Wuthering
Expectations

When I was first learning to root around in literature, Vintage International was the publisher with the spines that caught my attention.  T...

John Gunther’s memoir Death Be Not Proud (1949), the account of his teenage son’s illness and death from a brain tumor, was one of the smal...

John O’Hara wrote  Appointment in Samarra in 1934, but it is set in 1930.  The main character in 1930 is just about O’Hara’s age in 1934, c...

Appointment in Samarra has the restless energy that a jumpy 28-year old pours into a first novel.  The three-day crash of a doomed protagon...

  Dolce Bellezza suggested a readalong of John O’Hara’s first novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934), and although I did not do much to prom...

Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country (1948, although mostly published 1935-7) is a short novel about the sad, hard life of a hot springs prosti...

When I read Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps (1936), about a walk through the Liberian forests, I wondered about the pointlessness of ...

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...