Wuthering
Expectations

Max Beerbohm wrote a pleasing account of his visits to Algernon Swinburne.  “No. 2, the Pines,” is the essay, and Swinburne’s suburban addre...

In the fourth volume of Algernon Swinburne’s letters the alcoholic poet’s friends and family staged an intervention, saving his life at the ...

Three more examples of Trollope’s use of the sympathy device.  The Way We Live Now is Trollope’s angriest novel (disclaimer: that I have re...

Narrative contains within it a powerful tendency towards sympathy.  Anthony Trollope is more aware of this than most writers, or at least he...

When I read on vacation I do not take notes, and with a long, complex book I cannot write much without notes.  I read The Way We Live Now (...

Edwin Arlington Robinson sent me back to George Crabbe, and not just because one of Robinson’s poems is titled “George Crabbe.”  Crabbe is R...

Edwin Arlington Robinson made a useful move in The Children of the Night (1897), which I remind myself is his first (and also second) book ...

Edwin Arlington Robinson is a good example of why I wanted to turn to American writers for a while.  I last read him 25 years ago and came a...

A note on Mark Twain’s loose sense of structure in his early books.  They are such hodgepodges.  A bit of travel writing, a tall tale, some ...

First they read Walter Scott.  It was like the shock of a new world revealed.  (Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet , Ch. 6, tr. Mark Pol...

Crane writes about courage in its different forms in the stories in The Little Regiment , just as he does in The Red Badge of Courage .  I t...

I could use a book on Stephen Crane’s reading, too.  Or I could look at a Stephen Crane biography, I guess.  The research could be fruitless...

A little book about John Keats’s library; I would like to read that.  His first book, Poems (1817) , is mostly about his vocation as poet a...

Anka Muhlstein’s Monsieur Proust’s Library (2012) is deceptively titled.  There is never a hint of a library, except for the one in Proust’...

Reading G. K. Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse was like watching an early modern tabletop automaton in action (warning: noise), ...

Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965), among my favorite books, sent me to revisit one of its Victorian precursors, Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (...

Last fall, reading too many challenging books in a row – Walter Pater, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Valéry, Yves Bonnefoy – I vowed to switch t...

Stephen Crane’s The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) is a strange little book, but maybe not as strange as I first thought.  Although co...

I started my little bit of American reading early, before Christmas, which means for a while I will make remarks about books I read weeks ag...

First, planting some flags: The long Spanish novel La Regenta (1886) by Leopoldo Alas aka Clarín in July .  I remember that there was som...