Paris cafés, Pamplona bulls, and a crowd of the beautifully damaged — the novel that named a generation.
820 books. No filler. Every one explained.
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An old Cuban fisherman, eighty-four days without a catch, and the fish of his life — the whole method in one afternoon's read.
Hemingway's memoir of being young, poor, and absurdly talented in 1920s Paris — the most seductive book ever written about writing.
An American ambulance driver, an English nurse, and the Italian front — the Great War's great love story.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1932 first novel, which follows one man from the First World War through colonial Africa and industrial America to the Paris slums.
Broke, shameless, and ecstatically alive in 1930s Paris — the banned book that ended American censorship.
Three days behind enemy lines in the Spanish mountains — the longest novel, the biggest canvas, and the warmest heart.
Before Paris: the Brooklyn years, the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company, and the fury that made the flight necessary.
The debut story collection where the modern American short story was invented — trout streams, war flashes, and Nick Adams.
Céline's shrieking, hilarious portrait of a Belle Époque Paris childhood in the Paris arcades — poverty as opera.
Ten hallucinatory riffs between Brooklyn's 14th Ward and the Paris streets — Miller at his most purely musical.
Pound's farewell to London and elegy for the war dead — eighteen pages that indict an entire civilization.
The 'poem including history' — fifty years, 116 cantos, and modernism's most magnificent ruin.
Orwell's second novel: a rector's daughter loses her memory, wakes up on a London street, and finds out what England does with a penniless woman.
Henry Miller's account of inviting a destitute Paris astrologer to live with him at Big Sur, and of how badly it went.
James Baldwin was forty-seven, Nikki Giovanni twenty-eight. A London television studio, one evening in November 1971, and neither of them willing to let the other off easily.
Camus’s abandoned first novel follows a man who believes money can buy the time required for happiness.
Four darker literary fairy tales about sacrifice, beauty, art, poverty, and the harm done when one life is valued above another.
The unexpurgated series completes: fame with the double life still running underneath, and the ending the published Diary declined to print.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's short 1948 attack on Jean-Paul Sartre — a defence against a specific accusation that turns into a comic literary confrontation about who owns postwar French letters.
The century's most famous literary love affair, in its own hand: two decades of the Nin–Miller letters, selected by Gunther Stuhlmann.
James Joyce's first novel — a Dublin boyhood written in the boy's own changing language, from the nursery to the morning he decides to leave Ireland and become a writer.
Sabina, the woman with five lives, pursued through her own masquerade by a conscience she hired herself — Nin's most read novel.
Prague in the months after Munich, written by a correspondent who had just been there and could not report the half of it.
Beauvoir's hundred-page account of her mother's month-long death from cancer in a Paris clinic — the shortest and most direct book she wrote, and the case study The Coming of Age would turn into general argument six years later.
A country-house comedy that turns, in its second act, into an unsparing indictment of the double standard that punished the woman and promoted the man.
The lecture years on the page: creativity, women, and the examined life, gathered from the talks that made her a campus phenomenon.
A dying American colonel, a winter weekend in Venice, a young countess — the valedictory novel the critics panned and time is slowly rehabilitating.
Beauvoir's account of Sartre's last ten years — the blindness, the strokes, the political engagements, the dependence on her care — followed by the 1974 interviews the two of them recorded together, the most direct testimony we have of what fifty years of that partnership actually consisted of.
A twentieth-century Parisian actor meets a man who cannot die, and asks him to remember her. His answer runs seven centuries and every version of that promise.
The fourth and final volume of Beauvoir's memoirs — written at sixty-four with the whole life visible behind her, organised by theme rather than chronology, and containing the reckoning with 'I was cheated' that Force of Circumstance had ended on.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's third story collection, published ten months after The Great Gatsby — nine stories about money and class, including “Winter Dreams” and “The Rich Boy.”
One long letter to Alfred Perlès — Miller sails to New York in 1935, hates it magnificently, and sails back. A round trip, as the title says.
Beauvoir's diary of her four-month lecture tour across the United States in 1947 — the trip on which she met Nelson Algren, an encounter later scored across The Mandarins and her Letters to Nelson Algren.
Sixteen years later, Stearns reruns the great inquiry — thirty-six Americans, and a country he no longer wants to flee.
A political comedy about blackmail, a fortune built on a secret, and the damage caused by demanding moral perfection from another person.
The mail habit, preserved: a small edited collection of Nin's letters to a young admirer, Moira Collins.
Colette's cat and dog talk over the household — the early book she counted as her first step free of the Claudine machine.
The animals drive the farmer out and take over the farm. Orwell's 1945 fable is about what happens after that.
A jazz drummer dies in the first act, and the friends he leaves spend four hundred pages failing to explain it.
The sequel the Cook Book's success demanded — her recipes, annotated for American kitchens by the century's least likely collaborator.
Twenty-four years of letters with the poet-librarian who took her seriously before the world did.
A late gathering of Colette's short prose — first published not as a standalone book but as a named section of her Complete Works.
The trunk's last surprise: collector-era erotica thought lost for seventy years, recovered and published in 2016.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1937 political pamphlet — a hybrid work in which fictional dialogue, three ballet scenarios and an extended racial and political monologue interrupt one another.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1959 collection of five ballet scenarios — witches, sirens, gods and dockworkers, all speaking through movement rather than music.
Four late stories that keep hard subjects under a calm surface — and a title tale built on a revelation that changes everything you have read.
The scandalous exile finds his paradise: fog, cliffs, children, neighbors, pilgrims — and the question of whether paradise can be lived in.
James Baldwin's play about the murder of a young Black man in a Southern town and the all-white jury that lets his killer go, written after Emmett Till and dedicated to Medgar Evers.
At eighty-four, the rememberer goes back to the beginning: the boys of the Fourteenth Ward, named and thanked one by one.
Eleven ports and the sea-word for knocking about the world — with the great Genoa chapter, the tetralogy's buried childhood, at its heart.
A woman past fifty, alone in a Provence summer, decides what a life no longer organized around love can be.
Orwell's first novel: seven English people, one club that has never admitted an Asian member, and a magistrate who wants in.
Four decades of journalism in one volume — Paris cafés for the Toronto Star, Madrid under shells, the Blitz, the liberation ride to the Ritz.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's ten Copenhagen prison notebooks — February to October 1946 — first published in complete scholarly form in 2019, and the workshop in which the postwar novels began.
An emperor turns the discovery that people die unhappy into a program of unlimited logical cruelty.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's unfinished 1949 novel — an eighteen-year-old cavalry volunteer's first terrible night at the barracks.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1957 novel — the first of the German trilogy — about the last months of the Vichy government-in-exile at Sigmaringen.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's two songs — the sailor's chant À nœud coulant and the underworld revenge ballad Règlement, both recorded in his own voice in 1956 and collected as a book in 1981.
An aging courtesan and the beautiful young man she has kept for six years — the novel that made Colette a major writer.
The continuous novel's second book: Djuna, the dancers and the young men who refuse to grow up, and the café where everyone lands.
The five novels of the continuous novel in one volume — Nin's roman-fleuve of women's inner lives, assembled under its true name.
The 1922 symposium that put American civilization on trial — and sent the jury to Paris.
The fourth Claudine novel hands the story to another woman — Annie, learning to leave a husband who has always decided for her.
The sardonic Burgundian schoolgirl whose diary made Colette famous — published, at first, under her husband's name.
Claudine leaves Burgundy for the capital, and the schoolgirl's sharp eye is turned on Parisian society and her own heart.
Marriage does not tame Claudine — the third novel takes the series into its most openly erotic and disenchanted territory.
Nin's last and lightest fiction: a painter named Renate, a gallery of originals, and a book that ends by beginning again.
A fat insurance salesman with new false teeth and seventeen secret pounds drives back to the town he grew up in.
All of Ernest Hemingway's poems in one scholarly edition — school verse, Paris satires, war poems, and the private jokes he never meant to publish.
The interviews, collected: three decades of Nin answering questions, from little magazines to the fame years, in one scholarly volume.
The novel Miller wrote about losing June to another woman — abandoned in 1930, published in 1991, and rawer than anything he ever polished.
Ten wartime essays on Dickens, Kipling, boys' comics and seaside postcards, including the piece on Salvador Dalí that a publisher cut out of a printed book.
Her first book: a defense of Lawrence written in sixteen days, published in Paris in 1932 — the door her whole literary life walked through.
A jilted millionaire sails three artists to Antarctica to see what silence does to them — then comes back and buys the whaling trade.
The complete Toronto Star files, 1920–1924: the twenty-something in Paris, learning the style on deadline for a newspaper an ocean away.
Oscar Wilde's long prison letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, combining accusation, self-criticism, memory, suffering, art, and a new interpretation of Christ.
The bullfight book: a full treatise on the corrida that keeps turning into a book about death, Spain, and how to write.
Written at a dollar a page for an anonymous collector in the forties — published the year she died, and instantly her bestseller.
Orwell's first book: seventeen-hour days in a Paris hotel kitchen, then a month on the road in England.
Fifteen short stories about ordinary people in Dublin — the first book by James Joyce, and a nine-year fight to get it printed.
A husband learns of his wife's old, brief affair, and a close marriage comes apart over a few days in the country.
The life told in her own words — an autobiography assembled after her death from some forty of her books, and the English Colette most readers meet.
The poem where 'Blaise Cendrars' is born: a starving night in Manhattan, addressed to Christ — and modern French poetry changes course.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1955 fictional interview and aesthetic manifesto — a staged conversation about his own style that turns into a comic walk across Paris.
Six hundred letters he ordered never published — Fitzgerald teased, Perkins courted, wives won and lost — the offstage voice, complete with sins.
Small events turned into surprise — Colette's chronicles of the minor, and a seedbed for the books that followed.
Six stories about people reaching toward belonging and finding that the distance remains.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1952 novel — the first volume of his postwar Féerie sequence, a feverish mixture of prison, memory and grievance.
The third unexpurgated volume: New York with Rank, the return to Paris, and a private life running at full burn between two continents.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's first book of short stories, published in September 1920 — eight magazine pieces written for money, one of which became the most famous American story about a haircut.
Twenty-two flower portraits written from memory — late Colette turning description of a rose or a poppy into a kind of self-portrait.
The third and longest volume of Beauvoir's memoirs: the eighteen years from the Liberation of Paris in August 1944 through 1962, the years in which she wrote The Second Sex and The Mandarins, met Nelson Algren, campaigned against French torture in Algeria, and became one of the most-watched public intellectuals in Europe.
Twelve fashionable chronicles that follow the turning year — a private printing for a patron's friends, later folded into Journey for Myself.
Occupied Paris, watched and described from a single window — practical, intimate, and an irreplaceable record of the city's wartime life.
The girl raised to be a rich man's mistress, and the man who changes the terms himself — Colette's most adapted story.
An American in Paris, engaged to one person and in love with another, in Baldwin's shortest novel.
One Saturday in a Harlem storefront church, and the three lives that put a boy on its floor.
The only book of stories he wrote, containing "Sonny's Blues" and, at the end, a title story told from inside a white deputy's head.
The rise and ruin of General Sutter, told at telegraph speed — the little novel that made Cendrars famous and Hollywood hungry.
A month on safari, written as an experiment: can a true book, absolutely truthful, compete with the novel? Plus the Huckleberry Finn verdict.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's recovered 2022 novel — a young Ferdinand comes to on a battlefield, survives a military hospital, and starts moving toward London.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1944 novel — a wounded French veteran drops into a London underworld of pimps, prostitutes, musicians and eccentrics.
A thousand pages of argument by mail — Miller and Michael Fraenkel start with Shakespeare and end with everything, from the Villa Seurat to the war.
Before Paris, before the war, before everything: the school newspaper and literary magazine work of Hemingway, sixteen years old.
The craft doctrine, extracted: every passage where Hemingway explains the work — icebergs, morning hours, and stopping while it's going good.
The unexpurgated year — what the 1966 Diary couldn't print about Henry, June, and the winter that changed all three.
Everything Miller ever said about the work itself, gathered into one volume — the accidental craft book of the century's least teachable writer.
A Left Bank bachelor, two rich mistresses, and an arrangement that stops working. The only one of Gellhorn's novels set in Paris.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Oriental fairy tale, written around 1923 for his young daughter and illustrated by his first wife — a wandering child who is repeatedly offered safety and repeatedly leaves.
George Orwell went to Spain to write newspaper articles and joined a militia instead: a winter in the Aragón trenches, street fighting in Barcelona, a bullet through the throat.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1933 speech at Médan — instead of praising Émile Zola, he asks what has happened to the reality naturalism tried to describe, and predicts that literature committed to it will not be tolerated for long.
A Colette-like narrator, alone in a provincial hotel, is drawn into the private drama of the strangers around her.
Her first fiction: a surrealist prose poem of mirrors, sisters, and drowned rooms, printed on the Villa Seurat's own press in 1936.
Four pages that end the war literature of glory: the poet-legionnaire's confession, with drawings by Fernand Léger.
The most famous of Maya Angelou’s seven autobiographies: a Black girl’s childhood in the segregated South, and how she got her voice back.
The sequel to The Big Sea: Cuba, Haiti, the Soviet Union, and besieged Madrid, ending in Montmartre on New Year's night.
A nineteen-year-old in Harlem is pregnant, and the father of her child is in the Tombs for something he did not do.
Late prose of landscape, memory, and homage — Colette on familiar ground, seeing it new through the eye of a painter friend.
The late essays: masculinity reconsidered, women's becoming, travel, and craft — the last collection published in her lifetime.
Short chronicles of the street and the throng — Colette watching the anonymous life of the city pass.
The second unexpurgated volume: the analysts, the abortion chapter, and the reunion with her father that the 1966 Diary could only gesture at.
George Orwell's first book of essays: Charles Dickens, the twopenny school-story papers, and Henry Miller's Paris.
Old age falls in love and can't sleep: the last great infatuation, confessed in prose and painted through the small hours.
Four essays and dialogues in which Oscar Wilde argues that criticism is creative, art need not copy life, and a work should not be reduced to a moral lesson.
A collectible late volume that is not, despite its title, a diary — a mixed gathering of chronicles and tales, printed in a small run.
A painter, three sons, a war at sea — the unfinished masterpiece that shows what Hemingway was still reaching for.
The only book of poems James Baldwin published, brought out in London in 1983 when he was fifty-nine and almost nobody knew he wrote them.
The last portrait in the gallery is the best friend of all: Fred Perlès — Carl of Clichy — thanked at last under the old pet name.
Short prose of weather, illness, waiting, and travel — a mutable self-portrait Colette reworked heavily between 1922 and 1928.
The matador who invented modern bullfighting tells his life to Spain's greatest reporter — night swims, secret capework in the dark, and the melancholy of surviving the golden age.
A proud, aging aristocrat, reduced but unbroken, is drawn back into the schemes of the ex-husband she still half-loves.
A gospel singer is dead in a London basement, and his brother spends six hundred pages telling you who he was.
George Orwell's third novel: a bookshop assistant and failed poet has declared war on money, and lives on two pounds a week to prove it.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1933 play in five acts — Doctor Bardamu moves through colonial Africa, New York, the League of Nations and the Paris suburbs, everywhere finding institutions absorbed by hierarchy, money and paperwork instead of the people they claim to serve.
Dr. Louis Destouches's medical essay on the Ford factories in Detroit — a physician's report on what mass production does to the human body and what factory medicine is actually for.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's recovered short story, published in La Nouvelle Revue française in 2023 — a humiliated elderly woman in Pontabon carries her private mythology of a dead captain to his grave and walks away.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's recovered 2023 legendary novel — an imaginary Middle Ages of kings, troubadours, murder and personified Death, drawn from two overlapping manuscripts he never completed.
The first Cities of the Interior novel: Lillian's hungers, Jay's Paris, and the party where the whole cast finally assembles.
A mock almanac about the lesbian circle around the American writer Natalie Clifford Barney in 1920s Paris, written by Djuna Barnes in deliberately archaic English, printed privately in 1928 and sold by hand.
Colette's last book — a short return to the old women of her childhood village, published in the year she died.
D. H. Lawrence's last novel: printed privately in Florence in 1928, reprinted cheaply in Paris in 1929 to beat the pirates, and legal in Britain only from 1960.
A society comedy in which a young wife suspects her husband, an excluded woman returns, and a fan becomes evidence that tells the wrong story.
The first great trench novel — written in the mud by a forty-one-year-old private, Goncourt-crowned while the war it describes still ran.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's posthumous 1964 novel — Guignol's Band II picks up in wartime London with gas-mask experiments, a fourteen-year-old niece, and the criminal past that will not release Ferdinand.
The sequel to Duo: widowed Alice returns to her sisters and the battered old couch where the family regroups and survives.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1938 political pamphlet — a short grotesque opening beside the Seine gives way to a sustained argument against another war with Germany.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1941 political pamphlet — written after the fall of France, its later sections turn from defeat toward a social programme built around leisure, family and the arts.
Beauvoir's late short novel about a Paris advertising executive and the polished consumer world that has trained her, her family, and her ten-year-old daughter to see other people's suffering as a stain to be removed from the picture.
The fame years by airmail: Nin's letters to the Australian bookseller David Pepperell, 1968 to 1974.
Four wartime letters distinguish love of one’s country from the nationalism that makes murder a virtue.
Four decades of letters to the third member of the Villa Seurat triangle, from the Booster days to the last year of her life.
The richest man on a Caribbean island marries a young mixed-race woman to settle a score, and neither side of the island will have her.
Where the whole project begins: the diary an eleven-year-old started on the boat to New York, as a letter to the father who left.
The second book from the dollar-a-page trunk: thirteen more stories written for the collector, published two years after Delta of Venus.
James Baldwin's only children's book: a four-year-old named TJ on a Harlem block, written for his nephew and illustrated by a French painter he had known since 1959.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's recovered 2022 novel Londres, arriving in English as London on 13 October 2026 in Charlotte Mandell's New Directions translation — a French criminal underworld in wartime London destroys itself around Ferdinand.
A wartime gathering of short pieces and memories — miscellaneous by design, and revealing precisely because it is unsettled.
Comic and supernatural stories about murder as duty, a ghost who cannot frighten Americans, a secretless socialite, and a disputed Shakespeare portrait.
Two war correspondents wrote a farce about two war correspondents. A hit in London in 1946, it closed on Broadway after four performances.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's ~905-page preliminary manuscript of Féerie pour une autre fois — memories of Montmartre before the flight from Paris, and the bombing that reorganises the narrative into escape.
The Villa Seurat portfolio — portraits, surrealist manifestos, and the essay on Brassaï, gathered by Obelisk in 1938 and never quite reprinted whole.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1936 political and philosophical pamphlet — a short, disillusioned report from the Soviet Union that quickly widens into an argument against political utopianism.
The first volume of Beauvoir's memoirs: a bourgeois Catholic Paris childhood, the loss of faith, philosophy at the Sorbonne, and a friendship whose ending she said cost her her freedom.
The second story collection — 'The Killers,' 'Hills Like White Elephants' — the iceberg method at its coldest and most perfect.
