Nobel Prize–winner Luigi Pirandello is at once the most teasing and profound of modern masters, a connoisseur of ironies and impossibilities, and The Late Mattia Pascal is undoubtedly his most polished performance as a writer of fiction.

The logic of the Letter Killers Club, a secret society of "conceivers" who commit nothing to paper on principle, is strict and uncompromising.

The Marquis de Custine's record of his trip to Russia in 1839 is a brilliantly perceptive, even prophetic, account of one of the world's most fascinating and troubled countries.

The great critic's masterwork makes a case for the necessity of the imaginative works in a society ever more worshipful of the liberal ideals of rationality and progress.

The Life of Henry Brulard is a vivid memoir that is also an extraordinary work of the imagination.

The world's first picaresque novel and an inspiration for many writers, including Cervantes.

Auden's inspired and incisive response to a thinker who had done much to shape his own beliefs is a fundamental reading of an author whose spirit remains as radical as ever more than 150 years after he wrote.

In Hugo von Hofmannsthal's celebrated autobiographical novella a young nobleman reveals to his patron Sir Francis Bacon his particularly modern crisis of spirit.

The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren is a pathbreaking work of scholarship that is also a splendid and enduring work of literature.

Love's Work is at once a memoir and a book of philosophy.