Henry James
Story Stream
William and Henry James April 04, 2025
When Henry James decided to come to America in 1904 and 1905, his elder brother, William James, was not immediately pleased. William said that while his wife, Alice, would welcome his visit (she and Henry had a firm bond), he felt “more keenly a good...
The Everyday Avant-garde February 12, 2025
Generative Fiction: Henry James as a path for Avant-garde literatureThe aesthetics of “Alt Lit” have now defined underground literary culture for almost two decades. From Tao Lin’s early-2010s internet-driven auto-fiction to recent “post-ironic” nove...
On Henry James and the Enduring Lessons of Love December 20, 2024
In my late teens, when I read Henry James for the first time, the experience did nothing for me. I felt faintly repelled by the blocks of unyielding text, the walls of what appeared to be sadistically abstruse sentences that, serpentine in form and l...
Didion, Babitz & the Biographer Who Missed the Point December 19, 2024
In a 1939 essay, the critic Philip Rahv argued that there have been two main types in American literature: the solemn and semi-clerical, which he associates with Henry James, and the exuberant, open-air lowlife embodied in Walt Whitman. Between them,...
Narrative Hoard June 06, 2023
In an era of sentences that trend not only towards our laziest tendencies but also towards the speed and rhythm of our economy: the elevator pitch sentence, the jump-cut sentence, the news hook sentence, the perfectly manscaped short back and sides s...
Henry James & the Great War February 14, 2022
When Henry James and Henry Adams met in England in September 1914—a month after Britain declared war on Germany—“they threw their arms around each other as if bridging a great chasm.” (So wrote Aileen Tone, Adams’s companion.) James and Adams had bee...
The Best Politics Books of 2021 December 15, 2021
‘Fears of a Setting Sun’ by Dennis C. RasmussenIs the American experiment nearly at an end? The Founders, surprisingly, asked themselves that question even as the nation was coming into existence. Dennis C. Rasmussen studies their concerns in “Fears ...
In 'Tom Stoppard,' Hermione Lee Takes on a Living Subject February 15, 2021
Every other year, at a botanical garden in the Chelsea neighborhood of London, the playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard throws a lavish, all-day party for his many friends and their families. There are bands, puppets, jugglers, stilt-walkers, sta...
