This may not be to all as it is to me: If, as an English professor, I am grateful to be able to assign George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil or Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, in private life I contemn a form that is often too long to be short and too short to be satisfying. The worst thing to be said of the tales by a reader of my prejudices, and it had better be said at once, is that they are long short stories or short novellas (six of the seven are over fifty pages long, and two of these are more than eighty pages long). Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight characteristic of the modern short story with the haunting mystery of the nineteenth-century Gothic tale, in the tradition of writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, and Poe. Originally published in 1934, Seven Gothic Tales, the first book by “one of the finest and most singular artists of our time” ( The Atlantic), is a modern classic. Seven Gothic Tales is a set of enchanting stories in late-modernist prose by Isak Dinesen. An experiment with the form of the nineteenth-century-style review: mega-long excerpts connected by impressionistic ligaments.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |