Wuthering
Expectations

Chesnutt had been publishing short stories for over a decade when The Conjure Woman was published in 1899, so he was able to hurry together...

Yesterday I provided evidence, as I do now and again, that I should not review books.*  I described the stories in The Conjure Woman as ...

Today's post is part of the Harlem Renaissance branch of the Classics Circuit , ably organized by Rebecca Reid and others.  The Conju...

Despite my mockery of its terrible title, German Novellas of Realism I is a first-rate anthology.  Besides two good Stifter stories, it con...

How exciting.  I came across an Adalbert Stifter story that I had not known was available in English.  It's "Granite" also kno...

Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov had been discussing, by letter, which English novels to include in VN's Cornell literature courses, w...

I want to emphasize that Robert Louis Stevenson was a professional writer, a hack, although he lived at some distance from New Grub Street. ...

Thirteen years before "The Beach of Falesá," with no hint of the South Seas in the forecast, Robert Louis Stevenson was spending e...

I think I'll start at the end.  Robert Louis Stevenson's last collection of stories was Island Night's Entertainments (1893).  ...

I want to spend the week looking at the short stories of Robert Louis Stevenson.  The best of them are, within some limits, as good as anyon...

Paul Verlaine's clarity has surprised me.  Compared to the esotericism of Gérard de Nerval or the wild lingusitic play of Tristan Corbiè...

Paul Verlaine is hard to grasp or pin down, I find, because of the variety of his work.  He made wild swerves from book to book.  Fêtes Gala...

I have been reading two different translations of Paul Verlaine's poems.  They're oddly similar, and quite different.  Selected Poem...

A bit more of Fêtes Galantes , the shortest poem from the two translations I read. The Faun An ancient terra cotta faun Laughs on the g...

The poems in Paul Verlaine's  Fêtes Galantes (1869) are about commedia dell'arte characters prancing in the forest, chasing each ot...

With "The Scandal in Bohemia" (1891), the first Sherlock Holmes short story, Arthur Conan Doyle instantly eliminates the worst par...

Well, I found something in the Scottish Literature Challenge that really challenged me.  It was the last chapter of Arthur Conan Doyle's...

I've neglected the Scottishness of Boswell and Johnson's visit to Scotland.  The point of the trip was, after all, to see Scotland, ...

The Life of Johnson (1791) is such a big brick of a book.  Unless the reader is lucky enough to find the postern unlocked, long books, real...

I could not have asked for a better first entry to the Scottish Literature Challenge than this post on James Boswell's The Journal of t...