“Adventures in the Immediate Unreality” is an exceptional novel, highly personal and, in the same time, universal, describing the fall into maturity of a young man with exacerbated sensibility.
The small, insignificant town is the...
In August 1936 a Hungarian writer in his mid-thirties arrives by train in Venice, on a journey overshadowed by the coming war and charged with intense personal nostalgia. Aware that he might never again visit this land whose sites and scenes had...
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...
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...