Wuthering
Expectations

That first sentence in the title is broken into the last three lines of a W. G. Sebald poem, one written in English, titled “I remember” ( A...

To the book itself, to the new collection of W. G. Sebald poetry, Across the Land and Water .  Few of the poems in the book had been previou...

I have been so "with it" lately, writing about so many new books, even if they are only new collections or translations of old tex...

Nescio is slotted with his contemporaries Robert Walser and Franz Kafka as an example of “clerk literature” by Joseph O’Neill.  That’s my te...

I want to jot down some notes on Nescio, now author of a slender NYRB book titled Amsterdam Stories .  Damion Searls is the translator.  The...

No need to actually answer the question.  It is just something I have been wondering about.  I assume that anyone interested in culture – an...

The eagle-eyed reader of my Ambrose Bierce pieces may have noted the recurring appearance of death, or Death. In any case, it is certainly t...

Some scholars think that “What I Saw of Shiloh” is the single best piece Bierce ever wrote, and I am inclined to agree. The final paragraph ...

Ambrose Bierce’s stories are the traditional link between the weird tales of Edgar Allan Poe and the Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft and his ...

How about I start with the bad news about Ambrose Bierce, or at least describe an odd aspect of his fiction.  Then the rest of the week will...

REVIEW, v. t. To set your wisdom (holding not a doubt of it,     Although in truth there’s neither bone nor skin to it) At work upon a b...

Henry James told William Dean Howells that Washington Square suffered because, living in Europe, he “[felt] acutely the want of the ‘paraph...

"I am not magnificent," she said mildly, wishing that she had put on another dress. "You are sumptuous, opulent, expensive,...

"She has an income of ten thousand dollars in her own right, left her by her mother; if she marries a husband I approve, she will come ...

Back thisaway , while I was idly speculating that I might someday read a word or two more of the writing of Henry James, Emma of Book Around...

My last disastrous exploring expedition was to the Panamanian jungle , about a year ago.  This time I crossed Australia from Melbourne to th...

Friday is a holiday, so this will be the end of my wrassling with The Book of Disquiet .  I do not write anything for Wuthering Expectations...

What I would like to do is work through an interpretation of The Book of Disquiet .  What I am likely to do is string together a bunch of ...

The Book of Disquiet could use – I could use – an index.  If I were to do something more thoughtful with the book, my first step would be t...

The Book of Disquiet begins with instructions:  how to organize The Book of Disquiet .  Instructions to an editor, presumably, not the read...