**The hauntingly beautiful epistolary novel from “a glowing light of modern Italian literature” (New York Times Book Review)Longlisted for the PEN Translation Award**At the heart of Happiness, as Such is an absence—an abyss that pulls everyone to its brink—created by a family’s only son, Michele, who has fled from Italy to England to escape the dangers and threats of his radical political ties. This novel is part epistolary: his mother writes letters to hi...

Brief in the way a razor’s slice is brief, remarkable essays by a peerless stylistNew Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy’s strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. A renowned stylist of hyper-brevity in fiction, Fleur Jaeggy proves herself an even more concise master of the essay form, albeit in a most peculiar and lapidary poetic vein. Of De Quincey’s early nineteenth-century world we hear of the h...

“Landslide is that rare book that somehow succeeds in being both knowing and open–hearted, both formally sly and emotionally direct. Its timeless subjects—grief, storytelling, the giving up of childish things—are rendered in ways that are as movingly honest as they are probing and unfamiliar. A swift, compelling read.” —Adam Haslett, author of Imagine Me GoneMinna Zallman Proctor's Landslide is a captivating collection of interconnected p...

At age thirty, Minna Proctor, a child of the seventies and product of divorced parents—Jewish mother, Catholic father, had no religious orientation. In fact, her last “spiritual” foray was her perfunctory bat mitzvah. So when her father wants to become an Episcopal priest, Minna Proctor is flummoxed. Brought up primarily by her mother in a household without any religious expression or guidance, Proctor was surprised to learn that her charming, intellectual father had a religious life, and ...

The Lady and Her Monsters by Roseanne Motillo brings to life the fascinating times, startling science, and real-life horrors behind Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein.Montillo recounts how—at the intersection of the Romantic Age and the Industrial Revolution—Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein was inspired by actual scientists of the period: curious and daring iconoclasts who were obsessed with the inner workings of the human body and how it might be reanimated after death.

Richard Holmes’s great work of biographical exploration, published alongside its sister volume ‘Sidetracks’.In 1985, Richard Holmes published a small book of essays called ‘Footsteps’ and the writing of biography was changed forever. A daring mix of travel, biographical sleuthing and personal memoir, it broke all the conventions of the genre and remains ons of the most intoxicating, magical works of modern literary exploration ever published.Sleeping rough, he retraces Robe...

'The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.' When Dorian Gray has his portrait painted, he is captivated by his own beauty. Tempted by his world-weary, decadent friend Lord Henry Wotton, he wishes to stay forever young, and pledges his very soul to keep his good looks. Set in fin-de-siécle London, the novel traces a path from the studio of painter Basil Hallward to the opium dens of the East End. As Dorian's slide into crime and cruelty progresses...

This eBook features the unabridged text of ‘A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ from the bestselling edition of ‘The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf’.Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Wo...

In this beautiful reissue, the author of 'Footsteps' collects the biographical curiosities he discovered while researching the romantic poets, creating a captivating mixture of biography and memoir.‘Sidetracks' is a sister book to 'Footsteps', conjured up from decades of 'wanderings from the straight and narrow' of his major biographies of Shelley and Coleridge. As Holmes himself says, 'to be sidetracked is, after all, to be led astray by a path or an idea, a scent or a tune, and m...

A Tale of Art and Obsession - Historical Novel Society Indie Novel of 2015 LonglistedIncludes Book Group Discussion GuideLight, Descending brings to life Victorian art and social critic John Ruskin (1819-1900), a passionate and tormented genius whose career as art critic, social reformer, and benefactor and nemesis to some of the greatest names of 19th century art ended in near-universal public acclaim and madness.Octavia Randolph, author of...

'This is the saddest story I have ever heard.' Wealthy American John Dowell describes in a disarmingly casual, compellingly intimate manner how he and his wife Florence meet an English couple in a German spa resort. They become friends over the years and gradually the history of their relationships and the passions that lie behind the orderly Edwardian façade are unveiled. Dowell is the archetypal 'unreliable narrator', and his casual revelations are both unexpected and ex...

‘A masterly performance by the greatest literary biographer of his generation’ OldieIn this kaleidoscope of stories spanning art, science and poetry, award-winning writer Richard Holmes travels across three centuries, through much of Europe and into the lively company of many earlier biographers.Central to this pursuit is a powerful evocation of the lives of women both scientific and literary, some well-known and others almost lost: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germ...