Penguin Classics

Buy Now
• ISBN 9780141441283
• 608 Pages •5 x 8”
• $13.00
Most book reviews these days are ninety percent plot summary — so is it any surprise that we have trouble understanding an author who was trying to transcend plot?
01/04/2012
A number of years ago, I became very interested in what I thought of as Henry James’s best book, The Turn of the Screw­­. In particular, I believed that one hundred years of critical study had missed the point of it completely, and I had a better idea (which I still believe to be true). …
• Book: The Wings of the Dove
• Author: Henry James
• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Genre: Fiction

Recommended by:J.C. Hallman
J.C. Hallman is the author of a number of books. Wm & H’ry: A Short Meditation on Literature, Art, Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and the Correspondence of William and Henry James will appear from the University of Iowa Press in Fall 2012. His blog about the letters can be found here.
Buy Now
• ISBN 9780142437346
• 384 Pages •5 x 8"
• $11.00
A Portrait of a (Would-Be) Jersey Artist Reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
12/13/2011
I was a sophomore in college when I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man all the way to the last line for the first time. I was about the same age as Joyce’s hero Stephen Dedalus, though not nearly so well educated. I had working-class New Jersey to thank for that.…
• Book: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Author: James Joyce
• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Genre: Fiction

Recommended by:Alan Cheuse
Alan Cheuse's latest novel, Song of Slaves in the Desert, came out last spring. It will appear in paperback in July 2012.