The American Novel: Summer by Edith Wharton
I know the mountain. I lived there for two years. We called it Onion Creek, and it’s not much of a mountain, as mountain goes—more of a foothill—but it was an isolated, rural land populated […]
Category Archives: Classic Literature
The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Spoiler alert! In The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s sixth Sherlock Holmes book, Sherlock Holmes, the famed detective, returns. “The Final Problem,” the last story of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, was set […]
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
A woman dies. After her death, her family—her husband, four sons, and one daughter—must transport her body forty miles to Jefferson to bury her. In this day of high-speed automobiles and paved highways, this tragic […]
Jay Gatsby and the Green Light
Everyone is reading The Great Gatsby now! Kobo had announced that sales of this novel has increased by 250% worldwide. Amazon has been selling its Kindle edition for $4.99, and at that price, it has […]
On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
More years ago than I wish to confess, when a friend was leaving the country to work abroad, I gave her my copy of On the Road. I had just finished the book and enjoyed […]
The Portrait of a Lady
“Laborious,” one Goodreads reviewed wrote. Another compared it to getting a “workout at a gym.” And a third called it “needlessly long.” I understand their feelings. I have to confess that I struggled with this […]
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” Hemingway tells us, but John Wallace says, “The reading aloud of Huck Finn in our classrooms is humiliating and insulting to […]
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Perhaps a novel written a hundred and fifty years ago about fictitious events that happened more than two hundred and fifty years earlier might seem irrelevant in our times. We have escaped our Puritan […]
The Well-Beloved by Thomas Hardy
We read Thomas Hardy today because he’s still relevant, but perhaps the issues that made him relevant in his time, due to the changing nature of the world, are different than the things that make […]
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
There is a philosophy in this novel, but I fear I’m not smart enough to grasp it. So I come back to it every few years, read it again, and puzzle over what it is […]