Wuthering
Expectations

In May, I wrote about French travel writer Sylvain Tesson’s In the Forests of Siberia (2011), the book on his long, lonely stay in a cabin...

Months ago, I was reading quite a bit of the literature of the Spanish Civil War, especially the poetry but also George Orwell’s clear-eyed ...

In 1901, William James gives a series of lectures in Edinburgh that will become The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).   In 1951, Lu...

The 1801 and 1851 chapters of Jonathan Rée’s Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English are both built around writers I do not normal...

Onward into Jonathan Rée’s Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English .   I have reached “1701: Politics, religion and the two new phi...

The first chapter of Jonathan Rée’s Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English is titled “1601: Philosophy Learns English.”   It is m...

I would like to – no, I will – spend some time with Jonathan Rée’s Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English (2019), a history of mo...

By using such details, O’Hara almost single-handedly invented what came to be known as the New Yorker story.   (Frank MacShane, “Introducti...

The first story in Collected Stories of John O’Hara (1984) is “The Doctor’s Son” (1935), about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.   Several mon...

Aldous Huxley wrote good literary criticism, travel writing, art criticism, short stories, as well as four novels during the 1920s, all loos...

Brave New World (1932) was the first book assigned at the University of Kansas, long, oh so long ago, in a course naively titled “Western C...

Tender Is the Night , F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel about the decline and fall of a talented psychiatrist, is full of fine writing, begin...

Finally, I have finished Georges Bernanos’s Journal d'un curé de campagne ( Diary of a Country Priest , 1936), a 285-page novel that ha...

Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43) is on the one hand a 1,500 page monster that decompresses roughly the second half of Genesi...

See here – voici – the books I read in French in June that are not Diary of a Country Priest (1937) by Georges Bernanos, which is still in...

Graham Greene spent four weeks in 1935 on vacation in Liberia, with a taste of Sierra Leone and Guinea, walking through the upland forests. ...

Well into June, the last four books I read in May, quickly dispatched. Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark (1932), one of Nabokov’s Be...

More books I read in May. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931).   A difficult book.   It pushes Woolf’s ideas about the representation of con...