Travels with Henry James

Published on the 100th anniversary of the author’s death, this collection of James’s less touted writings—his travel essays originally published in the Nation—transports readers to America and Europe in the 1870s. New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg and critic Michael Anesko (Monopolizing the Master) contribute the foreword and introduction, respectively; both emphasize how James’s ambition, curiosity, and headstrong assessments of people and places merged in these essays, which provided a sturdy foundation for the rest of his career, making him recognizable to readers and greatly influencing his later writings. After this opening, readers plunge into the world of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in the late summer of 1870, forgetting automobiles and iPhones, though the old, drawn-out syntax requires some patience from those unaccustomed to it. James begins with a distinction that echoes throughout the rest of the collection: the difference between one’s imagination of a place and the reality. “There is an essential indignity in indefiniteness: you cannot imagine the especial poignant interest of details and accidents. They give more to the imagination than they receive from it.” Readers will love being privy to the picturesque realities of the American Northeast, and to James’s detailed observations of daily life during in 1872 during the summer he spent in traveling across Europe. James devotees will find that his essays are delightful, vivid, and generally uplifting.[em] (Nov.) [/em]