Wuthering Expectations

Daniel Kehlmann’s previous novel, Tyll (2017), wasabout a magical clown wandering through the hellscape of the Thirty Years’War.  Apparently that was not grim enoughfor him so his new novel, The Director (2023), although there is someearly hopeful Hollywood...

My summer plan was to read, short, easy books, and I almostsucceeded.  I read short, difficult booksin French, and accidentally read several grim, sad, violent books, alongside someplayful nonsense.
FICTION
The Field of Life and Death (1935), Xiao Hong – For example.  Ninety pages of classic Chinese peasantmisery.  Plague, starvation, abuse, and thenthe Japanese invade, with a Cormac McCarthy-like level of violence in a numberof places.  I had planned to...

In case yesterday’s invitation was a bit abstract, here ismy current sense of a twenty-play Elizabethan Not Shakespeare syllabus that Iwould like to investigate beginning next fall. I’ve read twelve of them.
Please note that almost every date below should be precededby “c.”  A few are likely quite wrong....

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to do.  I’ve been wanting to return to the plays of Shakespeare’scontemporaries, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson and so on.  The Spanish Tragedy, The Duchess ofMalfi, The Knight of the Burning Pestle,  Bartholomew...