Dear classics reader,
In this week’s shabby-chic red-and-gold opera box you will find:
The launch of our February read-along of The Age of Innocence;
Birthday wishes to Richard Brautigan;
The week’s new classics – including an inspired edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy;
A preview of coming attractions;
A list of classics to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day this week;
And our penultimate discussion of Anna Karenina – including a compilation of cinematic trains.
This newsletter may be too long for your email inbox. If so, click ‘View entire message’ at the bottom to see the full newsletter – or visit Substack.
The Age of Innocence (0 of 4)
‘On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.’
Today, on a January evening in the mid twenties, we start reading Edith Wharton’s award-winning novel, The Age of Innocence. All the details of our read-along can be found here.
The Age of Innocence is set in ‘Gilded Age’ New York. Before we start reading, here are a few notes on the period.
The term ‘Gilded Age’ emerged in the 1920s to describe the period in US history from the 1870s until the 1890s, marked by rampant economic growth, flagrant and luxurious excess and corrupt politics.
The term was initially a pejorative one, inspired by the title of Mark Twain’s 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which satirises the greed and corruption of post-Civil War America.
Twain and his collaborator Charles Dudley Warner took their title, in turn, from Shakespeare’s King John (Act IV, scene 2), in which the Earl of Salisbury says that:
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily . . . Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
Since then, ‘The Gilded Age’ has come to refer specifically to the period’s elite echelons of high society, a milieu that Edith Wharton portrays in her novels and with which, as we observed last week, she was intimately acquainted, having been born into the Jones family, one of the leading New York clans.
In his 1899 work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, the American economist Thorstein Veblen analysed this rarefied social stratum and coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ to describe their social currency:
Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.
And more than a century later, the ‘Gilded Age’ has acquired affectionate, even nostalgic associations, which were richly drawn upon by Julian Fellowes in his US spin-off of Downton Abbey – the HBO series The Gilded Age.
The first series of The Gilded Age broadcast in 2022 and the fourth is currently in development. As Fellowes has said:
Edith Wharton has been a tremendous influence on me and on my writing . . . I like to think I am kind to my characters [and] if I am, I do feel it is a lesson I have learned directly from the writing of Edith Wharton, from her tolerance and her wit and her humour, even while she wields the rod.
I look forward to discussing Chapters 1-10 next Friday 6th February.
Here are links to our previous The Age of Innocence posts:
The Schedule (9 January)
Edith Wharton (2 January)
These weekly read-along discussions of The Age of Innocence will be available to paid subscribers only. More details here.
If you – or anyone you know – would like to join this or future read-alongs, but can’t afford a paid subscription, just let me know and I’ll send a gift subscription.
Happy Birthday Richard Brautigan
In other news, today was Richard Brautigan’s birthday.
Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington where he spent much of his youth, before moving to San Francisco where he became involved with the Beat Movement. During the Sixties he became one of the most prolific and prominent members of the counter-cultural movement, writing most of his famous novels, including Trout Fishing in America (1967) and In Watermelon Sugar (1968). He was found dead in 1984, aged 49, beside a bottle of alcohol and a .44 calibre gun.
Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan (1967)
Here’s a journey that begins at the foot of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco’s Washington Square, wanders through the wonders of America’s rural waterways and ends, inevitably, with mayonnaise. With pure inventiveness and free-wheeling energy, the counterpoint to all those angry Beatniks, Brautigan tells the story of rural America, and the hunt for a bit of trout fishing. Funny, wild and sweet, Trout Fishing in America is an incomparable guidebook to the delights of exploration – of a country and a mind.
[UK] Canongate Canons | 144 pages | introduced by Neil Gaiman
[US] Mariner Classics | 144 pages | introduced by Billy Collins
What’s new this week?
Classics publishing is back up and running this week after the Christmas lull. This week saw the first publication of John Berryman’s ‘other’ Dream Songs; a cleverly repackaging of Robert Burton’s brilliant but unwieldy Anatomy of Melancholy; and two Penguin Modern Classics reissues of unusually recent titles.
Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs by John Berryman (1964-72)
Only Sing is a continuation of John Berryman’s vast project The Dream Songs. These 152 never-before-published poems are an expansion of this epic of the American twentieth-century psyche. In the voice and figure of Henry – riddled with desire, self-loathing and a permanent sense of being odds with the world – Berryman created, in the words of McCrae, ‘a hero for a disenchanted nation’.
[UK] Faber & Faber | 152 pages | introduced by Shane McCrae
[US] FSG | 192 pages | introduced by Shane McCrae
The Anatomy of Love by Robert Burton (1621)
Dryness, paleness, waking, sighing, despair, frenzy, death: love’s repercussions can be dire indeed. Perhaps that is why Robert Burton devoted the largest part of his pioneering 17th-century psychological work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, to this supreme passion. Edited to offer the modern reader easier access to this classic text, this abridged version preserves all the fantastic variety of the original, as Burton knits together stories and quotations drawn from millennia of European literature in order to understand love’s causes, consequences, and cures.
[UK / US] Pushkin Press Classics | 368 pages | introduced by Becca Rothfeld
Israel: A Personal History by Göran Rosenberg (1996 / 2025)
On 22 April 1962 what remains of Göran Rosenberg’s family embark from his native Sweden to make Israel their new home. Transplanted into a nation born only a few months before him, he is first enchanted by its vitality, imprinted by its ideals. It marks the beginning of a lifetime’s journey across the promised land and into its past, a reckoning with the utopian visions and desperate fears that went into Zionism as well as the violence and dispossession of its realization. This landmark book tells the story of that journey – through buried stories and erased villages, dreams and disillusionments, and the histories still unfurling today.
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 384 pages
[US] Other Press | 384 pages
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser (2001)
This landmark work of reportage exposed how a handful of fast-food giants came to dominate America and remake the world in their image: eroding wages, damaging consumers’ health and wrecking the environment. From talking to workers at meatpacking plants with shocking safety records to revealing the tactics used to target ever-younger customers, Eric Schlosser’s blend of humane storytelling and meticulous research encouraged millions to question the industrial food system, and to rethink the way they eat.
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 544 pages
[US] Mariner Classics | 544 ages
The book description above is taken from the publisher’s online blurb.
Coming Attractions
Future monthly read-alongs
For a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, you can take a peak here.
Our year-long read-along 2026
We are reading The Brothers Karamazov over the whole of 2026: twelve volumes in twelve months, January to December.
Join us! There’s still plenty of time to catch up. Here is the full reading schedule – and all our Brothers Karamazov posts will be gathered here.
We discussed Book One last week – and our discussion of Book Two is in three weeks’ time on Friday 20 February.
All the Brothers Karamazov posts are accessible to all subscribers for free, but if you would like to view or contribute to the conversation in the comment sections, you will need a paid subscription.
As ever, if you – or anyone you know – can’t afford a paid subscription, just let me know and I’ll send a gift subscription.
In-person book club
We finished discussing The Call of the Wild last week.
But if you would like to continue the conversation in person, please book a ticket for our The Call of the Wild discussion at the Hatchards Classics Book Club next week on Thursday 5th February.
We meet downstairs at Hatchards bookshop (187 Piccadilly, London) on the first Thursday of every month at 6.30pm – tickets cost £5 with a free Hatchards Reward Card and include a glass (or two) of wine. These book club events are not live-streamed, but I post a report of our discussion afterwards here on Substack.
Annual book subscription
And if you’re enjoying our read-alongs, why not treat yourself to the Hatchards Classic Book Club annual book subscription?
You (or a friend) can receive all the books we read each month here on Read the Classics, beautifully gift-wrapped and delivered to your door, anywhere in the world, as well as a year’s complimentary subscription to Read the Classics, so you can choose to read along with us, if you wish.
