Wuthering
Expectations

Another readalong post, by Simon Lavery , on La Regenta covering one of the main characters, the bad priest, in particular how he is introd...

The sarcasm of Leopoldo Alas can be a thing of beauty: They were going to inspect the hunting dogs and a St Bernard which Paco had bought a ...

Oh thank goodness someone has already written a better readalong piece about La Regenta .  It is by Scott Bailey .  He goes straight for the...

To remind myself how to write, I will gather some general notes about Leopoldo Alas’s gigantic 1885 novel La Regenta , perhaps still the foc...

Antonio Machado became a schoolteacher in 1907 – French, and later Spanish.  He taught in schools all over Spain, and in each case wrote poe...

Spanish Literature Month ! My July vacation has gelled so that I will be away for most of the month and will thus not write about Leopoldo...

Once I start looking for correspondences between Chekhov and Tolstoy, they become too easy to find.  Such rich writers give me a lot to mess...

“Now that’s from Chekhov’s Tolstoyan period,” says Scott Bailey, again and again – he said it yesterday – and I used to think, “What is he ...

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...