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.

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.

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.

A brilliant study of hopeless love and hapless indecision. It is a masterwork of Italian literature, here beautifully rendered into English in Beryl de Zoete's classic translation.

Charles Edwin William Augustus Chambers—Marquis and Earl of Belchamber, known familiarly as Sainty, is the scion of an ancient English aristocratic family. But he is uninterested in riding to hounds or drinking in the great tradition of his forebears,

Eighty years old, Ebenezer Le Page has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, and as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and the stories of those he has known.

At once picaresque adventure and campus comedy, curriculum vitae and last will, The Book of My Life is an extraordinary Renaissance self-portrait.