A sheltered Paris girl feeds on romantic fantasy until it pulls her out into the night — the first of the Minne novels.
The sequel takes Minne past sheltered fantasy into the harder education of marriage, dissatisfaction, and desire.
The series resumes after seventeen years: the war decade uncut, from the flight out of Paris to the night the mirages ended.
A music-hall performer and a young officer conduct a wartime romance by letter, and the wit the title promises turns out to be hard-won.
Miller's first surviving novel — Western Union, a failing first marriage, and New York as a machine for grinding men down, written in 1927 and unpublished for sixty-five years.
A French curiosity of the shelf: Marcel Moreau's book, published with a group of Nin's letters to him — her contribution, not her volume.
A young psychiatrist frees the world's most dangerous patient and follows him into the abyss — the monster-novel Henry Miller pressed on everyone.
The music hall seen from behind — the tired, precarious, intimate world of performers, by a writer who had lived it.
Beauvoir's long 1951–52 essay on the Marquis de Sade for Les Temps modernes — the philosophical argument that turned Sade from a scandal into a serious moral problem for postwar existentialism.
Colette's cold, exact memoir of her first marriage — the writing factory in which the Claudine novels were made and signed by another man.
Volume two of the friendships — opened, without apology, by the truest friend of all: the bicycle.
The life, told aloud at eighty: taped talk, photographs, watercolors — the scandalous century recollected from a sunny room.
Short, luminous memories of a Burgundy childhood, gathered around the mother who presides over them.
A chance encounter becomes a map of 1920s Paris, Surrealist wonder and the danger of turning another person into a symbol.
James Baldwin and Sol Stein were classmates at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. Fifty years later Stein opened the file drawer that held their letters.
The last prewar volume: the houseboat, Moré at the center, and the Paris world running out while the diary refuses to look away.
The trilogy's last act: a third party in the marriage, the darkest New York winter — and at the end of it, a boat to Paris.
A 1955 mass-market paperback of Henry Miller's legal writing, sold for twenty-five cents while his major books were still banned in America.
The 1936 novel about a woman named Robin Vote and the four people who cannot stop following her — edited for Faber by T. S. Eliot, who cut about thirteen pages and then wrote the introduction.
Orwell's last novel: a clerk in a London ministry falsifies the past for a living, then starts a diary of his own.
Poems that stretch to fit the century — nineteen dispatches from the studios of Chagall, Léger, and Delaunay, and the last verse before the novels.
The book Baldwin wrote after the funerals: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and a friend he could not get out of jail.
Thirteen essays from the years Baldwin came home: Harlem, the segregated South, a writers' congress at the Sorbonne, and the end of his friendship with Richard Wright.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1954 novel — the second volume of the Féerie sequence, a single night of Allied bombing over Montmartre.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1960 novel — the second of the German trilogy — about his 1944 flight into a collapsing Germany.
Ten essays, a stepfather's funeral on the day Harlem burned, and eight days in a Paris jail.
James Baldwin and the photographer Richard Avedon had been at the same Bronx high school. Thirty years later they made a book about what America looked like in 1964.
Four Mediterranean essays about bodily happiness, ruins, summer and the refusal to postpone life.
The 1924 philosophical opening Louis Destouches wrote for La Vie, Pasteur, Semmelweis et la Mort — cut by La Presse médicale, lost to the League of Nations archive in Geneva, and rediscovered in 2014.
The Paris dispatches alone, in a pocket volume — the city these pages map, reported by its most famous arrival at twenty-two.
The 1947 credo: writing from the unconscious outward — Nin's working method, stated in a pamphlet's span.
The Malcolm X film Columbia Pictures hired James Baldwin to write and never made. He published the screenplay as a book instead.
Seven uncles scattered to the world's ends, one boy reading their letters — the wander-poem John Dos Passos loved enough to translate.
Colette's prose set against fifty photographs by Izis — a late book-club photobook, and not the 1932 art book of nearly the same name.
Colette's animal pieces printed as a rare Swiss art book, with wood-engraved beasts by Paul Jouve — not to be confused with the 1953 photobook of almost the same name.
A Times correspondent's eyewitness tour of the salons and café tables of 1920s Paris — Joyce, Pound, Sylvia Beach, and the young Hemingway, sketched from the next chair.
A wartime book of animals — an imagined refuge 'where there is no war,' and one of Colette's decisive works about the otherness of beasts.
The Rosy Crucifixion, book two: married to Mona, done with jobs forever, and learning — expensively — how to become a writer.
Six very short parables that use biblical language to unsettle simple lessons about miracles, suffering, knowledge, and desire.
Oscar Wilde's first commercial book, a decorated collection shaped by classical myth, Catholic imagery, travel, love, and the Aesthetic movement.
A farm town in Ohio turns into a factory town inside twenty years, and the man whose machines did it cannot manage a conversation. Sherwood Anderson's novel of 1920.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's preface to Albert Serouille's 1944 history of Bezons — the neglected Paris suburb where Dr. Louis Destouches spent the war working the municipal dispensary.
Three long stories about clever people who cannot see the thing standing in front of them. The title is a joke, and this was her last collection.
A wide gathering of Colette's prose on animals, the Midi, appetite, and secrecy — where confinement and ecstasy turn out to be kin.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's early play — a bourgeois drawing-room comedy that slides through infidelity, a Paris house of assignation and Heaven, where God turns a telescope on the earthly spectacle.
A rare 1913 animal book — printed in just 300 copies, never reissued, and soon absorbed whole into Peace Among the Beasts.
Beauvoir's first philosophical essay, written under the Occupation and published a few months after the Liberation — the shorter, earlier statement of the argument The Ethics of Ambiguity would work out at book length three years later.
The happiest of the Paris books: two broke friends in a Clichy flat, and the era remembered as pure appetite.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1933 article in Candide — his first concentrated public explanation of what his writing is trying to do, six months after Journey to the End of the Night.
A 1946 pamphlet manifesto: why the psychological novel needs the logic of dreams, not the inventory of rooms.
Volume two of the Nightmare: America surveyed again — but the heart of the book is the long, aching essay remembering France.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's ten-page defence memorandum, written from the Copenhagen prison on 6 November 1946 — the primary source for how he answered the treason charges the French judiciary was building against him.
The letters behind the diary's hardest chapter: father and daughter writing to each other after the 1933 reunion.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's posthumous 1969 novel — the final volume of the German trilogy, and the escape at last completed.
The true case of Jean Galmot — rum fortunes, a Guiana seat in parliament, a prison cell, and a death in Cayenne that started a riot.
Djuna Barnes's first novel, published in New York in 1928 with twelve passages cut by her own publisher and replaced by rows of asterisks — a bawdy chronicle of a farm household run by one man, his mother, his wife and his mistress.
Oscar Wilde's one-act tragedy, written in French, in which Salome demands the head of the prophet Jokanaan after he rejects her.
Miller's surrealist film-on-paper, written after Anaïs Nin's House of Incest — 200 copies from Obelisk in 1937, with a drawing by Abraham Rattner.
The continuous novel's finale: Lillian in the Mexican sun, the labyrinth turned inward, and the journey home as the real voyage.
Sixty years of letters, edited by her biographer Caroline Moorehead. Faster, funnier and ruder than the prose Gellhorn published.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1924 medical thesis — a literary account of the Hungarian physician who discovered that doctors were killing their own patients.
Six late chamber pieces in one volume — the old man's small forms, from a dream of his mother to the view from eighty.
The Rosy Crucifixion begins: New York in the twenties, the marriage that must end, the woman who must be Mona — his most banned book.
The bookseller's own story — twenty-two years at 12 rue de l'Odéon, told by the woman who lent the Lost Generation its library and published Ulysses.
Beauvoir's first novel: an established Parisian couple's promise of freedom is tested — and shattered — by the younger woman they invite into their lives.
Colette's portrait of her mother — and, around her, her father and wild siblings — often called the finest thing she wrote.
The tetralogy ascends: a levitating saint, the Brazilian outback — and, unspoken at the center, a son who fell from the sky.
The slim self-published book of 1958 that carried Lillian to Mexico — and later grew into Seduction of the Minotaur.
The first of the four Parade's End novels — an English government statistician, the wife he refuses to divorce, and the war that arrives between the two halves of the book.
Late essays from the sage of Big Sur: Thoreau, the young Beats, the art of staying still while beating your wings.
The twenty-one years the memoir refused to write — the widowhood, in her own mail.
The film actress whose screen self outgrew her: Nin's most portable novella, and the character who wandered her books looking for a home.
A late book of portraits — the writers, performers, and painters Colette had known, drawn from memory in a few exact strokes.
A wartime miscellany with one masterpiece inside: 'Reunion in Brooklyn,' the exile's homecoming to the parents he fled.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's second story collection, published in 1922 — eleven very uneven pieces, two of them among the best things he ever wrote, and a table of contents in which he grades them himself.
A famous Black actor collapses on stage and spends the novel working out how he got there.
Still lifes in words from the studio hung with Picassos — objects, food, and rooms painted in sentences. Modernism at its most playful.
The Riviera at its most enchanted, and the marriage underneath it — nine years after Gatsby, the deeper, sadder masterpiece.
The compilation that put African storytelling on Paris shelves in 1921 — creation myths, trickster tales, and the source of a Ballets Suédois landmark.
Henry Miller's 1945 account of driving across the United States for a year and disliking most of what he found.
Alice B. Toklas's 1954 cookbook, which is also her memoir of fifty years with Gertrude Stein, told through the meals she cooked.
James Baldwin's first play: a woman pastors a Harlem storefront church, and then the husband she has told the congregation nothing about walks in.
The first one-volume Nin: fiction, diary, and criticism selected in 1973, at the height of the fame, as the front door to the shelf.
