Wuthering
Expectations

Rooting around my old things, I found this 1971 set of books written and illustrated by Richard Scarry, mostly.  I believe they originally c...

John Horne Burns was not a combat soldier during World War II, but worked in military intelligence and censorship.  For a while his work was...

John Horne Burns’s The Gallery (1947) is I guess one of those lost classics.  Myself, I prefer the found classics, but this one is interest...

For its first few pages, Evelina looks like an epistolary novel, like a Samuel Richardson novel.  “I am, dear Sir, with great regard” (Lett...

Business: the blog’s old “subscribe by email” function is being throttled on July 1.  I have moved every email subscriber over to a new serv...

I. J. Singer’s The Brothers Ashkenazi (1934-5 serialized in Yiddish, 1936 in English) is a big-sweep historical novel that begins with the ...

With any luck, I will, later this summer, visit The Mount , Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox, Massachusetts.   Not bad, huh? So I have been r...

The hardest book I’ve read recently, and the easiest.  The hardest not in French, a separate category of difficulty. Eudora Welty’s Delta ...

For some reason I paid $4.95 for Robert Coover’s Spanking the Maid (1982), although, if you can see the REGULAR PRICE, it’s $14!  For 94 pa...

  “The greatest English writer of our time” declares the cover of my copy of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940).   It’s a 1982 ...

Let’s say farewell to some books this week. Isn’t that cover of The Commitments (1987) great?   It is even more or less accurate.   “Jimm...

Wuthering Expectations is not moving, despite its recent transformation from a blog to a newsletter, but the Amateur Reader, the actual huma...

I meant to write some kind of D. H. Lawrence summary whatnot after my “Lawrence-influenced writers of the 1930s and 1940s” mini-series.  Thi...

Kay Boyle’s short novel The Crazy Hunter (1940) is about wealthy, horsey English people, and The Bridegroom’s Body (also 1940) begins: T...