The private life, The wheel of time, Lord Beaupré, The visits, Collaboration,…
This collection gathers some of Henry James's most incisive shorter works, tales of remarkable psychological acuity set against the drawing rooms of Europe and the mountains of Switzerland. The title story, "The Private Life," presents a delicious paradox: a celebrated actor who dazzles on stage yet proves insufferably dull in life, while a quiet gentleman reveals himself as a man of extraordinary imagination when the spotlight finds him. Other tales in this volume explore the delicate machinery of social ambition, the performance of identity, and the often painful negotiations between art and ordinary existence. James's characters move through worlds of privilege and aesthetic refinement, their inner lives running far deeper than their polished surfaces suggest. These are stories about the distance between who we appear to be and who we truly are, and the terrible loneliness of that gap. For readers who cherish the interior novel of consciousness that James helped invent, these compact masterpieces offer his talents in concentrated form.