The memoir tetralogy opens like a lightning strike: war, gypsies, and the art of being astonished — written after a decade of silence.
Malcolm X told his life to Alex Haley across two years of interviews and was murdered before the book appeared. It is the source James Baldwin was hired to turn into a film.
A long poem about a prisoner's execution and the institution that makes every person inside share the waiting, fear, shame, and isolation.
The marriage written in advance — Anthony and Gloria waiting for a fortune while the waiting eats them alive.
Hughes's autobiography to age twenty-nine: Africa by tramp steamer, Paris by dishwater, and the Harlem Renaissance from inside.
Beauvoir's Resistance novel, written in secret in Occupied Paris and published at the Liberation — an ethical thriller about a man who cannot forgive his own privilege and the woman he sends into a mission she may not survive.
Blaise Cendrars's memoir of the Foreign Legion squad he led in the First World War, written thirty years after he lost his right arm in it.
One of Colette's last books — written from her chair as her body failed, and set against decline rather than defeated by it.
The scandalous autobiographer turns to the shelf: a reading life told like an adventure, from boyhood pulp to Cendrars.
A new marriage and a beloved cat, and a jealousy that turns out to run the wrong way — Colette's coldest short novel.
Greece, 1939: the light, the ruins, and a monologuist named Katsimbalis — the book Miller himself called his best.
Beauvoir's six-hundred-page 1970 study of old age — the companion volume to The Second Sex, arguing that Western societies treat their elderly as a scandal to be hidden and that this is a decision, not a fact.
Everything after the forty-nine: the 1987 omnibus adds the later stories and the vault's fiction — the whole short-form career, one spine.
The first Miller book America was allowed to read: stories and essays smuggled home from the Paris years, Tropics not included.
Everything James Baldwin published and never put in a book, gathered twenty-three years after he died: reviews from his early twenties, speeches, open letters, and one short story.
The last book he worked on: Spain, 1959 — two great matadors, one murderous rivalry, and the old aficionado keeping score a final time.
Baldwin on the movies he grew up on, beginning with the film he was taken to at seven and ending with The Exorcist.
The century's most famous journal opens on Louveciennes, 1931 — Miller at the table, June in the doorway, and a woman writing it all down as it happens.
The divided decade: Mexico and California against New York, the fiction out of fashion, and the diary carrying a double life it couldn't print.
After the review: Dutton signs her, the young writers arrive, and the diarist of Paris becomes a figure in postwar New York.
The famous years: lecture halls, honors, a new generation of readers — and the diarist watching her own arrival with a lifetime's practiced eye.
The long approach: Alan Swallow rescues the novels, the diary is readied at last for print, and the volume ends on the edge of fame.
The war years in America: Greenwich Village, the hand press on Macdougal Street, erotica for a dollar a page, and the review that changed everything.
The second volume: New York with Otto Rank, the return to Paris, the houseboat on the Seine, and Europe arming behind every entry.
The seventh unexpurgated volume: two households in balance, the fiction winding down, and the decade-long campaign to publish the diary itself.
An early five-act blank-verse tragedy in which a young man seeking revenge in Renaissance Italy falls in love with the wife of the ruler he plans to kill.
The last early volume: dance, the D. H. Lawrence book, and the approach to the exact doorstep where the famous Diary begins.
The diary switches to English: work, modeling, a long courtship, and a young woman writing her way toward a marriage and a self.
Beauvoir's 1947 essay giving existentialism the ethics Sartre never got around to writing — the philosophical statement of the argument She Came to Stay had put in a novel and The Second Sex would put in a thousand pages two years later.
Late reflections written from an immobile chair — memory, the war years, and lost friends, gathered under the evening star.
Baldwin goes to Atlanta to report on the murders of twenty-eight Black people, most of them children, and comes back unconvinced by the conviction.
Sixty years of war reporting in one book, written by someone who kept going back long after the story stopped being hers.
In an Amsterdam bar, a former Paris lawyer confesses until confession becomes another form of control.
One volume, whole arsenal: every story through 1938 — 'Snows,' 'Macomber' — plus the Madrid play written under actual shellfire.
Two letters written for the centenary of emancipation: one to a fifteen-year-old nephew, one about the night Baldwin had dinner with Elijah Muhammad.
The unfinished novel recovered after Camus’s death returns to his father, his mother and a poor childhood in Algiers.
A late, deliberately mixed gathering — chronicles, tales, and prefaces bound together as one of Colette's collectible last volumes.
Djuna, a guitarist named Rango, and a houseboat on the Seine: the continuous novel's most concentrated love story.
A young writer, two women, and the summer that unmade a marriage — Hemingway's strangest and most vulnerable novel.
'This is the saddest story I have ever heard' — told, perfectly, by the one man in it who understands it least.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel of love, money, and the Jazz Age — written mostly in France, and often called the great American novel.
Five literary fairy tales about generosity, vanity, friendship, poverty, and the cost of seeing other people's suffering.
Her first collection: nine stories written months after Spain and the Winter War, published by Scribner's in 1941 and never reprinted.
Henry Miller's best pages from thirty years of writing, selected by his friend Lawrence Durrell.
Twenty-two short, dark tales of love's hidden side — betrayal, solitude, and illusion, told in the manner of a modern Maupassant.
Stories from the peace that followed the war, written by someone unconvinced by it.
Oscar Wilde's best-known comedy: two men invent useful false identities, two women insist on marrying someone named Ernest, and a handbag resolves the plot.
Colette rebuilds the two Minne novels into one — a young woman whose apparent innocence coexists with the beginnings of her own liberty.
The third early volume: a very young marriage, the move to Paris, and a would-be writer deciding what a wife is allowed to become.
Revolutionaries planning an assassination discover that a just cause does not settle what they may do.
Four wartime stories of frustrated love, shadowed by backward glances at the Paris circles of Colette's youth.
Chéri comes home from the war to a changed Paris and an aged Léa, and cannot live in either — the harsh sequel to Chéri.
Every letter he ever wrote, eventually: the Cambridge edition's decades-long project to publish the complete correspondence — volume by volume.
Chronicles across a single year — wartime hardship and the urge to reclaim ordinary life, with the child Bel-Gazou at the edges.
Written under the Blitz: George Orwell's argument that England could not win the war without becoming a socialist country.
Colette's war album — the First World War seen from hospitals, the rear, and ruined ground, without a word of bombast.
Beauvoir's 1957 book on her two-month trip to Mao's China — the most politically contested of her nonfiction, a document of what a serious European left intellectual could and could not see in the People's Republic in the mid-1950s.
Hollywood's philosopher-king, half-finished — the novel Fitzgerald was writing the day he died, and proof the powers had come all the way back.
A foreign colony in a Mexican village in 1953, half of it driven out by the Red Scare. Gellhorn lived four years among people like them.
Beauvoir's Prix Goncourt novel: a six-hundred-page roman à clef of the Parisian intellectual left in the four years after Liberation — Sartre, Camus, Koestler and Nelson Algren all present under lightly changed names.
The stray pieces, gathered: four decades of essays and reviews, led by the 1930 Lawrence piece that started her public writing.
Camus asks whether life is worth living when the universe supplies no final meaning.
The shadow autobiography assembled: every Nick Adams story in the order of Nick's life, with eight unpublished pieces joining the canon.
The raw feed of the Nightmare: the actual notebook from the 1940–41 American tour, published in facsimile — blots, sketches, and all.
Her criticism at full length: the case for the poetic, psychological novel, written at the height of the Diary's fame.
Author and editor, complete: twenty-two years of letters between Hemingway and Maxwell Perkins — the working marriage behind the shelf.
A wife and her husband's mistress discover that their bond with each other matters more than the man they share.
Oscar Wilde's only novel: a beautiful young man stays unchanged while his hidden portrait records age, cruelty, and guilt.
When Oran closes against an epidemic, ordinary people decide whether decency is enough.
The modern one-volume Nin: thirty-eight selections in chronological order, with the whole posthumous shelf finally in the pool.
Thirty-seven years of essays in one volume, assembled by Baldwin two years before he died — the single book to own if you are only owning one.
The second memoir volume, covering Beauvoir from her 1929 meeting with Sartre through the Occupation and the Liberation of Paris — the years the intellectual partnership at the centre of her life was built and tested.
The two-meter poem: a train across Siberia, a girl asking if they're far from Montmartre, and Sonia Delaunay's colors running the whole way down.
Colette's most personal book — a meditation on desire, pleasure, and the varieties of love, built from portraits rather than plot.
A quotations collection with receipts: 365 verified Nin lines, each with its citation — the antidote to the internet's fake Nin.
The second year of verified Nin: 365 more sourced quotations, arranged across life, love, consciousness, women and men, and art.
A history and critique of rebellion that asks when resistance turns into justified murder.
Two childhood companions on a Breton shore cross into adulthood the summer an older woman intervenes.
Two months in the coal towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, then a long argument with the people Orwell agreed with.
Beauvoir's thousand-page 1949 argument that femininity is made and not born — the founding book of second-wave feminism and the century's most influential work of feminist philosophy.
The fifth and final Claudine book: Claudine spends a winter in her friend Annie's country house while her husband is away being treated, and the cycle closes in a minor key.
The sequel to The Vagabond reverses its ending: the woman who chose freedom gives herself to a dependent, possessive love.
Fourteen novellas written between 1936 and 1978, gathered in one volume. For most of Gellhorn's fiction it is the only edition still in circulation.
A clown, a ladder, a moon: the fable Miller called the strangest story he ever wrote — begun as a favor to Fernand Léger.
An essay arguing that poverty should be ended by changing property relations, not managed through charity, so each person can develop freely.
