Wuthering
Expectations

A bit more late late James before my long long vacation, if that is what it is.  I’ll be back in June.  Let me know what you want me to brin...

I’ve been reading some of the last stories of Henry James – “Julia Bride” (1908), “Crapy Cornelia” (1909), “The Bench of Desolation” (1909) ...

The most remarkable single chapter of Nostromo is Part III, Chapter 10, about five-sixths of the way in, which in a properly structured nov...

What a relief – I have been reading Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) – that some novelist finally figured out that 1) stories do not have to...

Thomas Hardy’s Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles (1925) is the second of the three books Hardy wrote and assembled in his eig...

The Ivan Bunin that Graham Hettlinger translates in Collected Stories is a nostalgist.  His longing for a vanished Russian was reinforced b...

Ivan Bunin was a prolific short story writer for most of his life.  Early on he was best known as a poet.  He wrote novels, a book about Che...

“The Gentleman from San Francisco” (1915) is Ivan Bunin’s most famous story at this point, I think, although I do not remember ever seeing i...

After reading a book of the poems of Angelos Sikelianos , I pushed on into modern Greek poetry a bit with the 1981 Selected Poems of Odysse...

In his 1909 Preface to Wings of the Dove , Henry James writes: But my use of windows and balconies is doubtless at best an extravagance by i...

When Mrs. Stringham sees Milly Theale on the edge of an abyss, she imagines that Milly is contemplating suicide, but she also imagines that ...

The Wings of the Dove is built out of distances and gaps.  James approaches the central characters, the central story, from a distance, and...

The piece about The Ambassadors in The Cambridge Companion to Henry James (1998) was all about sex.  The chapter on The Wings of the Dove ...

So it’s not just me.  I’m glad to know that.  Here is William James writing to his brother in 1902: I have read The Wings of the Dove (for ...

Daniel Beer’s The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars (2017) filled a major gap in my understanding of Russian history.  An i...

I usually write up these ragbag poetry posts when a poet is giving me trouble – which is most of the time.  Pick out some good scraps – so, ...

Max Jacob was a painter, friend of the famous (once the friends became more famous than him), and master, or at least writer, of the strange...

Today the short book of translated poetry at hand is Perched on Nothing’s Branch: Selected Poems (1986) by Attila Jószef (1905-37).  Ah, th...

From the Greek section of Willis Barnstone’s Modern European Poetry anthology (1966), I have picked up the idea, likely wrong, that the gre...

Have you glanced at what few, I should think, would read through – the mighty mass of Coleridge’s collected letters?  It is of course a prof...