Tag Archives: henry james
Pugs of Wisdom: Time and the Master!
The sublime Anthony Lane (surely it’s time for a follow-up to Nobody’s Perfect?) on the novels of Henry James: His books are drenched in time: the times at which they were written, and the times and ways in which they were rewritten or left alone; the times in which they are set; the times that [...]
Leon Edel’s One-Volume Henry James!
Our book today is Henry James: A Life, Leon Edel’s massive 1985 one-volume abridgment of the monumental five-volume James biography he worked on for twenty years. That five-volume set, finished in 1972, constitutes another classic example of a “Steve book” – a book my friends are a) certain I’ve read and b) almost equally certain [...]
Penguins on Parade: The Princess Casamassima!
Some Penguin Classics are a bit guilt-inducing, even with the best of intentions. Surely there’s no author in the last century who induces guilt quite so readily – if unintentionally – as Henry James? We sense at once how formidable he is, but we cannot love him as we know he wants us to, and [...]
Penguins on Parade: RLS in the South Seas!
Some Penguin Classics stand as reminders of what might have been. Necessarily, the entire shelf of Penguin Classics from ancient Greece and Rome serve this melancholy purpose – imagining the lost works of Sophocles, Euripides, Asinius Pollio, Livy, and the rest all here with us, neatly persevered inside those so-familiar black-spined paperbacks, knowing with that [...]
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