To find out more, follow this link or email Hatchards directly: subscriptions@hatchards.co.uk
Holocaust Memorial Day
As I mentioned in November last year, I have prepared a round-up of Holocaust literature to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which fell on Tuesday this week. The day is marked on January 27th every year, the date that Auschwitz was liberated in 1945.
Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld (1978)
Badenheim, a resort town near the forests of Vienna, is preparing for the arts festival of the summer season. The hotel workers and local tradespeople rush to prepare the small town for the influx of vacationers. But just as the season is getting into full swing, a small note appears on a municipal notice board: the Sanitation Department is announcing an increase in its jurisdiction. No one knows what the Sanitation Department is, but no matter – the festival carries on. Soon inspectors are spread all over town, bringing estrangement, suspicion and mistrust wherever they go.
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 144 pages | translated by Dalya Bilu
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski (1946)
Tadeusz Borowski’s concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles; and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes.
[UK / US] Penguin Classics | 192 pages | translated by Barbara Vedder | introduced by Jan Kott
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)
In Amsterdam, in the summer of 1942, the Nazis forced teenager Anne Frank and her family into hiding. For over two years, they, another family and a German dentist lived in a ‘secret annexe’, fearing discovery. All that time, Anne kept a diary. Since its publication in 1947, Anne Frank’s diary has been read by tens of millions of people. This Definitive Edition restores substantial material omitted from the original edition, giving us a deeper insight into Anne Frank’s world. Her curiosity about her emerging sexuality, the conflicts with her mother, her passion for Peter, a boy whose family hid with hers, and her acute portraits of her fellow prisoners reveal Anne as more human, more vulnerable and more vital than ever.
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 368 pages | edited by Otto H. Frank & Mirjam Pressler | translated by Susan Massotty | introduced by Elie Wiesel
[US] Bantam | 400 pages | edited by Otto H. Frank & Mirjam Pressler | translated by Susan Massotty | foreword by Nadia Murad
Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World by Jan Karski (1944)
It is 1939. Jan Karski, a brilliant young Polish student, enjoys a life of parties and pleasure. Then war breaks out and his familiar world is destroyed. Now he must live under a new identity, in the resistance. And, in a secret mission that could change the course of the war, he must risk his own life to try and save those of millions.
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 480 pages | afterword by Andrew Roberts
[US] Georgetown University Press | 464 pages | foreword Madeline Albright | afterword by Zbigniew Brzeziński
Fateless by Imre Kertész (1975)
Gyuri, a fourteen-year-old Hungarian Jew, gets the day off school to witness his father signing over the family timber business – his final act before being sent to a labour camp. Two months later, Gyuri finds himself assigned to a ‘permanent workplace’. This is the start of his journey to Auschwitz. On his arrival Gyuri finds that he is unable to identify with other Jews, and is rejected by them. An outsider among his own people, his estrangement makes him a preternaturally acute observer, dogmatically insisting on making sense of the barbarity – and beauty – he witnesses.
[UK] Vintage Classics | 272 pages | translated by Tim Wilkinson
[US] Vintage | 272 pages | translated by Tim Wilkinson | published as Fatelessness
If This is a Man by Primo Levi (1947)
‘With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contemptible. What has survived in Levi’s writing isn’t just his memory of the unbearable, but also . . . his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. He was himself a magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I’ve ever known’ – Philip Roth.
[UK] Abacus | 464 pages | translated by Stuart Woolf | introduced by David Baddiel | afterword by Primo Levi
[US] Simon & Schuster | 187 pages | translated by Stuart Woolf | published as Survival in Auschwitz
Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account by Miklós Nyiszli (1960)
When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, they sent virtually the entire Jewish population to Auschwitz. A Hungarian Jew and a medical doctor, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was spared from death for a grimmer fate: to perform ‘scientific research’ on his fellow inmates under the supervision of the infamous ‘Angel of Death’: Dr. Josef Mengele. Nyiszli was named Mengele’s personal research pathologist. Miraculously, he survived to give this terrifying and sobering account of the terror of Auschwitz.
