Embedding oneself in The Ambassadors by Henry James is like reading little else. I feel as if every time I start up again an unending endoscopy of my perceptions proceeds until I shut the book. Take this section of beauty from. Strether, the main character, is talking to Madame de Vionnet—a woman who has some [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Henry James’
Putting the Parts Together
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Amber Reeves, David Lodge, H.G. Wells, Henry James, Jane Wells, Moura Budberg, Rebecca West, Rosamund Bland on December 27, 2011 | 3 Comments »
There are several ways to read the title of David Lodge’s novel about H.G. Wells, A Man of Parts. Lodge himself directs us to two readings in an epithet taken from Collins English Dictionary: Parts PLURAL NOUN 1. Personal abilities or talents: a man of many parts. 2. short for private parts. Both of these [...]
Book Hunting in San Francisco: Wallace, Wallace Stevens
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Ardvark Books, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Christine Schutt, Community Thrift Store, Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Frank Kermode, Henry James, Home Land, John Hawkes, Nightwork, Paul Valery, Sam Lipstye, San Francisco, The Collected Works of Paul Valery, The Crossing, The Quarterly, The Wings of the Dove, The World within the Word, Travesty, Wallace Stevens, William H. Gass on August 7, 2011 | 2 Comments »
I love San Francisco. Especially the book stores and thrift stores. The Community Thrift Store in the Mission has been a goldmine for me the last six years and each time I come here I check in and check out with jewels for about $1.50 each. I remember going there and finding the first six [...]
Joy to the Reader When Reading Gass’s The Tunnel
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Bookworm, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Guilt and Innocence in The Tunnel, Habitations of the Word, Henry James, Hitler, Holocaust, Into The Tunnel, John Hawkes, Lannan Foundation, Marus Klein, Michael Silverblatt, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Rainer Maria Rilke, Samuel Beckett, Sonnets to Orpheus, The Lime Twig, The Tunnel, Tropes of the Text, William H. Gass on June 15, 2011 | 9 Comments »
How can I contain myself? (But perhaps the question is: how could Gass both contain and not contain himself to have done what he did?) Having had The Tunnel to go back to every morning was like having the one you love next to you, to be transfixed and freshened, to be, as that worthy [...]
For Your Consideration IV – Gass/Stein/Music
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged A Temple of Texts, Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Joyce, Three Lives, William H. Gass on May 24, 2011 | 3 Comments »
“Why hadn’t I known long before reading Stein–was I such a dunce?–that the art was in the music–it was Joyce’s music, it was James’s music, it was Faulkner’s music; without the music, words fell to earth in prosy pieces; without the music, there was only comprehension, and comprehension may have been analysis, may have been [...]
For Your Consideration III – Birthday Wishes to Henry James
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Fiction and the Figures of Life, Henry James, William H. Gass on April 17, 2011 | 2 Comments »
In the essay “In the Cage” (from Fiction and the Figures of Life), William Gass speaks about the fourth volume of Leon Edel’s five-volume biography of Henry James. Gass is not too impressed by how Edel reads James but I am once again smitten by Gass and his understanding of James (I would hope for him to expand [...]
Happy 168th, Henry James!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Big Other, Henry James, Henry James's birthday, John Madera, The Bostonians, The Golden Bowl, The Princess Casamassima on April 15, 2011 | 7 Comments »
Reading Stanley Elkin’s Searches and Seizures: On “The Bailbondsman”
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged "The Art of Fiction", “The Bailbondsman”, Big Other, Henry James, John Madera, Searches and Seizures, Stanley Elkin, William Gass on April 4, 2011 | 15 Comments »
If you’ve been following along with us here at Big Other, you know that in January we read and discussed Tom McCarthy’s C (more here and here), followed that up with Mary Caponegro’s The Complexities of Intimacy (more here, here, and here) and Manuel Puig’s Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (more here, here, here, and here), [...]
Reader Rage, Henry James Hate
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged A Temple of Texts, Anger, Arnold Bennett, Bill, Canal Street, Charles-Adam Foster-Simard, Edith Wharton, Hate, Henry James, Henry James and the Joys of Binge Reading, How to Make Sense, Literary Taste, People who hate Henry James, Philip Larkin, Quoting Philip Larkin's poem "This be the Verse" without giving him credit, Rage, Rudolf Flesch, The Believer, The Millions, Virgina Woolf, Ward, William Faulkner, William Gass on March 31, 2011 | 17 Comments »
To start, we have two simmering, searing proclamations: In A Temple of Texts, William Gass quoted Arnold Bennett’s book, Literary Taste: …your taste has to pass before the bar of the classics. That is the point, if you differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong, and not the book. (6) In the [...]
On Loving Henry James
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Big Other, Frost, Henry James, John Madera, On Loving Henry James, Roderick Hudson, The American, Thomas Bernhard, Watch and Ward on December 28, 2010 | 8 Comments »
“Liberature”: Some Thoughts About Julián Ríos
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Big Other, Henry James, House of Ulysses, John Madera, Julián Ríos, Larva: A Midsummer Night's Babel on December 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
So, today, at the library, I was roaming around the stacks, and I noticed House of Ulysses, by Julián Ríos. Ever since swimming through some pages of Larva: A Midsummer Night’s Babel, I’ve wanted to read Ríos’s work, and by read I mean, read everything that’s out there by him. But, since I’ve decided read [...]
Guest Post, by Gary Amdahl: A Sentence About a Sentence I Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Gary Amdahl, Henry James, The Jolly Corner on May 1, 2010 | 3 Comments »
“He projected himself all day, in thought, straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and into the other, the real, the waiting life; the life that, as soon as he had heard behind him the click of his great house-door, began for him, on the jolly corner, as beguilingly as the slow opening [...]
Tiny Shocks: Uncovering the Reductive Plot of James Wood’s How Fiction Works
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson, Breathless (1960), Breathless (1983), Chekhov, Cthulhu, Curtis White, Flaubert, G.I. Joe, Hamlet, Henry James, How Fiction Works, James Wood, Jean Luc Godard, Jean-François Lyotard, John Gardner, John Ruskin, Last Tango in Paris, Les Carabiniers, Madame Bovary, Nabokov, ostranenie (enstrangement), Saul Bellow, The 400 Blows, The Concept of Character in Fiction, The Middle Mind, Theodore Adorno, Theory of Prose, Three Blondes and Death, Tripticks, Viktor Shklovsky, Watchmen, William H. Gass, Yuriy Tarnawsky on January 31, 2010 | 40 Comments »
On January 22, I read Shya Scanlon’s post “The Dull King”; on January 25 I read his second post “Cover Your Tracks.” Both were about reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works. Before that I’d heard of James Wood but hadn’t read anything by him; I knew some people liked him and some didn’t like him. [...]
-
Authors
-
John Madera
-
John Dermot Woods
-
Ryan W. Bradley
-
Michael Leong
-
Greg Gerke
-
J. A. Tyler
-
Stacy Muszynski
-
A D Jameson
-
Tim Jones-Yelvington
-
Rachel Swirsky
-
Edward Mullany
-
Aya Karpinska
-
Paul Kincaid
-
davis schneiderman
-
Amber Sparks
-
Tim Horvath
-
John Domini
-
Elaine Castillo
-
Curtis White
-
Paula Bomer
-
Andrew Taggart
-
James Tadd Adcox
-
Nick Francis Potter
-
Brian Kubarycz
-
Gabriel Blackwell
-
Janey Smith
-
Matty Byloos
-
J/J Hastain
-
Greg Hunter
-
Jeff Bursey
-
-
Top Posts
-
Recent Comments
