Wuthering
Expectations

Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo or Drifting Clouds (1887-89) is the first modern Japanese novel. Meaning the first to successfully incorpor...

Jorge Luis Borges is a writer with whom I feel very comfortable. He's had as much impact on the way I think about books as just about an...

I've been enjoying, a bit too much for my own good, the amazing 1899 London Daily Telegraph list of the " 100 Best Novels in the W...

"Snow-Bound" (1866) was, one might suspect, actually designed as a unique form of torment for high school students. Twenty pages o...

John Greenleaf Whittier makes a good punching bag. Even in a short collection like the Robert Penn Warren edition that I'm reading, just...

I counted the pages devoted to 19th century poets in eight anthologies of American poetry. With one exception, the books all try to cover al...

The Denver Bibliophile (actually, see here ) and the Commonplace Blog are asking for nominations for the most overrated novel. Nominees so...

Why, it's my birthday. Two years of Wuthering Expectations. Last year , I celebrated with Wuthering Heights . Logically, this year it...

William Pritchard has been a literature professor at Amherst College for over 50 years. He's written a memoir on the subject, English Pa...

William Pritchard is, I think, my favorite living critic.* I can't guess why he's not better known, except that one of his specialti...

A little over a year ago, I found myself, much to my surprise, in Tokyo . I spent a month there, weekdays in a tiny overheated conference ro...

I picked one of the Moroccan books recommended to me , Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami, and jumped in. I read the book al...

As if by internet magic, Elizabeth Spencer appears in the Wall Street Journal a day after I write about her.* She provides a list of her Fi...

So I have a theory that I in fact had heard of Elizabeth Spencer, author of the best-selling novella The Light in the Piazza , but had releg...

While I'm wandering outside the 19th century, how about I write a little about Elizabeth Spencer? The story so far: A year ago , I rea...

Ma femme and I are thinking of going to Morocco is January. She has been doing the reading, not me. I do not, it turns out, know where to s...

The book is Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine (2009) by ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan. Here...

"Now, what colour are ash-buds in March?" Is the man going mad? thought I. He is very like Don Quixote. "What colour are ...

Cranford was one of three major English novels published in 1853,* along with Bleak House and Villette . Should I add Gaskell's own Ru...

Every now and again I come across someone praising a book or movie because it features a "strong female character." I've never...