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 208 pages | translated by Tibère Kremer & Richard Sevear | introduced by Richard J. Evans | afterword by Bruno Bettelheim
[US] Arcade | 240 pages | translated by Tibère Kremer & Richard Sevear | foreword by Bruno Bettelheim
Maus by Art Spiegelman (1980-1991)
Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Approaching the unspeakable through the diminutive (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), Vladek’s harrowing story of survival is woven into the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits, studying the bloody pawprints of history and tracking its meaning for those who come next.
Life With a Star by Jiří Weil (1949)
Stitched onto the jacket, worn over the heart, according to the rules for all Jews, the star turns Josef Roubicek into an outsider in his own city. Forced to lurk on the edges of Prague, to work as a gravedigger at the cemetery, and to keep off the trams and streets after curfew, he waits for a summons from them. Every day the grinding bureaucracy of evil brings new regulations, along with new lists of names to join the transports. This remarkable novel traces one Jewish man's struggle to exist in Nazi-occupied Prague. Drawing strength from the smallest of things a lost love, a stray cat, an onion Josef determines to live, and realises that surviving against the odds is the greatest act of resistance.
[UK] Daunt Books | 256 pages | translated by Rita Klímová & Roslyn Schloss
[US] Northwestern University Press | 224 pages | translated by Rita Klímová & Roslyn Schloss | preface by Philip Roth
Night by Elie Wiesel (1958)
Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith. Describing in simple terms the tragic murder of a people from a survivor's perspective, Night is among the most personal, intimate and poignant of all accounts of the Holocaust. A compelling consideration of the darkest side of human nature and the enduring power of hope, it remains one of the most important works of the twentieth century.
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 144 pages | translated by Marion Wiesel
[US] FSG | 120 pages | translated by Marion Wiesel
Anna Karenina (13 of 14)
And last, but by no means least, this month we read the penultimate instalment of Anna Karenina. Here are my thoughts:
Please do share yours!
The video above is inexcusably long – apologies – so I will keep these written notes brief.
First a short note on Jules Landau, the mysterious figure to whom Karenin and Countess Lydia Ivanovna surrender their ability to think for themselves.
We see Landau enter a trance and later learn that – in this state – he advises Karenin to refuse a divorce with Anna. He is thus responsible, in part, for the novel’s tragic denouement.
Tolstoy satirises the international craze for spiritualism and clairvoyance in the late nineteenth century. Princess Myagkaya explains Landau’s phoney background to Oblonsky:
Landau was a commis [clerk] in a shop in Paris, you see, and he went to see a doctor. He fell asleep in the doctor’s waiting room, and while he was asleep he began giving advice to all the patients. And it was remarkable advice. Then the wife of Yury Meledinksy – you know, the one who is ill? – heard about this Landau, and took him to see her husband. He is treating her husband now. And he hasn’t done him any good, as far as I can see, because he’s just as feeble as before, but they believe in him and take him everywhere. And they’ve brought him to Russia. He’s been besieged by everyone here, and he has started treating everybody. He cured Countess Bezzubova, and she became so attached to him that she has adopted him.
Landau is partly modelled on the real Scottish medium, Daniel Dunglas Home, whom Tolstoy saw in Paris in 1857.
Home came to St Petersburg in 1871 and held seances for Alexander II and lectured on spiritualism. He had previously visited Russia in 1859 with Count Kushelev-Bezborodko and married the count’s sister-in-law, a goddaughter of Nicholas I, thereby becoming Count Bezborodko. Rather remarkably, the novelist Alexandre Dumas was his best man,
Landau likewise becomes Count Bezzubov in the novel. ‘Bezzubov’ means ‘toothless’ – a direct reference to ‘Bezborodko’, which means ‘beardless’.
