Wuthering
Expectations

Nicholas Jenkins – I did not register his name at all for the entire first novel, but I know it now – goes to school, gets a job in publishi...

My writing here is often about what surprised me or did not.  So let’s have that about the first four novels of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to ...

In France, at the Lyon public library, I was surprised to bump into so many romans fleuves , whatever those are.  They were notable on the s...

I should make that the new official slogan of the blog.  It is from p. 614 of Finnegans Wake , one of the books I recently read. FICTION ...

More keys.  As Anna Livia Plurabelle says or thinks or dreams at the very end of Finnegans Wake , “The keys to.”  She is falling asleep so s...

I am too tired to write about  Finnegans Wake which is a good state for writing about this dream novel where characters keep falling asleep...

Over the last month I read Finnegans Wake (1939).  I first read some bits of it in college, in a Norton Anthology of British Literature , a...

I will write about two newly published translations of Spanish novels that comprise an amusing stunt by Open Letter Books.  They are Attila ...

FICTION The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904), Arthur Conan Doyle – My emergency book, the book on my phone, for when I need to read in th...

Another remarkable Russian novel finally made it into English last year, Andrey Platonov’s Chevengur , written in 1929 but not published unt...

I read Andrey Platonov’s novel Chevengur (1929) not too long ago and the collection of stories Soul (1935-46) last month.  Here we will ha...

Wolf Solent has pressed his beautiful young wife against an ash tree, presumably as a prelude to sex, but he begins rubbing the bark: ‘Hum...

Last summer I read John Cowper Powys’s novel Wolf Solent (1929) and recently I read A Glastonbury Romance (1932), not his first novels but...

One of these books is 1,100 pages long.  It was just by chance that I read two genuinely disgusting books at around the same time. FICTION...

My subject is Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart (1943), her first novel, and the only book of hers I have read.  I read Alison Ent...

Farewell to The Story of the Stone and a valuable browse in Chinese literature.  I’ll do it again someday. FICTION The Peony Pavilion ...