Henry James led a wandering life, which took him far from his native shores, but he continued to think of New York City, where his family had settled for several years during his childhood, as his hometown. Here Colm Tóibín, the author of the Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel The Master, a portrait of Henry James, brings together for the first time all the stories that James set in New York City. Written over the course of James’s career and ranging from the deliciously tart comedy of the early “An International Episode” to the surreal and haunted corridors of “The Jolly Corner,” and including “Washington Square,” the poignant novella considered by many (though not, as it happens, by the author himself) to be one of James’s finest achievements, the nine fictions gathered here reflect James’s varied talents and interests as well as the deep and abiding preoccupations of his imagination. And throughout the book, as Tóibín’s fascinating introduction demonstrates, we see James struggling to make sense of a city in whose rapidly changing outlines he discerned both much that he remembered and held dear as well as everything about America and its future that he dreaded most. Stories included: The Story of a Masterpiece A Most Extraordinary Case Crawford’s Consistency An International Episode The Impressions of a Cousin The Jolly Corner Washington Square Crapy Cornelia A Round of Visits

Toward the end of James's career, Charles Scribner's Sons offered to publish his collected work under the overall title The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James. This book is the first comprehensive effort to apprehend the full complexity of James's self-performance there.

This collection of prefaces, originally written for the 1909 multi-volume New York Edition of Henry James’s fiction, first appeared in book form in 1934 with an introduction by poet and critic R. P. Blackmur. In his prefaces, James tackles the great problems of fiction writing—character, plot, point of view, inspiration—and explains how he came to write novels such as The Portrait of a Lady and The American. As Blackmur puts it, “criticism has never been more ambitious, nor more useful.” The latest edition of this influential work includes a foreword by bestselling author Colm Tóibín, whose critically acclaimed novel The Master is told from the point of view of Henry James. As a guide not only to James’s inspiration and execution, but also to his frustrations and triumphs, this volume will be valuable both to students of James’s fiction and to aspiring writers.

In New York Revisited, first published in Harper's Monthly Magazine in 1906, Henry James describes turn-of-the-century New York in vivid detail. Although written in 1904-1905, when James returned to the U.S. after living abroad for more than 20 years, the essay is as pertinent today as it was 100 years ago. The text appears as it was originally published and is enhanced with period illustrations and photographs. Beautifully bound and with a spectacular view of the Flatiron building on the cover, this book is a literary treasure.

At the height of his career and the zenith of his creative powers, Henry James returned to works he had written up to thirty-five years before and "wrote them over" for the New York edition of his novels and tales (1907-1909). The first detailed study of the subject, this book uses new material to tell the story of James's heroic renewed commitment to his oeuvre. It examines the revision of particular works, shedding new light on interpretative controversies (especially with The Portrait of a Lady and Daisy Miller), and attends to questions of principle raised by the paradoxical processes of the reviser. Revealing James's painful struggle for perfection, the study illuminates his genius as a framer of sentences and a master of dramatic nuance. With both critical and biographical approaches, this vivid portrait of James's achievement will appeal to students of James and the novel.

The American A social comedy about Christopher Newman, an American businessman on his first tour of Europe. Along the way, he finds a widow from an aristocratic French family.