The words he spoke over the war: the narration of Joris Ivens's 1937 documentary, printed as a small, strange book the next year.
A long, highly decorated poem in which a speaker questions a sphinx about imagined lovers, gods, monsters, and ancient history.
A clerk in Algiers kills a man, then faces a court more interested in his behavior at his mother’s funeral.
The prophet of the exodus tells his own story — the manifesto, the Select's saucers, the blindness, and the trip home.
The early collection in which Colette's short prose became unmistakably her own — lyric reveries, animal pieces, and music-hall sketches side by side.
Miller on Rimbaud — the boy who invented modern poetry and walked away — in the least objective, most alive study ever written of him.
The parody that burned a bridge on purpose: Hemingway lampoons his mentor Sherwood Anderson — and breaks a contract doing it.
Four novellas about Americans out of work, written by a twenty-seven-year-old who had spent a year being paid to go and look.
A divorced music-hall performer is offered love and security, and has to decide what her independence is worth.
The other half of the career: fifty years of reporting on everything that was not a war.
Langston Hughes's first book: the poems of Lenox Avenue, the sea, and the Paris nightclub kitchen, published when he was twenty-four.
Three novellas about Europeans who stayed in East Africa: two sisters at a hotel on Kilimanjaro, a man building a farm in Kenya, a woman out of options.
The 1928 novel about an Englishwoman who loves women and says so, which a London magistrate ordered destroyed four months after it was published and a New York court cleared five months after that.
The novel she made out of the winter fighting and what she found at Dachau — reissued forty years later under a colder title.
Essays from the turn of the decade — writing, Balzac, healers, and bums — where the Paris provocateur starts sounding like a sage.
Three long stories of middle-aged women whose lives are coming apart — Beauvoir at her most Chekhovian, in the fiction that best carries the analysis of women's mid-life she had made in The Second Sex twenty years before.
The white whale of the Villa Seurat: the D. H. Lawrence book that nearly swallowed Miller in 1933, published at last in 1980.
Miller's own explanation of the banned books — the essay where he tells censors, critics, and readers what he thought the sex was for.
Five early essays in which poverty, silence, sunlight and death already form the vocabulary of the later books.
Hand-set on Nin's own Gemor Press in 1945: the portraits of women that grew into the continuous novel.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, published in March 1920 and sold out in three days: a Princeton student's education in love, money, and disappointment.
Gertrude Stein's first book — three long stories about three working women, written in the flat repeating sentences that Ernest Hemingway and a generation of American writers learned from.
Colette tells her life through the rooms she lived in — an autobiography written as a sequence of Paris addresses.
The first book: three hundred copies from a little Paris press, 1923 — everything Hemingway had that the stolen suitcase spared.
Key West fishing captain, rum-runner, revolutionary — Hemingway's darkest argument about how poor men survive in the Depression.
The double life, documented: eight years swinging between a husband in New York and a lover in California, from the journal that kept both books.
A travel book organised entirely around the trips that went wrong, and the funniest thing she ever wrote.
Kenya, 1953 — the safari that became a marriage story, a meditation on belonging, and Hemingway's most contentious posthumous publication.
Four long stories about marriage, each one titled from a promise made at the altar.
One Dublin day, June 16th, 1904 — the novel that remade the form, published by a Paris bookshop when no one else would touch it.
The stories that broke the silence — hand-set on her own press in 1944, and reviewed into legitimacy by Edmund Wilson.
Oscar Wilde's first play, a Russian political melodrama about a revolutionary torn between a planned assassination and love for the future ruler.
Six dispatches on what the war was doing to civilians, and the reporting that got her barred.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1957 argument for a broad postwar amnesty — nineteen handwritten pages that widen his own case into a general demand for reconciliation.
The apprentice Nin, published at last: stories written around 1930, before the diary's fame, before even House of Incest.
Her actual autobiography — brisk, dry, and stopped dead at 1946: the title says exactly what the book is, and what it declines to be.
Her first novel, at twenty-five, and the one she spent the rest of her life leaving out.
Beauvoir's earliest book — five linked stories about young Catholic bourgeois Paris women written in 1935–37, rejected by Gallimard and Grasset, and published only forty-two years later as a document of the author before she had learned to write.
Beauvoir's only completed play, written under the Occupation and staged in Paris in October 1945 — a besieged fourteenth-century Flanders town choosing which of its own people it will not feed.
Three friends argue about abstract painting in one slim volume — the painter from the Jockey bar, Miller, and Saroyan.
Small-town Ohio after dark — the linked stories that taught American fiction to speak plainly, from the writer who sent Hemingway to Paris.
The darkest of the story collections: insomnia, nada, and 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place' — the code with the lights going out.
Three novellas from the Villa Seurat's last season — including the father story the diary had been rehearsing for twenty-five years.
Gellhorn's letters from 1930 to 1949: the Depression, Spain, Normandy, Dachau and the Hemingway marriage, printed with the replies included.
Gallimard's Cahiers Céline 3 — the collected medical corpus of Dr. Louis Destouches, before he became Céline: the 1924 Semmelweis thesis and the public-health and factory-medicine writings that surrounded it.
Cahiers Céline 6 and 10 — Céline's ten-year correspondence with the writer Albert Paraz, from the Danish exile years through the return to France, and the surviving public campaign to have Céline read again after the war.
Cahiers Céline 5 — Céline's correspondence with the women in his life beyond Lucette: the American dancer Elizabeth Craig, Karen Marie Jensen, Cillie Pam and others, from the pre-Journey years through exile.
Cahiers Céline 9 — the 758-page scholarly edition of Céline's letters to his literary secretary Marie Canavaggia, twenty-four years of the working relationship that saw the novels into print.
Cahiers Céline 11 — 302 pages of the intense, then broken correspondence between Céline in Danish exile and the American Jewish literary scholar Milton Hindus, culminating in Hindus's 1948 visit to Denmark and his 1950 portrait of Céline as a crippled giant.
Cahiers Céline 4 — the young Louis Destouches's surviving letters and earliest known writing from the Sangha-Oubangui trading post in French Equatorial Africa, 1916–1917, the year Journey to the End of the Night's Bikomimbo chapters were quarried from.
The central single-volume selection of Céline's correspondence — 2,080 pages, five decades, and a private voice that changes with every recipient.
Claude McKay's account of two decades of travel — Harlem, London, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Marseille, Morocco — by a writer who refused to settle anywhere or belong to anyone's programme.
A Jamaican woman educated in England comes home and declines to be improved — the novel Claude McKay wrote furthest from Harlem and rated highest himself.
Black seamen, drifters and musicians on the Marseille waterfront — the novel that gave Négritude its vocabulary, written by a Jamaican who preferred the docks to literary Paris.
The collection that opened the Harlem Renaissance, written in strict sonnets by a Jamaican who refused to soften either the form or the anger.
The first bestseller by a Black American novelist — written in France, set in Harlem, and denounced by the movement it belonged to.
Written around 1930, unpublished for ninety years: a novel of the Marseille docks with a disabled Black protagonist and openly queer characters, decades ahead of anything that could be printed.
Amanda Vaill’s biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy opens the Lost Generation story beyond Hemingway and follows the couple at the center of its friendships.
John Glassco’s lively memoir of arriving in Paris at nineteen and spending the end of the 1920s among Montparnasse writers, artists, rented rooms, and late nights.
Gertrude Stein tells the story of her Paris life and artistic circle in the voice of her partner, Alice B. Toklas.
Paula McLain’s historical novel retells Ernest and Hadley Hemingway’s Paris marriage from Hadley’s imagined perspective.
John Fante’s novel of a broke, arrogant young writer chasing literary glory and love in Depression-era Los Angeles.
Knut Hamsun’s feverish portrait of a penniless young writer walking Kristiania while hunger dismantles his reason and pride.
William S. Burroughs’s hallucinatory, obscene, grotesquely comic assault on addiction and conventional narrative.
Jack Kerouac turns highways, jazz, friendship, poverty, and restless movement across America into the defining Beat novel.
J. P. Donleavy’s blackly comic novel of a charming American disaster drinking and scheming his way through postwar Dublin.
Jean Genet turns theft, prisons, sex, betrayal, and wandering through Europe into a defiantly beautiful literary autobiography.
Henry Chinaski across wartime America, one abandoned job at a time — the American work ethic, refused politely and then not politely.
The childhood behind the persona: the beatings, the acne, the library, and the first drink — Bukowski's most sustained novel.
Bukowski watched Hollywood film his life, then did the most Bukowskian thing possible: he turned the experience into another novel.
The poems of the Women years: desire, wreckage and the typewriter, in the collection whose title became Bukowski shorthand.
The underground newspaper column that invented the public Bukowski — autobiography, fiction and provocation with no editor in the way.
Charles Bukowski quit the post office in January 1970 and handed his publisher this novel within weeks. It is the job, turned into literature.
Bukowski's last novel: a detective story dedicated to bad writing, finished while he was dying, with Death herself as the client.
The 1978 European tour in prose and photographs — the Paris week, the Apostrophes disaster, and the return to Andernach, told by the man at the center.
The stories that made France love him first — half of the notorious 1972 collection, under the title the world kept.
The final collection published in his lifetime — age, cats, the computer, the dead, and 'Bluebird', the poem where the armor opens.
The one-volume door into the poetry: four decades selected by John Martin, the publisher who paid Bukowski to quit the post office.
What happens when a persona built on failure suddenly succeeds: Chinaski, famous at last, and no better at living.
The mid-1980s poems: the San Pedro years, the cats, the childhood resurfacing, and the loneliness given its full name in the title.
A young Paris student agrees to a temporary affair and learns that emotional detachment cannot be guaranteed in advance.
