January 11 2009, 11:35 AM
Another good list, from Michael Dirda in the December 2008 US Airways Magazine, of all places -- though actually, it makes sense that an in-flight magazine would be suggesting books you can download. (Though I don't think US Airways has in-flight Wi-Fi yet. Hmm.) Anyway, each of these 6 books gets a longish review, available to read online in one of those magazine-viewer doohickeys, ugh. It's murder to read this way, but the longer reviews are definitely worth a look.
[open the Table of Contents and look for the story "Hidden Treasures"]
Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh
by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
From the review: "Le Fanu is best known for such eerie tales as 'Green Tea' and 'Camilla,' but this is one of the dark masterpieces of Victorian sensation fiction. The 17-year-old Maud Ruthyn has been brought up on an isolated estate by her enigmatic father, a student of arcane philosophies. ..." Dirda says this book is "Comparable in power and narrative intricacy to Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White."
Oblomov
by Ivan Goncharov
From the review: "In this delightful Russian novel deeply admired by Tolstoy, the hero spends the book's first hundred pages trying to rouse himself to get out of bed. ..."
Hauntings: Fantastic Stories
by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget)
From the review: "A friend (later a former friend) of Henry James, Violet Paget wrote about subjects as diverse as Italian history, gardens and the morality of war. But under her pen name, Vernon Lee, she established herself as one of the great crafters of the classic ghost story. ..."
Augustus Carp, Esq., By Himself
Sir Henry Bashford
From the review: "Subtitled 'being the autobiography of a really good man,' this comic masterpiece has been called 'the funniest unknown book in the world.' ...."
Cane
Jean Toomer
An excerpt, "Becky": http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/toomer/toomerstory.html
From the review: "Cane is one of the first great classics of African American fiction, even though Toomer rejected all racial labels ... Appropriately, his book itself escapes labeling -- being a jazzy medley of sketches, poems and stories about the black experience in small Southern towns and big Northern cities. ..."
Red Cavalry, by Isaac Babel, is also reviewed, but no English translation is available online other than in limited preview on Google Books.
Also mentioned in this story:
"... Thomas Love Peacock's witty conversation novels, such as Crochet Castle (1831), or Hope Mirrlees' innovative fantasy Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), or such devastating tales of love gone wrong as Benjamin Constant's Adolphe (1816) and Theodore Fontaine's Effi Briest (1894)."
Crochet Castle (1831): http://manybooks.net/titles/peacocktetext00ccstl10.html
Adolphe (in French only); http://manybooks.net/titles/constantb13861386113861-8.html
Effi Briest (in German only): http://manybooks.net/titles/fontanetetext048effi10.html
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