Wuthering
Expectations

Mark Twain, Anton Chekhov, both kind of dark.  I could use that as a transition from Twain to Chekhov.  Twain moves in an anti-humanist dire...

This piece is just one long, soulful, sardonic laugh at human life.  (from “About Play-acting,” 1898) Mark Twain is describing a Viennese pl...

Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), what a strange novel.  First, that apostrophe – there should be two, right? Second, Twain’s original idea was t...

My problem with The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) had been that one major character, Lord Henry Wotton, speaks in the voice of Oscar Wilde...

When The Picture of Dorian Gray was serialized, it was widely and snarkily reviewed.  Wilde engaged, with a couple of the reviewers, leadin...

With some new context, I read The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891) for the third time.  Three times is a lot for me, especially for a se...

As much as  I have enjoyed Edwin Arlington Robinson’s books, and as good as The Man against the Sky (1916) is, it may be time for me to swi...

Shelley’s lack of narrative sophistication drove me crazy, as it always has.  I mean the times when Shelley loses control of her three-level...

Today is the 200th anniversary of not the publication (1818) but the conception by the 18 year-old Mary Godwin of Frankenstein; or the Moder...

It covers a period of two days; runs to twenty-seven pages of large type exclusive of appendices; and carries as many exclamation points as ...

“Would some one mind explaining to me the meaning of every other word you’ve used,” I said.  “What’s a trackless ‘heef’?  What’s an Area?  W...

What a shame that there is not a recent edition of Rudyard Kipling’s collections of short stories, annotated – in some cases, heavily annota...

“I thought you thought everything signified.  You were so full,” she cried, “of signification!” Yes, exactly, just what that character from ...

Henry James was a restless, experimental writer who wrote his way to his ideas.  I mean experimental in the sense that he had to try an idea...

Ransom had heard that the Cape was the Italy, so to speak, of Massachusetts… I take this line as Jamesian sarcasm.  It comes early in the re...

Henry James has some great descriptions of people in The Bostonians .  Maybe too many for what he is doing, even, like he is a comic who get...

She had been consumed by the passion of sympathy; it had crumpled her into as many creases as an old glazed, distended glove.  (Ch. 5) Henry...

I have dithered about writing about G. K. Chesterton’s Collected Poems – maybe not interesting enough – but then maybe it is.  You may for ...

When I read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) long ago, long, long ago, I already knew that it was a mishmash of stories ,...

Isaac Rosenberg is now, inescapably, a “war poet.”  Rosenberg was killed in action in France in April 1918.  He was 27.  His great poetic ac...