James Salter’s dreamlike 1967 novel of an intense affair, provincial France, and a temporary life imagined from the outside.
Françoise Sagan’s brief, sunlit 1954 debut about a seventeen-year-old girl whose jealousy turns an easy Riviera summer into something irreversible.
Sylvia Plath’s darkly funny 1963 novel about a gifted young woman looking skeptically at the adult future she is expected to want.
A pink-haired American charges through 1950s Paris in pursuit of freedom, theater, sex, and every bad decision that promises a good story.
A woman returns to the affair she began at fifteen and discovers that memory has changed what she thought she knew.
A young American enters a wealthy man's life in Italy, then decides that imitation is not enough.
A love story in which heroin becomes a third partner, then narrows two lives into dependence and collapse.
A cynical journalist moves through sex, scandal, cocaine, and decadent Paris at the beginning of the 1920s.
A sensational 1919 crime novel where opium, cocaine, theater, private scandal, and London nightlife form one conspiracy.
Heroin without romance: finding it, paying for it, using it, withdrawing, and arranging life around the next dose.
A magical experiment turns pregnancy into the center of a war between occult factions, competing wills, and enormous egos.
A young doctor records how medical relief becomes euphoria, dependence, and total loss of control.
Jean Cocteau records withdrawal, dreams, art, memory, and the uneasy bargain between opium and creativity.
Four people chase better futures until substances and fantasies consume the lives they were meant to improve.
Crowley’s enormous autobiography of travel, sex, drugs, mountaineering, feuds, magic, scandal, and self-mythology.
Two lovers turn cocaine and heroin into a private romance before pleasure gives way to dependence, desperation, and spiritual crisis.
A rational surgeon confronts an occultist who turns fascination, coercion, and forbidden experiment into Gothic terror.
A collection of Crowley’s sinister, decadent, occult, and darkly comic short fiction.
Crowley’s short, hallucinatory tale of psychic connection, suffering, altered consciousness, and psychological horror.
A boy learns shame early and tries every available way to turn himself into someone else.
One ordinary day carries the private weight of a love the outside world barely recognizes.
A brief summer love becomes the line dividing one life into before and after.
A young man performs the life expected of him and hopes the performance will eventually become real.
A writer looks back on the boy he loved and the fear that made an honest shared life impossible.
A respectable Englishman stops treating his love for men as an illness and chooses a dangerous but honest future.
A wounded soldier must choose between different kinds of love in a world where neither can be public.
A young man carries one attachment through a world determined to make him live as someone else.
A young scholar survives tuberculosis, begins chasing health and desire at any cost, and learns that escaping every duty does not give his life a purpose.
Desire, beauty, class, and conditional acceptance inside wealthy 1980s Britain.
Two women fall in love while the conventional futures expected of them close in.
Queer freedom in 1980s London meets class, power, loneliness, and the lives that came before it.
One prisoner's ordinary day reveals the human reality inside a revolutionary state turned labor camp.
A society removes the word I and turns equality into the control of every individual life.
A society gives up freedom willingly because comfort, entertainment, and chemical happiness feel easier.
A revolutionary is arrested by the state he helped create and ordered to confess to crimes he did not commit.
Books burn easily in a culture already trained to prefer speed, noise, entertainment, and easy answers.
An American dictatorship arrives through elections, promises, resentment, and a leader who insists only he can fix the country.
Schoolboys build a society from scratch and discover how quickly rules can give way to fear and violence.
Two opposed societies reveal how revolutionary ideals can harden into conformity without becoming simple villains.
One woman remembers freedom while authoritarian rules become ordinary through repetition, fear, and religious language.
Industrial wealth consolidates into an oligarchy and crushes the movement trying to oppose it.
An endless queue waits before a bureaucracy that controls permits, medicine, information, and official reality.
A man is arrested without a charge and trapped inside rules controlled by authorities who refuse to explain them.
A classroom experiment shows how quickly discipline, slogans, symbols, and belonging can replace judgment.
A numbered citizen in a glass city begins to discover the dangerous appeal of privacy and individual thought.
A war veteran uncovers a medieval masterpiece and briefly discovers a life he might have wanted.
A young artist rebuilds the truth about five condemned soldiers from letters, witnesses, codes, and stubborn love.
A nineteen-year-old soldier learns that the language of glory has nothing to do with the daily reality of the First World War.
A child's false certainty separates two lovers, and a lifetime of writing cannot restore what history takes from them.
Everything the soldiers were trained not to say.
The real love, hospitals, waiting, and loss behind the First World War.
A wartime affair ends without explanation, and jealousy turns the search for an answer into a struggle with belief.
Four people shelter in a ruined Italian villa while war, love, empire, and memory keep crossing the walls.
A soldier comes home without fifteen years of memory, forcing three women to decide what a cure would restore—and destroy.
The Armistice stops the shooting, but Ernst Birkholz and his friends discover that becoming civilians again is another struggle.
A North Vietnamese veteran tries to write a life that memory will not let him arrange in order.
War and grief carried in ordinary objects and unsaid feelings.
A roadside affair becomes a murder plan, and getting away with it proves more dangerous than guilt.
A failing marriage travels deeper into North Africa and loses every familiar form of protection.
A Depression-era dance marathon turns hunger and exhaustion into paid entertainment.
The first Bukowski book from Black Sparrow Press — 45 poems, 800 paperbound copies, and the start of the partnership of his life.
Eighteen years of poems in one volume — the in-print gateway to the three rare early collections, plus a section of new work.
The second Loujon Press book: 3,100 signed copies, hand-made in New Orleans, with artwork by the painter Noel Rockmore.
The poems between Play the Piano Drunk and Ham on Rye, named for the flowering shrub in the San Pedro garden years.
The first big Bukowski story collection — published by Ferlinghetti's City Lights, dedicated to Linda King, and later split into two famous volumes.
Nine poems cut from The Days Run Away during editing, rescued into the last of the early Bukowski chapbooks.
Bukowski's first book: a 200-copy chapbook that took thirty months to appear and did not sell out for years.
The late story collection: drinking, women, gambling and writing, compressed to the bone — the book that named a punk band.
Bukowski's first full-length poetry collection: 777 copies hand-printed in a New Orleans apartment by Jon and Louise Webb.
The first poetry collection of the full-time years — published the year after Post Office, with the title poem about a mockingbird and a cat.
A decade of portrait poems, issued as a numbered double number of the Wormwood Review — the little magazine that printed Bukowski for decades.
The poems between Women and Ham on Rye, under the longest and most quoted title Bukowski ever put on a book.
A 400-copy Glendale chapbook of eighteen poems — four of which have never been reprinted anywhere since.
The first Black Sparrow story collection: twenty-seven stories of the buried life, folding in the two rare 1960s prose pamphlets.
The collection that carries the elegies for Jane — Bukowski's grief poems for the great love of his rooming-house years.
The poems of the early 1980s: success arrived, the past not gone, and a writer measuring one against the other.
The posthumous archive begins in earnest: previously unpublished poems from the reserve Bukowski left behind, three years after his death.
A posthumous collection published twelve years after Bukowski's death, near the end of the archive series.
189 previously unpublished poems running from the early 1980s to 1994, the year Bukowski died.
The first posthumous Bukowski volume published by Ecco, after Black Sparrow Press closed in 2002.
A posthumous collection whose title jokes on a famous Yeats line — evidence of how widely read the supposedly artless Bukowski was.
143 previously unpublished poems from the archive, a decade into the posthumous program.
The last Bukowski book published under the Black Sparrow Press imprint, one year before the press closed.
The posthumous volume whose title became the most-quoted Bukowski sentence — 416 pages of poems spanning 1970 to 1990.
The second prose pamphlet: an autobiographical account of a hemorrhoid operation, published a year after the first.
Bukowski's first book of prose — a stapled 500-copy pamphlet that sold for a dollar and introduced Henry Chinaski.
The second volume of letters: the years Bukowski left the post office, published his first novel, and became a writer people had heard of.
The columns the first book left out — nine years of underground newspaper writing, gathered after his death.
The last volume of letters, running to the year he died — the San Pedro decades, the film work, and the illness at the end.
The letters of the post-office decade: an unknown poet writing to small-magazine editors while sorting mail for a living.
Thirty-eight stories, and the half of the 1972 City Lights omnibus that kept the wildest material.
Thirty-nine recovered pieces, including Bukowski reviewing his own first book and assessing Ginsberg, Creeley and Zukofsky.
The first posthumous book, published two years after his death — poems and stories mixed the way Septuagenarian Stew had mixed them.
The first story Bukowski published and the last one he wrote, in the same book — forty-six years of work recovered from magazines nobody kept.
Eighty poems and twenty stories shuffled together, published the year Bukowski turned seventy and named for it.
The first of Abel Debritto's thematic gatherings: every poem and passage Bukowski wrote about cats, in 128 pages.
The subject he is most famous for, gathered across 272 pages: the drinking that fed the writing and put him in hospital.
Fifty years of love poems in 224 pages, published two weeks before Valentine's Day 2016 — though the contents are far harder than that suggests.
Bukowski on how to write, assembled from two thousand pages of unpublished letters.
The other book about writing: stories, essays, interviews and introductions, edited by the scholar who recovered his uncollected prose.
497 pages arranged by the period of life each piece describes, not by publication date — a life told through its own writing.
98 poems printed as Bukowski typed them — the first collection in twenty-five years to reproduce the manuscripts unaltered.
The volume that actually closed the archive series, two years after the one announced as final.
Announced as the last of the archive collections — though two more followed it.
256 pages rescued from the scarce early pamphlets — the closest thing to a complete early Bukowski.
The screenplay published three years before the film existed, in a small edition Bukowski illustrated himself.
