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...
Louis Couperus was catapulted to prominence in 1889 with Eline Vere, a psychological masterpiece inspired by Flaubert and Tolstoy. Eline Vere is a young heiress: dreamy, impulsive, and subject to bleak moods. Though beloved among her large...
"Cornelie De Retz Van Loo, a twenty-three-year-old divorcee from an upper-class Hague milieu, tries with mixed feelings to begin a new life in Italy in 1900. After some time in Rome, she discovers that Italy itself can never bring her the...
A mystical Javan prince and a promiscuous wife are twin challenges to Commissioner Van Oudijck's seemingly impregnable authority. As he struggles to maintain control of his district in the Dutch East Indies, as well as of his family, ancient...
An internationally best-selling debut novel about the life, marriage, and legacy of one of the greatest mathematicians of the last century.
Princeton University 1980. Kurt Gödel, the most fascinating, though hermetic,...
The End of Days, by acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five books, each leading to a different death of an unnamed woman protagonist. "How could it all have gone differently?" the narrator asks in the intermezzos...
Albena Stambolova’s idiosyncratic debut novel, Everything Happens as It Does, builds from the idea that, as the title suggests, everything happens exactly the way it must. In this case, the seven characters of the novel — from Boris, a young boy...
The year is 1635. Iceland is a world darkened by superstition, poverty, and cruelty.
Men of science marvel over a unicorn's horn, poor folk worship the Virgin in secret, and both books and men are burnt.
Jonas Palmason, a poet and...
“The Blue Fox is a magical novel.”—Bjork
The year is 1883, and the stark Icelandic landscape is the backdrop for this spellbinding fable that is part mystery, part fairy tale. The fates of a priest, a naturalist, and a young woman with...
"An extraordinary, powerful fable — a marvel." — Alberto Manguel
"Sjón writes like a man under a spell, filled with enchantment and magic and great wit. He is a rogue of the first...