Wuthering
Expectations

It’s all so Freudian, isn’t it, the basis of all these Schnitzler stories?  Schnitzler’s characters reveal or discover  themselves as the re...

The one hour of voluptuous joy he had experienced with Clara now seemed to him to be surrounded by spine-chilling horror.  (172) Now that is...

For last year’s German Literature Month, I tried out Arthur Schnitzler’s best known play, Der Reigen / La Ronde , which was about sex and i...

The title of Fortunata and Jacinta is misleading, suggesting some sort of balance between the two characters, and Galdós does his best to i...

I was surprised at the earthiness of Fortunata and Jacinta , at its vulgarity.  Victorian English (and American, and for that matter Russian...

Jacinta’s dream, early in Fortunata and Jacinta , is matched by Fortunata’s dream late in the novel.  A reminder, Jacinta is the angelic wif...

Fortunata and Jacinta is nominally a work of “realism,” whatever that is.  How odd that it is so full of dreams, mental illness, and saints...

Fortunata and Jacinta , the gigantic 1886 novel by Benito Pérez Galdós, is one of the two greatest Spanish novels of the nineteenth century,...

The absence of recognizable fiction for such a long stretch of Mark Twain’s early career explains what had been a mystery to me, why his fir...

Let’s strangle some jokes today.  Just writing about them makes them shrivel. This one is from “’Mark Twain’ on the Launch of the Steamer ...

In what passes for an idea at Wuthering Expectations, I browsed through a book titled The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain , Doubleday, ...

So what was the youthful, vigorous Mark Twain doing with his time? In San Francisco the men of ‘The Call’ told me many legends of Mark’s app...

At times I could hear Mark Twain behind Rudyard Kipling.  Pawing through a volume of Twain (the first volume of Library of America Collecte...

By 1888 Rudyard Kipling had created one great character, an Irish soldier in the colonial service, Private Terence Mulvaney.  A private at t...

That line in the title would not be out of place in any number of Kipling stories, but I read it in “The Other Man,” one of the Plain Tales ...

Rudyard Kipling’s imaginative territory is large.  “The Man Who Would Be King” and “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” would be logical pl...

None the less, here begins the story where every right-minded story should begin, that is to say at Simla, where all things begin and many c...

Two more ghost stories, both by Rudyard Kipling:  “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” and “My Own True Ghost Story.”  Both stories are circa 1888.  This...

The final ghost story of the week is William Hope Hodgson’s “The Gateway of the Monster,” the first story in the 1910 collection Carnacki, t...

“The Upper Berth” (1886) by F. Marion Crawford and “The Red Room” (1896) by H. G. Wells.  The titles link the stories – both are in the “spe...