Thirty-four interviews across thirty years, from an unknown in a Hollywood apartment to a famous man beside a San Pedro pool.
Bukowski's last journals, 1991 to 1993, with twelve drawings by Robert Crumb.
The revised script with photographs from the set — and 140 copies signed by Bukowski, Mickey Rourke, Faye Dunaway and the director.
Seven years of letters with the artist Sheri Martinelli — one of the few people Bukowski argued with about art rather than performing for.
One story, illustrated by Robert Crumb — 376 copies signed by both men, and the start of a collaboration that outlasted Bukowski.
240 pages chosen as the shortest complete answer to the question of what Bukowski wrote.
The second Crumb collaboration: one story about an aging comedian who has lost whatever he had.
A selection of Bukowski chosen by another editor to introduce him to strangers: eighty stapled pages, four hundred copies, printed in Madison, Wisconsin.
The letters Bukowski wrote to his uncle in Andernach, the German town where he was born, published there by a Bukowski society ten years after his death.
An illustrated story Bukowski wrote in 1947 and never published, followed by the newspaper column and the work he sold to men's magazines in the 1980s.
Ten years of letters between Charles Bukowski in Los Angeles and the Canadian poet Al Purdy, printed as photographs of the originals with Bukowski's drawings still on them.
One short story published on its own as a book, illustrated throughout by Bukowski, with eleven copies carrying an original drawing done by hand.
An uprooted merchant tries to build a life in a newly independent African country where property, status, and safety can vanish overnight.
A disciplined writer goes to Venice for rest and stays while desire and disease strip away his control.
A bored New York bank clerk comes to Tangier looking for a real life and discovers how quickly action can turn into crime.
Seventeen stories in which travelers, families, missionaries, and outsiders discover how quickly the world can stop behaving as they expected.
A woman enters a foreign city, makes sure strangers remember her, and searches for the man she has chosen to end her life.
A police officer tries to protect everyone he loves, then discovers that pity can become another form of control.
After an affair destroys her marriage, a young Englishwoman enters a cholera epidemic and begins the harder work of understanding herself.
A British reporter in 1950s Saigon learns that an American idealist can cause terrible harm without ever believing himself cruel.
A Moroccan teenager and an American writer meet in Fez as resistance to French rule turns the city dangerous.
An insect collector is trapped in a sand pit, forced to shovel every night, and slowly becomes attached to the life he meant to escape.
On one Day of the Dead in Mexico, an estranged wife offers a former British consul one last chance to leave the drinking life that is killing him.
Everyone knows a murder is coming, yet an entire town fails to stop it.
Existence itself becomes physically disturbing to a solitary writer in a French town.
A man performs the version of himself other people expect while feeling unable to understand them.
A brilliant, spiteful narrator argues against reason while sabotaging every chance at connection.
A survivor of Dresden moves through war and time in short sentences that refuse heroic explanations.
A university professor’s apparently ordinary life gains its weight through exact, restrained prose.
A dying judge discovers that the respectable life he built may have been the wrong one.
An impossible transformation exposes how quickly love can become a judgment about usefulness.
A valuable pearl promises escape from poverty and instead draws greed, fear, and violence.
A painter explains a murder from inside the obsession and suspicion that led him to it.
Isadora Wing tests sexual fantasy, marriage, and freedom in a candid, feverish, and sharply self-mocking voice.
Miller and June’s first Paris trip, recovered from an unfinished manuscript before the city became part of his legend.
A brilliant lawyer turns sex, family, guilt, and ambition into one breathless comic confession.
Bataille’s short, controlled escalation of erotic obsession into surreal violence and transgression.
A jealous writer turns a brief bohemian affair into one rushing act of self-exposure.
The 1939 travel notebook Miller gave away whole — begun on Hydra, finished at Delphi, and dedicated to George Seferis.
A Black Spring dream rewritten by hand and carried across eighty silkscreened pages by Bezalel Schatz.
A blocked writing day becomes a horse, a bridge, a volcano, a gondola, and finally the sad angel hovering above them all.
Forty-five years and nearly a million words — the expanded correspondence that restored lost letters and passages cut from the 1963 selection.
Six commissioned erotic pieces, published after Miller’s death under two titles — and shadowed by a serious authorship dispute.
Six late essays moving from the Florida wetlands to Picasso, Cabeza de Vaca, Marie Corelli, a Japanese stranger, and Jack Nicholson.
A five-hundred-copy Berkeley cabinet of corrected typescripts, a work schedule, a Black Spring epilogue, circus memory, art, and publisher intervention.
A late, hand-sized argument that American sexual freedom remains stunted by puritanism and emotional immaturity.
Miller’s passionate appraisal of Jakob Wassermann’s miscarriage-of-justice novel, first made as a five-hundred-copy illustrated Colt Press book.
Miller’s four-page salute to John Cowper Powys: youthful idol, joyful philosopher, daily writer, and proof that age need not diminish imaginative life.
Seven short works—essay, letter, memory, fiction, and meditation—issued as the eleventh number of Irving Stettner’s Stroker.
A Pound-prompted comic anatomy of money: part mock economics, part cultural history, and wholly suspicious of the value people agree to worship.
A late dream of death and reconciliation, followed by Miller’s imaginative China: the lifelong quarrel with his mother finally released.
Miller’s wartime antiwar argument: an open letter to Alfred Perlès followed by a demand that violence be confronted first within the self.
Miller at eighty: gratitude, bodily comedy, and a refusal to treat old age as the end of imaginative appetite.
An aging pacifist writer confronts Mishima’s spectacular death without endorsing his militarism or reducing him to a diagnosis.
An illustrated wartime indictment of the American market for art—and of the commercial compromises demanded from writers who want to survive.
Miller passes the hat for Alfred Perlès: a funny, urgent Paris appeal to buy his friend six months in Ibiza and the freedom to finish a novel.
Eleven Miller watercolors issued as a portfolio: color, line, and visual improvisation allowed to stand without prose explanation.
Anne Poor’s postwar drawings meet Miller’s memories of prewar Greece in a compact, independent collaboration.
Bob Nash’s art prompts an imaginative journey in a brief illustrated essay from Miller’s Big Sur circle.
Miller’s only play sends a heartless American through seven absurd, slapstick scenes toward mortality, love, and reluctant feeling.
A richly made tribute to the painter Hans Reichel, where friendship, abstraction, order, and improvisation converge.
Miller’s incandescent portrait of Beauford Delaney: painter, friend, and proof that creative abundance could survive American neglect.
A facsimile notebook from Miller’s American journey, preserving the raw handwriting, drawings, lists, and reversals behind finished prose.
Miller’s watercolor argument turns seeing into renewal: the familiar world made liquid, bright, and strange again.
Miller’s case for amateur freedom: painting as renewed attention, appetite, and affection rather than professional mastery.
Miller salutes Jean Varda—painter, collagist, host, and floating-world architect of an improvisational California life.
A collector and a writer negotiate books, manuscripts, friendship, and literary survival across eighteen years of letters.
Miller’s late letters to Irving Stettner and his handmade magazine stay funny, visual, and fiercely attentive to ordinary life.
Three decades of letters join a self-made writer to a scholar of France through Rimbaud, Nin, Gide, and remembered Paris.
Miller’s side of the defining Paris correspondence: love, rivalry, manuscripts, money, and two writers inventing themselves in public and private.
Before Paris became legend, Miller wrote the struggle in real time to his oldest artistic confidant: work, failure, books, marriage, and escape.
Two exuberant old literary outsiders exchange myth, appetite, illness, books, and encouragement across the Atlantic.
A first, scarce window into Miller’s letters to Emil Schnellock, preserving the apprenticeship before the fuller archive appeared.
A critic’s manuscript prompts Miller to contest interpretation, explain intention, and turn disagreement into sustained correspondence.
Georges Belmont’s Paris conversations draw Miller into direct speech about Brooklyn, France, sex, censorship, painting, and the making of a public self.
At Pacific Palisades, Christian de Bartillat prompts an aging Miller to move backward through Paris, America, friendships, work, and survival.
Miller, Kay Boyle, Erica Jong, and Thomas Sanchez offer four dissenting Americas: lunacy, imprisonment, migration, and the contested West.
A centennial Miller arranged as a life journey: ten books distilled into a bracing autobiography of appetite, independence, and renewal.
Miller joins a compact international tribute to Joseph Delteil, celebrating the French writer’s appetite, independence, and stubborn singularity.
Two British volumes gather Miller’s major prose modes—Paris, America, travel, art, friendship, and the essayistic voice between them.
Herta Hilscher-Wittgenstein’s photographs visit the Gotham Book Mart founder, with Miller and Anaïs Nin adding affectionate testimony.
A pocket-sized self-portrait assembled from stories, essays, autobiographical sketches, and photographs for readers meeting Miller beyond the scandal.
Douglass's final autobiography follows his life from slavery into abolition, the Civil War, public office, and diplomacy.
Douglass revisits his childhood and explains how freedom led him into public speaking, newspaper editing, and political disagreement.
Douglass's first autobiography follows his childhood in slavery, secret education, and beginnings as an abolitionist speaker.
Poe's first collected tales place Gothic terror beside comic exaggeration, literary parody, and speculative adventure.
A young stowaway's voyage moves from mutiny and shipwreck into an Antarctic world his account cannot explain.
Poe's 1845 collection places The Raven beside songs, haunted landscapes, youthful poems, and scenes from a verse drama.
Angelou's third poetry collection joins bodily confidence and resistance to poems of hurt, labor, family, and memory.
Angelou's second memoir follows a young mother trying to earn a living and find a place for herself after World War II.
Angelou's fourth memoir follows her move into New York's literary and political life while her son grows toward independence.
