If it be permitted to speak of ‘love at first syllable,’ then that’s what I experienced in my first encounter with this poet of prose.” So wrote Thomas Mann of the work of Peter Altenberg. A virtuoso Fin de Siecle...
"The Conspiracy" is the last and most acclaimed novel by French writer and activist Paul Nizan, who died two years after its publication fighting the Germans at the Battle of Dunkirk. Hailed by Jean-Paul Sartre as Nizan's masterpiece, the book...
What is it to be in love with a pathological liar and fantasist? Esther is, and has been for more than twenty years. Lajos, the liar, married her sister, and when she died, Lajos disappeared. Or did he? And Esther? She was left with her...
“He has an evening suit, but never an occasion to wear it, so he puts it on when he paints his pictures.”
Insel, the only novel by the surrealist master Mina Loy, is a book like no other — about an impossible friendship...
A witty and erudite love letter to a bygone age, from one of Europe's last great humanists.
"A sparkling slice of eighteenth-century life" Paul Bailey, Independent
In August 1785 Paris buzzed with scandal. It involved an...
The restless King Oliver VII of Alturia, an obscure Central European state whose only notable exports are wine and sardines, wants nothing more than an easy life: so, plotting a coup against himself, King Oliver VII escapes to Venice in search of...
Ecstasy is the story of young widow roused out of the torpor of her solitude by a dalliance with a courtly womanizer. It is written in a dreamily impressionistic style whose primary concern is to capture its heroine's eternally shifting moods at...