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Henry James (1843-1916), the younger brother of the psychologist William James and one of the greatest of American writers, was born in New York but lived for most of his life in England. Among the best known of his many stories and novels areThe Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw,andThe Wings of the Dove. In addition toThe New York Stories of Henry James, New York Review Classics has published several long-unavailable James novels-The Other House, The Outcry,andThe Ivory Tower. Louis Begley is a novelist and retired lawyer. He has written eight novels, includingWartime Lies, About Schmidt, andMatters of Honor, which was published in 2007. He is a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres of France and served as the president ofPENAmerican Center from 1993 to 1995. He lives in New York with his wife, Anka Muhlstein, an historian of France.
The Other House is the story of a brutal crime, and its violence is not duplicated in any of Henry James's other works...[It] takes place in broad British daylight, and the passions which explode in it with such force are acted out on disciplined lawns between stately British houses, deriving their well--founded security from a banking fortune. The Other House is intensely British in its motives and emotions; and its intensity derives precisely from the fact that when the calm is broken, and the conflict...is engaged the contrast is as of a violent rush of air into a place of quiet... --Leon Edel The Other House contains some of the most harrowing, compressed, and ambiguous scenes James ever wrote. -- Threepenny Review Played out on the tidy lawns between two aristocratic houses, the staid Eastmead and the boisterous Bounds, a desperately tangled love-scrimmage spirals into a crime of unspeakable brutality, with a deeply unsettling climax. Readers left puzzled by the murky pychosexual terror of James's The Turn of The Screw should give this passionate melodrama a try. -- Library Journal
