Michael Gorra

Jul 31, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Michael Gorra |Harry Strawson |Alberto Manguel |Mia Levitin

They are old friends, these prefaces. You will find one or another of them reprinted in almost every contemporary edition of Henry James’s work, in Penguin or Norton or Oxford World’s Classics, and sometimes even when the book doesn’t reproduce the text of his late-life revisions for the New York Edition (1907–09), the twenty-four-volume set of his fiction for which they were written.

Jun 27, 2024 | nybooks.com | Michael Gorra

The character Mark Twain named Jim first appears in the second chapter of Huckleberry Finn, “setting in the kitchen door” of the woman who owns him, nervously stretching his neck at a sound at the back of the garden and calling out in worry, “Whar is you? Dog my cats ef I didn’ hear sumf’n.” He settles back to listen, only he soon begins to snore, and the sound then creeps out in the shape of Huck and his friend Tom Sawyer.

Oct 12, 2023 | nybooks.com | Michael Gorra

The Pole is a seventy-two-year-old pianist named Witold Walczykiewicz, a last name that his hosts in Barcelona cannot pronounce; so “call me Witold,” as he tells them over a postconcert dinner. He has huge hands and “a chest that seems to burst out of his jacket”; his hair is “extravagantly white”; but he moves more easily than many men his age, and his “long, lugubrious face” and “faded blue eyes” recall those of the actor Max von Sydow.

Sep 14, 2023 | nybooks.com | Michael Gorra |Zadie Smith

In response to: Playing with the Past from the September 21, 2023 issue To the Editors: In his review of my novel The Fraud [, September 21], Michael Gorra finds that “as nearly as [he] can tell” the link between William Harrison Ainsworth and the Tichborne Claimant is invented. But as the novel itself makes clear, the young Irish poet Edward Kenealy—who spent a few years coming to dinner at Ainsworth’s—eventually became the Tichborne Claimant’s defense lawyer. Some facts are even stranger...

Aug 31, 2023 | nybooks.com | Michael Gorra

I don’t remember much about our day at Stowe, whether it was rainy or dry, where we parked, what the road from Oxford was like. The house was closed, that much I know, but we’d come for the gardens, and today a few keystrokes give me some images I recognize: a footbridge we crossed, a series of so-called temples at which we lingered. That was a kind of joke, “Temple” being the family name of the first Viscount Cobham, who called this eighteenth-century landscape into being.