Wuthering
Expectations

I read most of the Yiddish books I meant to read, almost as many more that I found along the way, and now have an even longer list of books ...

“We have no desire to make extravagant claims: Yiddish literature can boast no Shakespeares, no Dantes, no Tolstois.” That's from the in...

Meaning, not for me. For someone else. One thing I've noticed reading Yiddish literature is its similarity to Senegalese literature, to ...

I. L. Peretz was expert with the sort of story I wrote about yesterday, detailed, small-scale. See not just his stories, but the remarkable ...

This week, God willing, I wrap up the Yiddish project. More on that later. Now I want to look at a great writer I somehow never wrote about,...

"Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation. Crime, which the human animal took a fancy to in his ...

Why do I have so much trouble with Charles Baudelaire? I have read four of his books recently, which helped some, but I remain nervous. Wha...

I don't spend much of my imaginative or literary life in Belgium. But lately I've been spending time with two vicious Belgium-basher...

Rubens might be a mummy, though, or a ghost. It's in Chapter 23, " Vashti ." Lucy Snowe is watching a play, and is enraptured...

Fiction writers, even the most perverse, especially the most perverse, like to give their readers clues about how to read their novels. Char...

Dickens was a master of the rhetoric of fiction. His range of modes and methods rivaled that of any writer who ever lived. I would guess tha...

The continuing Dickens problem, for the first decade of his career as a novelist: the young, pure heroes and heroines are boring. In Dombey ...

Hey, waddaya know, I finished Dombey and Son (1846-8). This was Dickens's seventh novel, and his best yet. Months ago, a friendly com...

Just a bit on the actual book, first. So feel free to skip ahead to the eight year old if uninterested in the history of classical China. Th...

I feel so bad. I forgot, last week, when writing about Sholem Aleichem's The Railroad Stories , to mention the song "Train Across ...

I thought I was going to pin down a couple of my favorites among Sholem Aleichem's Railroad Stories , but I'm having trouble doing ...

"My goodness, the things one sees traveling! It's a pity I'm not a writer. And yet come to think of it, what makes me say I...

Lamed Shapiro was probably a pretty darkly hued fellow to begin with, but he was also rejecting some of what he saw as the sentimentality or...

A couple of examples of Lamed Shapiro's mostly unhappy world that aren't so directly about violence. Indirectly, yes. In "Befor...

Now here's a tricky writer to recommend. Lamed Shapiro wrote some of the most graphically violent stories I have ever encountered. A lot...