An after-dinner conversation, the focal point of this short story, manages to monopolize the reader's attention from the very beginning. An American artist is longing to create his masterpiece. In his pursuit, he has found a way to expel his frustration through a discussion about the magnum opuses of different artists. This is the turning point of his life....
In Venice, in a dilapidated, dusty palazzo, lives old Miss Bordero and her niece, zealously guarding her treasure, a bundle of letters written to her in her youth by the famous poet Jeffrey Aspern, who fell in love with her. The narrator, a literary critic, enters the palace under a fictitious name, renting rooms in it. He is determined to seize Asperno's legacy at any cost ... The novella "Asperno's Letters" constantly keeps the reader in suspense, this work is considered one of the best in the work of Henry James....
A young American, Winterbourne, who has lived in Europe for many years and has managed to break the habit of American customs, arrives in the small Swiss town of Vevey to see his aunt. At the hotel, he accidentally meets a wealthy American Miller family - a nine-year-old boy, his older sister and their mother. They travel around Europe accompanied by their agent and are going to go to Italy. The girl - Daisy Miller - amazes Winterbourne with her beauty, as well as free and laid-back behavior, which is not accepted in Europe. He is trying to understand what is behind this strange behavior from...
Spouses Monark, once rich gentlemen, aristocrats. They lost their fortune and were now forced to look for work. Tall stately, graceful, graceful. Spouses considered themselves genuine samples, ideal for working as sitters. But the drawings always turned out to be the same, they looked like beautiful statues. And they were much inferior to real sitters, poor people without any position, but at the same time talented, artistic, able to transform, alive....
The plot of the "Merry Corner" is built around the episode of the return of Spencer Brydon to his home in New York. The hero spent a significant period in Europe - thirty-three years. The intrigue unfolding in the story resembles the one presented in the earlier story of James “The Beast in the Thicket”....
Henry James’s novels and classics of American and world literature, author of the novels American, Woman Portrait, Wings of the Dove, Ambassadors, etc., are included in the book into the world of psychological mysteries, superstitious expectations, mysterious, terrible and sometimes unexplained events. The novel entitled The Turning of the Screw, which gave the title to the collection, became a kind of "calling card" of James the Innovator and won numerous screen adaptations. The original interpretation of the motive of meeting with ghosts brought the story closer to the parapsychological...
