Wuthering
Expectations

This week at Wuthering Expectations:  educational literature.  Or literature about education.  Whatever.  I don’t care. First up, the form...

All of Inger Christensen’s poetry in English comes from one translator, Susanna Nied, who worked closely with the poet, who knew English wel...

Build into the rules of the game the inevitable breach of the rules as if it were a rule.  As if inevitable death were a natural turn.  Need...

well, I don’t know about that: will the worms send us back to the chef: will we be too rare or too tough or overdone or sauceless: I thi...

For months, I have been rummaging around in recent American poetry – Amy Clampitt, Rita Dove, Peter Cole – without writing much about it.  ...

I have to write about some of the Nicanor Parra antipoems that I read, however theoretically in Spanish, just to remind myself that I did it...

Richard of Caravana de Recuerdos wanted people to read the poems and antipoems of Chilean physicist and antipoet Nicanor Parra.  We both rea...

The marriage of Count and Countess Holk has turned sour.  The children are old enough to go to boarding school; building the new beachfront ...

Three examples of Fontane’s influence or perhaps just presence, one predictable, another unusual, and the third hard to believe. Thomas Ma...

When my old book club read Effi Briest – this was ages ago – several readers found the late 19th century Prussian setting and the German na...

Maybe ten years ago I read a number of the short novels of Theodor Fontane, the German novelist with confusingly French name,* and I reread ...

Event: German Literature Month, hosted by Lizzie’s Literary Life and Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat . Book: The Perpetual Motion Machine by Pa...

No, I don’t know what that means.  It’s in Chapter 13 of Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries . At Vapour Trails , Séamus has written about the mysteri...

The key place where Hamsun updates Dostoevsky is in Chapter 7, where the oddball outsider Nagel is at a party arguing about Gladstone.  The ...

Everyone who reads Hunger compares it to Dostoevsky.  I did it, too.  The voice of the narrator makes him feel like a cousin of a Dostoevsk...

What am I waiting for?  Here it is, the Knut Hamsun Mysteries readalong event, where a number of thrill-seeking readers enjoy one of the al...

First, a reminder: next week we will implement readalong blogging procedures for Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries and Nicanor Parra’s Poemas y Antip...

There is a minor character in A Dream Play , the Billposter – you know, like theatrical posters – who is the first happy person the goddess ...

Ingmar Bergman devotes a chapter of The Magic Lantern to A Dream Play (1901).  “In 1986, I was to direct Strindberg’s A Dream Play for th...

STRANGER:  I’ll soon believe nothing is impossible.  This is the worst I have ever known. MOTHER:  Oh no.  There's worse possible.  Ju...