New York Review Books classics

Introduction -- The art of fiction -- New novels in review. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd ; Charles Dickens, Our mutual friend ; Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and daughters ; George Eliot, Middlemarch ; Thomas Hardy, Far from the madding crowd ; Émile Zola, Nana -- Memorials. George Sand ; Anthony Trollope ; Ivan Turgénieff ; The life of George Eliot -- Emerson ; Browning in Westminster Abbey -- Forms of fiction. Guy de Maupassant ; The future of the novel ; Matilde Serao ; Gustave Flaubert ; Émile Zola ; The lesson of Balzac -- Valedictions. The tempest -- Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields

"Best known as a master novelist, Henry James was also an incisive critic whose essays on the novel had as profound an influence on its development as did his fiction. Here, Pulitzer-finalist Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, gathers some of the most virtuosic essays from across fifty years of James's career. From his landmark essay "The Art of Fiction," an exhilarating treatise on the complexity of literary form, to "The Lesson of Balzac," a tender portrait of one of James's greatest touchstones, to career-defining assessments of writers such as George Eliot and Ivan Turgenev, James reveals himself as a passionate and sensitive reader, one whose unerring ability to locate the currents within Anglophone literature was matched only by his uncommon prescience regarding its future. Slyly humorous and unabashedly opinionated, On Writers and Writing is a compelling artistic biography of a writer at his cogent and stylish best"--