At the novel's center is Durtal, a writer obsessed with the life of one of the blackest figures in history, Gilles de Rais – child murderer, sadist, necrophile and practitioner of all the black arts. The book's authentic, extraordinarily detailed...
The Dwarf is the acrid journal of a court freak, a twenty-six-inch-tall misanthrope whose name, Piccoline, is mentioned only once, in passing, by another character. Thereafter called the Dwarf, he offers a distorted perspective on the fortunes of...
ohn Galsworthy (1867-1933) devoted virtually his entire professional career to creating a fictional but entirely representative family of propertied Victorians, the Forsytes. He made their lives and times, loves and losses, fortunes and deaths so...
Three Kingdoms is a classic historical novel. It was also the first Chinese novel with each chapter headed by a couplet giving the gist of the content. It describes the power struggles among the kingdoms of Wei, Shu and Wu, headed by Cao Cao, Liu...