Wuthering
Expectations

When Mystical Creatures Attack by Kathleen Founds, a 2014 comic novel.  Not the kind of thing I normally read.  Blurbs point to or are writ...

Just one more Pinocchio post, I think.  So many people have been reading the book, saying what I might want to say.  Seraillon put up most ...

The Adventures of Pinocchio first appeared in 1881 as a serial in an Italian magazine for children.  The story ends with the murder by hang...

Grazia Delleda’s After the Divorce (1902) is a novel written a lot like a lot of novels are written now.  I would not have guessed it was ...

The plays of Vittorio Alfieri have not been brought into English effectively.  I say this on the basis of reading one of them – Saul (1784)...

Now, 18th century Italian tragedy, which I know by one name, Vittorio Alfieri, and by one play, Saul (1782), although he wrote several doze...

Some of you out there, who understand your commedia dell’arte , those with a liberal education, your hummus eaters, will know that this play...

Don’t forget that it is not too late to join in on next week’s Pinocchio fun.  I hope it is not too late, since I just started the book ton...

No, I have changed my mind.  I will write that post about Eliot’s humor. It is a funny book; Eliot is a funny writer.  The Jewish side of ...

In a comment to a Levi Stahl post on Daniel Deronda , Mark Marowitz advances the crackpot idea that the villainous husband Grandcourt is a...

The second big innovation or experiment in Daniel Deronda is the one readers dislike so much, the joining of two stories written in discord...

George Eliot was a great formal innovator.  This is not the way I think about her, nor the way I usually see her described, yet it is true. ...

Having read the novel badly, I do not want to waste time making an argument about Daniel Deronda .  Mostly I just want to mess around with t...

If I had more sense I would set Daniel Deronda (1876) aside and not write about it as I did with  Middlemarch (1871-2) when I read it seve...

The title is ironically misappropriated from Leopardi’s Canto XXXII, “Palinode to the Marchese Gino Capponi,” in the J. G. Nichols version. ...

I have switched to the J. G. Nichols translation of Leopardi.  The title is from Canto XXIV, “The Calm after the Storm.”  I have finally got...

I went to a different Leopardi poem, Canto VI, “Bruto Minore, ” p. 57 in Galassi.  Giacomo Leopardi is the great poet and essayist of pessim...

What is Italian literature?  I ignored the question; it is an important one for this literature.  These judgments are always retrospective: ...

In 2015, I am concentrating on Italian literature.  Unlike some other reading projects I have pursued here – Yiddish, Scottish, and Austrian...

Although respecting ancient tradition I made a list of best books, the fact is that I only read books incidentally.  I actually read words a...