Like Camus's The Fall, Georges Simenon's thriller is at once a devastating personal confession and an indictment of modern society's empty and deadening moral codes.

"What you have loved remains yours." Thus speaks the irresistible rogue Sindbad, ironic hero of these fantastic tales, who has seduced and abandoned countless women over the course of centuries but never lost one, for he returns to visit them all-ladies, actresses, housemaids-in his memories and dreams.

Maupassant merges fact and fiction, dream and documentation in this seemingly simple logbook of a sailing cruise along the French Mediterranean coast.

Harriet has left her boyfriend Claude, "the French rat." At least that is how she prefers to frame the matter.

Schuyler has a pitch-perfect ear for the children's voices, and the story, told entirely through snatches of dialogue and passages from Guinevere's diary, is a tour de force of comic and poetic invention.

As Jean Strouse's generous, probing, and deeply imaginative biography shows, however, Alice James was a fascinating and exceptional figure in her own right.

Alien Hearts is the story of three lovers bound by bitterness as much as passion. Maupassant's artist hero falls for a woman of the world-a glacially dazzling beauty whose past with an abusive husband leads her to hold him-and everyone-at arm's length. He seeks solace with his doting mistress, but remains racked by pointless infatuation.

The first translation of Nescio into English-all the major works and a broad selection of his shorter stories.

One of the major documents of modern European civilization, Robert Burton's astounding compendium, a survey of melancholy in all its myriad forms, has invited nothing but superlatives since its publication in the seventeenth century.

In this story about a Greek couple in Nazi-occupied Athens who must share their living quarters with a German officer, Wescott offers an account of political oppression and spiritual struggle that is also a parable about the costs of closeted identity.