The setting of “The Aspern Papers” is Venice. Francesco Guardi’s “The Grand Canal,” circa 1760

The future of Another Look is still uncertain, but we nevertheless have a late summer surprise for you: a special Zoom event!

Our August 24 event

Thanks to a first-ever collaboration with the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute (DCI), we will be hosting a special Zoom discussion of Henry James’s short 1888 classic, The Aspern Papers. The event will take place at 3-4:30 p.m. on Monday, August 24. (The earlier-than-usual hour is planned to welcome Another Look fans in other time zones.) The discussion will also be recorded and posted afterwards. Like all our events, it’s free and open to the public.

The panelists

Henry James in 1905

Tobias Wolff and Robert Harrison will lead the discussion. Acclaimed author Robert Harrison, professor of French and Italian, writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and hosts the popular talk show, Entitled Opinions. Novelist Tobias Wolff, a Stanford professor emeritus of English, is the recipient of the National Medal of Arts.

On The Aspern Papers

The Aspern Papers was inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley’s correspondence with Claire Clairmont, the stepsister of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein. (Shelley’s novel was featured in our January 2017 event.) Clairmont cherished the letters until her death.

In James’s The Aspern Papers, an elderly invalid who once was the beloved of a renowned American poet Jeffrey Aspern lives in seclusion with her spinster niece in a Venetian palazzo. The unnamed narrator goes through elaborate machinations to gain access to her private papers and literary relics from the long-ago romance.
There are many editions of The Aspern Papers available online and in print.

Your Zoom invitation

The event is free, as all our events are. However, we ask that you click here to reserve a spot at the event