A good ghost-story . . . must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life

The mass production of culture may very well be justified by the fact that it permits you to pick up books like this for only a dollar:

Ahem. Which leads me to the best $1.00 you could possibly spend this month: the cost of a used copy of the out-of-print Wordsworth Classics edition of Ghost Stories of Henry James, which, as Martin Scofield explains in his introduction,

contains all the stories by James which can strictly be described as ghost stories, in that they all contain an apparition, or at least, in the case of “The Private Life” and “The Jolly Corner,” a ghostly “double.”

The pleasures found in those ten stories should surprise no lover of James, for no author has had a more firm grasp on the ineluctably individual nature of consciousness than him. Our ghosts are our selves, as often as not, as Scofield writes,

Henry James’s ghosts are liable to arise as much from within as from without: whatever their vivid perceptibility, they are often as much emanations from the psyche as visitants from “another world.” Indeed, it is precisely the equivocation between the two that gives them their imaginative power.

Which, to press a point, could be said of all of James’s writing: it is from the equivocation between internal and external, and the mutual deceptions thereof, that it derives its power.

That’s Ghost Stories of Henry James, and you can read the rest of Levi Stahl’s thoughts on it here.

You Might Also Like:

More from Conversational Reading:

1. Story by Story: Brian Evenson’s Fugue State (16) “Alfons Kuylers” Blake Butler is taking on Brian Evenson’s new collection Fugue State story by story. Here he’s agreed to share his take on the 16th story...
2. Story Lengths The blogger at Spinning has written There was a recent question raised at the MetaxuCafe forum about story length, and the usual answer would be...
3. One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each The Complete Review: The Ogura Hyakunin Isshu is a poetry-anthology first put together around 1237 by Fujiwara no Teika (who also included one of his...
4. What Do Barack Obama And Roberto Bolano Have In Common? Both authors of books banned from our nation's swelling prisons. The federal government's most secure prison has determined that two books written by President Barack...
5. YFTS: Turning Points The first thing I'd like to remark about on our current section of Your Face Tomorrow (we're in Week 13) is this was the first...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.