Melville House

StoriesIf you're up $16,000 at the casino and missing dinner with the woman you love, how do you find the strength to drive away? If you give up your career and your beautiful wife and find yourself drinking vodka and fixing cars for a living, is that necessarily a step down? In Hush Hush, Steven Barthelme gives us a simultaneously twisted,...

Although this novella stands out from his body of work in that it's a playful yet sinister fairy tale, it brilliantly fuses F. Scott Fitzgerald's ongoing lush fantasies about the extremes of wealth with his much more somber understanding of what underpins it. Loosely inspired by a summer he spent as a teenager working on a ranch in Montana,The...

"e;The great thing is to lead a normal life, and not be the slave of your passions. What do you get if not?"e;One of Russian literature's most renowned love storiesa vivid and sensitive account of adolescent love, wherein the sixteen year old protagonist falls in love with a beautiful but older woman living next door, thereby...

About This BookIt was his intention to trade a few sword-thrusts in some place or another, and get the business over with.A sparkling new translation tells the tale of a young libertine who finds his rapier wit matched by actual rapiers. In this autobiographical tale, a young dandy is forced to flee his hometown after falling afoul of the...

A NovelA seductive and shockingly inventive literary thriller that entwines  suspense, history, the supernatural, adventure, steampunk, and a wicked  sense of adventure into an intoxicating new genre.EPISODE ONE IN AN ASTONISHING NEW SERIES New Venice--the ';pearl of the Arctic'--is a place of ice palaces and pneumatic tubes, of...

There is a degree of bliss too intense for elation.This little-known novella from one of the masters of the form is so unusual for Joseph Conrad's work in several respects, although not in its exotic maritime setting or its even more exotic proseit is unusual in that it is one of his very few works to feature a woman as a...