Arthur Conan Doyle was a vocal supporter of Home – and apparently witnessed him levitating – but other nineteenth-century writers were less convinced. William Makepeace Thackeray described Home’s performances as ‘dire humbug’ and Robert Browning said that ‘the whole display of hands, spirit utterances etc., was a cheat and imposture’.
More seriously, Anna’s death scene will stay with us all for a long time, I think.
I thought you might be interested to watch this compilation of various screen versions of that scene.
Unexpectedly, the one I find most compelling is the clip from the 1997 feature film adaptation directed by Bernard Rose and starring Sophie Marceau, which by all accounts is an absolute turkey: the film has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 26% – but I thought this sequence was well done.
I look forward to talking about the final instalment of Anna Karenina next month. On Friday 27 February we will discuss Part Eight, Chapters 1-19.
These chapters are the only ones that did not appear in the Russian Messenger. They were first published as a separate pamphlet and were included as Part Eight when Anna Karenina was finally published in book form in 1878.
Here are links to our previous Anna Karenina posts:
The Schedule (18 December 2024)
Leo Tolstoy (3 January 2025)
0. Introductions (10 January)
1. Part One, Chapters 1-23 – and Nabokov on Time (31 January)
2. Part One, Chapters 24-34, Part Two, Chapters 1-11 – and John Sutherland on Anna’s English novel (28 February)
3. Part Two, Chapters 12-29 – and Sergei Eisenstein at the races (28 March)
4. Part Two, Chapters 30-35, Part Three, Chapters 1-12 – and the Mowing Scene (25 April)
5. Part Three, Chapters 13-32 – and the Mirror of the Revolution (30 May)
6. Part Four, Chapters 1-17 – and Nabokov’s double nightmare (27 June)
7. Part Four, Chapters 18-23, Part Five, Chapters 1-6 – and the Mystery of Crowning (25 July)
8. Part Five, Chapters 7-20 – and Aleksandr Voronsky on Art (29 August)
9. Part Five, Chapters 21-33 – and Patti (26 September)
10. Part Six, Chapters 1-15 – and Shklovsky on the Snipe Hunt (31 October)
11. Part Six, Chapters 16-32 – and provincial geography (28 November)
12. Part Seven, Chapters 1-16 – and the Angliyskiy Klub (2 January)
Finally, many thanks to Cams Campbell for recommending the six-part Russian documentary series, Intriguing Secrets of Anna Karenina (2024), on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV.
I haven’t watched it yet but it looks fantastic – beautifully made and with an unusual, experimental approach to the novel. Here is the trailer.
Buy a copy of any of the books above through Bookshop.org (UK) or Bookshop.org (US) and Read the Classics will earn a commission from your purchase. Thank you in advance for your support!
This section really did for my blood pressure. It started with real comedy (Dolly asserting herself about Stepan's debts) that turns so quickly into tragedy.
The way Tolstoy describes how Anna sees everything negatively is brilliant - it sounds like the narrator's voice, but it's clearly Anna's perspective. Anna's assumption that everyone is talking about her - judging her - comes over clearly.
And the way we gradually enter Anna's mind and can follow her thought process is heartbreaking. There are so many ways Anna could have been saved - by Stepan, by Karenin, by Vronsky, by a random stranger at the station - but she is alone.
I'd always assumed that Anna died at a main railway station - somewhere a bit grand - rather than a provincial pitstop. But it does seem.right that Anna ends her life away from society that has neglected her.
I hadn't realised that Anna wouldn't make it to the last book, so I'm eager to see what that has in store.
Some early thoughts: ten pages into The Age of Innocence and the social rigidity already feels oppressive enough to understand why Scorsese called it “the most violent film I have ever made.” Strangely, it keeps making me think of American Psycho: different eras, opposite tones, but a similar obsession with prescribed behaviour and the quiet brutality of social expectation.
Not in terms of explicit violence, of course, but in the way both books anatomise social life through obsessive description.
I don’t think it’s accidental that these stories unfold in New York. Across different periods, the city functions less as a setting than as a system that produces and enforces social behaviour.