The novels that the great Italian writer Alberto Moravia wrote in the years following World War II represent an extraordinary survey of the range of human behavior in a fragmented modern society. Boredom, the story of a failed artist and pampered son of a rich family who becomes dangerously attached to a young model, examines the complex relations between money, sex, and imperiled masculinity. This powerful and disturbing study in the pathology of modern life is one of the masterw...

Contempt is a brilliant and unsettling work by one of the revolutionary masters of modern European literature. All the qualities for which Alberto Moravia is justly famous—his cool clarity of expression, his exacting attention to psychological complexity and social pretension, his still-striking openness about sex—are evident in this story of a failing marriage. Contempt (which was to inspire Jean-Luc Godard’s no-less-celebrated film) is an unflinching examination of desp...

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is vintage Tennessee Williams.Published in 1950, his first novel was acclaimed by Gore Vidal as "Splendidly written, precise, short, complete and fine."It is the story of a wealthy, fiftyish American widow, recently a famous stage beauty, but now "drifting." The novel opens soon after her husband's death and her retirement from the theatre, as Mrs. Stone tries to adjust to her aimless new life in Rome. She is adjusting, too, to aging ...

"The Tanners is a contender for Funniest Book of the Year."—The Village VoiceThe Tanners, Robert Walser’s amazing 1907 novel of twenty chapters, is now presented in English for the very first time, by the award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky. Three brothers and a sister comprise the Tanner family—Simon, Kaspar, Klaus, and Hedwig: their wanderings, meetings, separations, quarrels, romances, employment and lack of employment over the course of a...

This antiquarian volume comprises Wilhelm Jensen's 1902 novel, Grandiva. First published in the "Neue Freie Presse", this text was inspired by an eponymous Roman bas-relief and would become the foundation for Sigmund Freud's seminal 1907 work 'Delusion and Dream'. Freud’s copy of this book can be found on the wall of his study in the Freud Museum at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London. A seminal book in the development of psychoanalysis, this text is a must-have for those with a keen interest in...

"Everyone felt his own beloved person threatened," notes the narrator of Svevo's sarcastic tale of a bungling murderer--an underemployed porter known derisively as "il signore" by his equally down-at-heel friends--on the loose in the city of Trieste."L'assassinio di via Belpoggio" was first published in installments in 1890 and was Svevo's first major story.Genre: short storyWords: 9,014Date of English translation: 2011

The world-famous masterpiece about a writer's obsessive pursuit of forbidden love by a Nobel Prize laureate.Translation by Michael Henry HeimPublished on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustave von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to h...

The wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime--his own murder. • “A beautiful mystery plot, not to be revealed.” – Newsweek“Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.” – John Updike“One of Mr. Nabokov’s finest, most challenging and provocative novels.” – The New York TimesDespair’s protagonist, Hermann, is another mast...

The celebrated author, Gustave Aschenbach, burdened by his successes, comes to Venice for a holiday and encounters a vision of eros -- a vision for which he pays with his life. Death in Venice, Thomas Mann's intensely moving elegy for a man trapped between myth and modernity, was written at the peak of his powers.

The glitter and cynicism of Rome under Mussolini provide the background of what is probably Alberto Moravia’s best and best-known novel — The Woman of Rome. It’s the story of Adriana, a simple girl with no fortune but her beauty who models naked for a painter, accepts gifts from men, and could never quite identify the moment when she traded her private dream of home and children for the life of a prostitute.One of the very few novels of the twentieth century which can be ra...

Stanislavski's simple exercises fire the imagination, and help readers not only discover their own conception of reality but how to reproduce it as well.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Aanton Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels–here brought together in one volume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.The Steppe–the most lyrical of the five–is an account of a nine-year-old boy’s frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russi...