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Henry James: Complete Stories 1892–1898

“The Turn of the Screw” | “The Real Thing” | “The Death of the Lion” | “The Middle Years” | 17 other stories More

Edited by John Hollander and David Bromwich

“An unexpected strain of recklessness, abandon and apprehension runs under the staid expanse of James’s prose, providing the sort of thrilling tensions and dangers—beyond taste, beyond vanity—that we find completely necessary and satisfying about the most thoughtful, the most provocatively human works of literature.” — The Commercial Appeal

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week Henry James, “The Real Thing”
April 15, 2021

Story of the Week Henry James, “Greville Fane”
August 17, 2018

The Moviegoer The Innocents: a great ghost story and an inspired rendering of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw”
October 6, 2016

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This Library of America volume is one of five that make available for the first time in new, complete, and authoritative editions the astonishing abundance of invention and unwavering intensity of the aesthetic vision of Henry James as displayed in more than one hundred world-famous stories ranging from brief anecdotes to richly developed novellas.

Equally adept at ironic comedy, muted tragedy, and supernatural fantasy, at lively social satire and nuanced portraiture, James in his shorter works explores a staggering variety of situations and emotions. Here are courtships and legacies; the worlds of literature, theatre, and the popular press; the paradoxes of temperament and the constraints of custom; the clash of conscience and desire. Stylistically, the stories allowed James to experiment with tones and devices quite different from his novels—dramatic plot twists and surprise endings, swift pacing and ebullient humor. The brilliance of his technical command allowed him to transform the tiniest of suggestions—a fleetingly observed gesture, an anecdote dropped at a dinner party—into fiction remarkable for its lambent surfaces and intricate psychological counterpoint.

The twenty-one stories in this volume represent James at the peak of his storytelling powers. Among them are “The Turn of the Screw,” one of his most popular works, and a terrifying exercise in psychological horror centering on the corruption of childhood innocence; “The Real Thing,” a playful consideration of the illusion of art and the paradoxes of authenticity; “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Death of the Lion,” and “The Middle Years,” three very different expositions of the mysteries of authorship, embodying some of James’s most profound insights into the nature of his own art; “The Altar of the Dead,” a somber, ultimately wrenching meditation on the relation of the living to the dead; and “In the Cage,” an extended evocation of the inner life of a young woman trapped in a dehumanizing job at a postal-and-telegraph office.

John Hollander and David Bromwich, volume editors, are Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut and Sterling Professor at Yale University, respectively. Mr. Hollander is a 1990 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Mr. Bromwich is the author of Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

Nona Vincent
The Real Thing
The Private Life
Lord Beaupre
The Visits
Sir Dominick Ferrand
Greville Fane
Collaboration
Owen Wingrave
The Wheel of Time
The Middle Years
The Death of the Lion
The Coxon Fund
The Altar of the Dead
The Next Time
Glasses
The Figure in the Carpet
The Way It Came
The Turn of the Screw
Covering End
In the Cage

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ISBN: 978-1-88301109-3 948 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 82 Library of America Series

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Henry James: Complete Stories 1892–1898

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