Reading Paths

James Agee’s “A Death in the Family,” Ann Petry’s “Country Place,” Thornton Wilder’s “The Ides of March,” Cynthia Ozick’s “Trust,” Richard Stern’s “Other Men’s Daughters,” J. F. Powers’s “Morte d’Urban,” Jean Stafford’s “The Mountain Lion,” William Maxwell’s “The Château,” Louis Auchincloss’s “The Rector of Justin,” Richard Yates’s “The Easter

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It’s not an idle allusion. Flaubert, writing a century earlier, had been looking for an alternative to Romanticism, a tendency he defined as broadly as Yvor Winters later did. The result, “Madame Bovary,” inaugurated a new, more formally conscious kind of realism. Williams identified something called “the Flaubertian novel, with its concern for loc

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