Wuthering
Expectations

The plays of Aristophanes are more context-dependent than anything else we’ve been reading, the comprehension, set aside the humor, of many ...

The Wasps (422 BCE) by Aristophanes is a satire of juries, not really of the functioning of the Athenian judicial system but of the old men...

Sophocles’s The Women of Trachis is usually dated to the early 420s, so in the same period as the string of Aristophanes and Euripides play...

The Clouds by Aristophanes, 423 BCE, performed the same year as The Suppliants , perhaps, although it is a later, revised, version of The C...

  Some of these books have to got back to the library.   Let’s write ‘em up. *** Some Prefer Nettles (1929) by Tanziaki Junichiro.   A ...

The Suppliants , or The Suppliant Women , by Euripides, c. 423 BCE, or perhaps a few years later depending on how certain passages link to s...

My piece about Dorothy Richardson’s The Tunnel (1919) was a bit late, and now I’ll write up Interim (1920), the fifth novel in the Pilgrim...

The Knights (424 BCE), the second surviving Aristophanes play.  The target is the demagogue, a familiar figure today, and thank goodness be...

The Tunnel is by far the longest book in the Pilgrimage series – almost 300 pages! not actually long – and it contains the longest chapter...

The Tunnel (1919) by Dorothy Richardson, the fourth book in the Pilgrimage series, is what I will write about here.  There are always inte...

So what is Hecuba to him, exactly?  Shakespeare would have meant the Hecuba from Seneca’s gruesome Troades (1st century CE), not the Hecuba...

The Acharnians (425 BCE) by Aristophanes, his third play and our first.  It is a chaotic joke machine, so no wonder I did not remember it a...

Andromache by Euripides, performed sometime around 425 BCE.  Another example of the Euripidean mess, in my opinion – the title character va...

Laird Hunt’s Zorrie reminded me strongly of an interesting bestseller from a century earlier, Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground (1925).  Glasg...

Nancy Pearl, America’s librarian, asked Twitter to recommend favorite “quiet” novels, and what surprised me is that people responded as if ...

Sophocles, Oedipus the King , performed c. 426.  A perfect work of art, although hardly the perfect play.  We have read enough to see that f...

Now here’s a Greek tragedy – Hippolytos , performed 428 BCE, winning Euripides the first prize.  Or maybe one of the other lost Euripides pl...