Melville House

One of the biggest bestsellers of all time, and one of the first and most influential spy novels of the twentieth century, is back in print for the first time since 1948Alan Furst fans will note that train passengers in his bestselling thrillers are often observed reading The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars. It's a smart detail: First published in...

A wickedly funny and satisfyingly highbrow black comedy about the collapse of Western academic institutions under the weight of neoliberal economics and crushing, widespread idiocy.Lars and W., the two preposterous philosophical anti-heroes ofSpuriousandDogmacalled ';Uproarious' by theNew York Times Book Reviewreturn and face a political,...

';At the World's Fair in Paris I once lost my late husband and, just then, an elegant gentleman accosted me. As I look at him, he opens up his overcoat and hasn't got anything on underneath. I only mention this in passing.'This never-before translated work by a major yet overlooked mid-20thcentury writer is a brutally funny look at the human comedy...

The characteristic themes of Cather's mature work are already present in her debut novella, an evocation of a tragic love triangle. Bartley Alexander, renowned engineer of bridges, is a man with a past who ';looked as a tamer of rivers ought to look.' Discovered by his mentor ';sowing wild oats in London,' he returned to America and the...

The restored, unbowdlerized text of Raspe's slapstick travel epic featuring the classic illustrations from Strang & Clark (1895) No one has journeyed to as many foreign lands as Baron von Munchausen. Nor, when it comes time to fire a cannon, will you find anyone more accurate. The comfort of courtly life is as natural to him as the...

...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 versus social convention, and the cost of sexual desire. This novella is a marvel...