies. I drank cup after cup till I was drunk. Th...

Winter Night It is late in the Winter night. I am absorbed in a book And forget to go to bed. My wife takes my lamp and says, “Do you know w...

An antiquarian shows the island travellers his book collection: "Upon gaining the vault, forth flew a score or two of bats, extinguishi...

A pious Jew died, leaving many wonderful books, which the heirs sold to strangers. And when the other pious Jews saw this, they were pained ...

A little setup: most of Herman Melville's Mardi is a journey from island to island, each with a different king, different society, diff...

Sholem Aleichem left Russia in 1905, after witnessing a pogrom from the second story of a hotel. From then on, until his death in 1916, he w...

So greed is bad, I think we all more or less agree about that. What's a fellow to do about it? Be less greedy, I suppose. Or reform soci...

All of the plays in God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation are American (written in the U.S., performed in New York theaters), b...

More samples from Nahma Sandrow's God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation . I had not planned to write about this for more tha...

Yiddish literature is full of surprises. Whatever I thought I might find, it did not include a play with a cast of characters featuring: AUN...

So if I were to take this idea seriously - when and how did poets and novelists start writing seriously about animals - I would have to look...

Thinking about literary animals, I have wandered into 18th century England, when the poets either had cats, or wrote about them, or both. He...

"A little later comes a hedgehog, a muddle-headed, scatter-brained creature, bold yet easily frightened, who scuttles along in a nearsi...