A Life is the gruelling story of the frustrated existence of a bank clerk with a poetic soul. The artistic aspirations of the protagonist and the emptiness of his daily life become tragic in the great divide between what he wants and what he actually has
Long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce and Kafka, and now available in a supple new English translation, Italo Svevo’s charming and splendidly idiosyncratic novel conducts readers deep into one hilariously hyperactive and e
Influenced by the rise of the science of psychology and the turmoil of the early 20th century, A Perfect Hoax is an ironic and affectionate story of illusion, self-deception, and impracticality in a practical world. Mario Samigli is in his seventies; he h
Sólo en 1923 con la publicación de "La conciencia di Zeno" recibió Italo Svevo (1861-1928) reconocimiento público por su enorme talento para el relato y la novela. Testigo atormentado de la Gran Guerra de 1914, su mundo literario gira en torno a la so
...the sin of an old man is equal to about two sins of a young man.The fable-like story of an old man's sexual obsession with a young woman is a distillation of Italo Svevo's concerns--attraction of an older man to a younger woman, individual conscience v
The Horned Man opens with a man losing his place in a book, then deepens into a dark and terrifying tale of a man losing his place in the world. As Lawrence Miller—an English expatriate and professor of gender studies—tells the story of what appears t
Part political thriller, part meditation on the nature of desire and betrayal, Seven Lies tells the story of Stefan Vogel, a young East German, whose yearnings for love, glory, and freedom express themselves in a lifelong fantasy of going to America. By a
A generous selection that shows the poet James Lasdun at his lyrically inventive bestTwo men grapple with jumper cables, trying "to make a stand // in this last corner of our realm; machinery . . ." A man on his way to see his therapist encounters a femal
A true story of obsessive love turning to obsessive hate, Give Me Everything You Have chronicles the author's strange and harrowing ordeal at the hands of a former student, a self-styled "verbal terrorist," who began trying, in her words, to "ruin him." H