Memoirs Of Hecate County

Memoirs Of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson

первая история, про snapping turtles, напоминает оленей, поедающих мои daylily [по-русски называется красоднев, кто бы мог подумать]
this is from Glimpses of Wilbur Flick:

My uncle writes me that he wants me to go in for all the experiences of college life, but I believe in choosing your experiences.
...
He had got the job through Jinx Ames, the daughter of a Morgan partner, who had had some success as a torch singer...

from dictionary: carry a torch
To have longstanding feelings of love that are not requited: still carrying the torch for a man she knew in her twenties.

compare Torch song and Music for Torching (album)

this is from The Princess With the Golden Hair

On the walls were German colored reproductions of Giorgiones and Botticellis, and an Italian Annunciation...
...
She was cute: when I had liberated one little breast and was about to proceed to the other, she said with coquetry: "Only one!"
...
She is now so responsive to my kissing her breasts that I can make her have a climax in that way.
...

Then her birthday came around, and it was another dreadful ordeal: they insisted on giving her presents in spite of her begging them not to. She had never learned how to thank people, make a fuss about things the way they did: “Oh, Aunt Alice, how beautiful! — how sweet you are to give me that!” — her people never said those things.

история с Анной напоминает In Love, а в остальном похоже на Генри Джеймса, которого я в свое время ниасилил. но по сравнению с Генри Джеймсом Уилсон гораздо более down to earth и более ироничен. ну и Набоков еще.

...at this point he quietly disappeared and didn’t come back fbr some time, while Mrs. Dilling and I had a very pleasant conversation about our favorite movie stars. Presently Jack reappeared, looking green around the gills.

...

“Wasn’t he sympathetic when you were ill?” “He kept wanting me to try to get up and do without the brace. He didn’t want to believe it was really bad because he didn’t want to think he was to blame.” [история про отца и падение с лошади напоминает Галковского "через немогу"]

...

She had in a sense never even been Americanized — that is, she had never been vulgarized as many children of immigrants are, who, in adapting themselves to our cities, had acquired bad manners and a blatancy that, for some reason, seemed much more offensive than any mere peasant crudeness of their parents.

“great soul in a small destiny” - a line from Johanna of the Spirits, song by Cherry Poppin' Daddies Album: Rapid City Muscle Car, released: 1994 - anachronism?

...at last I heard Imogen’s voice as indistinct as a disembodied spirit that can hardly get through from the other world and as guarded and non-committal as a political prisoner of the Fascists who is allowed to see a newspaper interviewer.

She was one of those exasperating women who are extremely dependent on men yet spend the major part of their lives repudiating them or trying to take them down.

see also @ asylum & Edmund Wilsons's The Twenties & The Decadence