Wuthering
Expectations

While writing yesterday’s post, I got tangled in a Twitter “conversation” with people who were pretending to be crazy; it was about, in a se...

Lambert Strether’s idea of France is tied up in French books.  He came back from his honeymoon with lemon-coloured volumes in general on the...

The Ambassadors is a terrific Paris novel, even a bit of a tourist novel.  The point of view belongs entirely to Lambert Strether, returnin...

A good thing about reading the difficult, aggravating The Awkward Age (1899) so recently is that it makes The Ambassadors (1903), a novel ...

Harper’s Bazar asked a number of authors to write on the topic “The Turning Point of My Life.”  I believe Twain’s response was his last pub...

Two examples now of books Twain did finish in his old age, two miniature novels, A Double Barreled Detective Story (1902) and A Horse’s Tal...

For fifty years, The Mysterious Stranger, A Romance (1916) stood as Mark Twain’s final, posthumous novel.  Scholars working on the Twain ar...

What was Mark Twain writing in his old age?  I have to make a list.  It is a complex subject.  He lost interest in books , but he wrote an i...

Gorky’s Tolstoy and Other Reminiscences (2008) is translator and editor Donald Fanger’s replacement for an older collection titled Reminis...

Late Lyrics and Earlier , with Many Other Verses (1922) by Thomas Hardy, his sixth book of lyric poems.  Hardy was something like eighty-tw...

H. Leivick is the Russian among the American Yiddish poets.  The Russian Symbolist; Dostoevsky.  The Dostoevsky comparison comes from his bi...

I needed to refresh myself in the other great line of Modernist American poets, the ones who did not write in English.  So I poked around in...

Now, a good try.  A moderately useful book, the Poems of Carles Riba, with poems from 1919 through 1952 translated by J. L. Gili , a longti...

He might have been a student under the charm of a museum – which was exactly what, in a foreign town, in the afternoon of life, he would hav...

In the versions of Alexander Blok’s “The Twelve” that are not rock operas, the marauding Reds do some looting: Open up the cellars – treat ...

In January 1918, Alexander Blok banged out “The Twelve,” a twelve-canto idiosyncratic response to the revolution.  I have read four versions...

A year ago I read a cluster of books by the extraordinary generation of Russian Silver Age poets.  I skipped the slightly older Alexander Bl...

My prejudice was that E. E. Cummings was the author of Modernist Poetry for Dummies , assuming that “dummies” in that series is affectionate...

The strangeness of The Octopus is what makes it a great book, however great that might be.  Any hack can write a novel defending noble farm...

The Octopus begins with a poet on a bicycle, but it is mostly about wheat framers fighting the railroad, fighting over freight rates and pr...