Hughes's 1951 sequence joins the voices, interrupted rhythms, and unmet hopes of postwar Harlem.
A Black boy grows up among the work, arguments, faith, and music of his Kansas family before moving to Chicago.
Hughes's first Simple collection turns Harlem conversations into arguments about work, love, race, and everyday dignity.
Plath's late poems move through birth, estrangement, anger, and startling changes of voice.
The 1981 volume gathers Plath's poetry across years, with editorial notes and an early-work appendix.
Plath's first poetry collection makes family, landscape, and ordinary creatures strange in scale.
A mother who escaped slavery faces a haunting that brings her family's buried history into the present.
Milkman Dead's search for his family's origins turns a coming-of-age story into an inquiry about inheritance and belonging.
A Black girl in Ohio longs for blue eyes, while a childhood friend remembers the world that taught her to want them.
On a journey down the Mississippi, Huck's loyalty to Jim comes into conflict with what he has been taught is right.
A boy turns punishment into play, then discovers dangers that cannot be settled by make-believe.
An American pleasure voyage becomes a comedy about tourists, famous sights and the expectations they bring with them.
A family moves between London and revolutionary Paris, where an old crime threatens people who tried to escape its inheritance.
An unexpected fortune gives Pip the life he wants and makes him misjudge the people who care for him.
A trusting young traveler keeps finding suffering where his teacher promised a perfectly ordered world.
Short alphabetical essays turn questions about belief, authority and everyday judgment into arguments a reader can test.
A perceptive young Babylonian discovers that sound reasoning offers little protection from jealous rulers and judges who protect their own interests.
A writer asks what women could create if they had an income, uninterrupted time and access to education.
A London hostess prepares a party while memories, private fears and the aftermath of war move through the city.
One writer carries an unfinished poem through changing centuries, desires and expectations.
A postponed trip, a family dinner and an unfinished painting survive differently in the minds of those who return.
A young migrant looks for steady work in an America where each welcome can become another form of dependence.
A stranger seeks permission to belong, while every explanation makes his position harder to establish.
A creator abandons the being he brings to life, then struggles to escape the claims it makes on him.
A secluded young woman writes the history she has been unable to tell her only friend.
A survivor remembers the friendships and public hopes that plague has carried away.
A miser's haunted night asks what his money, memories and remaining time could do for other people.
An American doctor and his young wife accept a rich stranger's hospitality in Latin America, and cannot afterwards account for the days that follow.
Nine travel essays from Morocco, Algeria, Ceylon, South India and Istanbul, written by a man who had already decided the places he loved were going.
Paul Bowles wrote his autobiography at fifty-nine and told almost nothing. William S. Burroughs called it Without Telling.
Four Moroccan stories in which kif, not alcohol, is the way out of the ordinary world.
More than four hundred letters across sixty-three years, selected from seven thousand pages — and far more forthcoming than the autobiography.
Thirteen late stories about houses, money and the people who end up owning both. Bowles was seventy when Black Sparrow published it.
Eleven short passages of Moroccan history, from a Carthaginian sailing past the coast around 500 BC to the day before yesterday.
Bowles's first collection in seventeen years, and a title Time magazine called ironic, masking profound misanthropy.
Nine late stories written when Bowles had stopped travelling, including the one where a boy trades bodies with a cobra.
The 1920 essay in which Freud watched his grandson throw a wooden reel out of his cot and concluded that something in us wants to repeat, and something wants to die.
Freud's late argument that living together costs each of us the satisfactions we most want, and that the price is paid in guilt.
The 1923 book that redrew the mind as three parts, the I, the It and the Over-I, and gave English its ego, id and super-ego.
Freud's argument that every dream is a disguised wish, built on his own dreams and printed in 1899 with 1900 on the title page.
The short 1905 book that argued children have a sexual life, and that Freud rewrote five times before he was done.
A royal wedding at the Louvre, a massacre six days later, and two young men who try to kill each other and end up friends: Dumas's Paris of 1572.
A sailor jailed on his wedding day spends fourteen years in a fortress and the rest of the book taking Paris apart, one enemy at a time.
The last of the musketeer novels: Aramis puts a twin on the throne of France, and the four friends pay for it one by one.
Four swordsmen, a queen's twelve diamonds and a branded woman, told to Paris in daily newspaper parts in the spring of 1844.
The four musketeers at forty, split by a civil war in Paris and reunited under a scaffold in London.
Ten strangers on an island off Devon, a nursery rhyme on the wall, and no detective coming to save anyone.
An heiress, her new husband and the friend she took him from, on a Nile steamer with nowhere to go but the next temple.
A snowbound train, a dead American with twelve stab wounds, and a carriage full of strangers who all have an alibi.
A village doctor tells the story of his neighbour's murder, and tells it honestly. That is the trick.
Agatha Christie's first novel, written on a bet in a wartime dispensary, and the first appearance of Hercule Poirot.
Janie Crawford comes home barefoot, sits on her own porch, and tells a friend the whole of her life — written in seven weeks in Haiti and published in September 1937.
Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography, published in 1942, which won a thousand-dollar prize and had been cut to keep white readers comfortable — the excised chapters were not restored until 1995.
Zora Neale Hurston's first novel, 1934: a preacher with a great voice and no self-control, written by a preacher's daughter who borrowed the postage to mail the manuscript.
Zora Neale Hurston drives back into Eatonville, sits on the store porch, and writes down seventy tales and the whole conversation around them — the first big collection of Black American folklore, published in 1935.
Two years in Jamaica and Haiti on a Guggenheim Fellowship, written up as travel, political history and religion at once — and named after the sentence a Haitian spirit says when it takes over a body.
The verse play whose opening night was a fist fight, and whose first scandal was a sentence that ran over the end of a line.
Twenty-five years of poems split in half by a drowning: the book Hugo asked readers to treat as the work of a dead man.
An ex-convict, the policeman who will not let him go, and a quarter of a million words on why France was built to produce both.
Hugo's French title names the cathedral, not the bell-ringer. The book is about the building, and it saved it.
Hugo's exile novel: one fisherman, one wrecked steam engine on a reef, and the octopus chapter that gave French a new word.
Three chapters of the novel Capote never finished, and the magazine instalments that ended his friendships in 1975.
A young woman living on charm and other people's money in wartime Manhattan, remembered by the neighbour she left behind.
Four members of a Kansas farm family killed in one night, reported for six years, and written with the equipment of a novel.
Fourteen short pieces and a murder story, published in 1980 by a writer who had not finished a book in fifteen years.
A boy is sent south to find the father who left him, and finds a decaying house full of people with nowhere else to go.
A Brooklyn longshoreman, two cousins off the boat from Italy, and a lawyer who stands at the side of the stage telling you how it ends before it happens.
A back yard, a broken apple tree, and a manufacturer who shipped cracked cylinder heads to the Air Force and let his partner go to prison for it.
One set, one house, and a travelling salesman whose memories walk into the kitchen while the present is still going on.
Arthur Miller read the 1692 Salem court records, changed four things in them, and wrote the play that a congressional committee later made him answer for.
Arthur Miller at seventy-two, writing his own life in the order memory hands it over rather than the order it happened.
Twenty-three short chapters on why Rome grew and why it fell, written in 1734 by a judge who thought a country's dissensions were a sign of life.
Two Persian travellers loose in Paris, writing home about a city they cannot make sense of — and the household one of them left behind, coming apart while he is away.
Twenty years of comparing the laws of every country Montesquieu could find out about, and the Book XI argument that split power three ways in the United States Constitution.
Stowe's answer to the charge that she made it all up: the court cases, runaway advertisements and testimony behind Uncle Tom's Cabin.
The travel poem that made Byron famous overnight: a bored young lord wanders from Lisbon to Rome, and the poet slowly takes his place.
Byron's unfinished comic epic: a young Spaniard is seduced, shipwrecked, sold and sent across Europe while the narrator talks over him.
Stowe's second anti-slavery novel, about a North Carolina plantation, a court ruling that made the master's power absolute, and a rebel preacher hiding in the swamp.
Two dozen short poems written as song lyrics in the winter of Byron's marriage, including She Walks in Beauty and The Destruction of Sennacherib.
Twelve bedtime stories about how the camel got his hump and the elephant his trunk, told to "O my Best Beloved" and drawn by Kipling himself.
An Irish orphan in Lahore walks the roads of India with an old Tibetan lama, and is quietly trained as a British spy.
Gertrude Stein's short book about why she chose France, written in the last months before the German army reached Paris.
Gertrude Stein's short book about her friend Pablo Picasso, written in French in Paris in 1938 by one of his first collectors.
Puck brings back the dead of English history to talk to two children in Sussex, and between two of their stories sits "If—".
Stowe's letters from the 1853 tour that Uncle Tom's Cabin paid for: mobbed in Britain, left alone in Paris, and happiest in the Louvre.
A woman drowned in a sack, a Venetian's revenge and a deathbed confession, told in broken pieces: the Eastern tale that Delacroix painted twice.
Seven stories and their songs: a boy raised by wolves, a mongoose against two cobras, a white seal, and a night when the elephants dance.
Two drifters sign a contract to become kings of Kafiristan, and one of them comes back two years later with the other's head in a bag.
A love story set in Newport after the Revolution, written in grief after Stowe's son drowned, with a real minister who preached against the slave trade.
Eight poems from Byron's first summer of exile on Lake Geneva: a prisoner in a castle dungeon, the end of the world, and a poem of thanks to his sister.
The anti-slavery novel that outsold everything in the nineteenth century, and the book that gave America the insult "Uncle Tom".
George Breitman's second Malcolm X collection, named after the motto he announced in Harlem in June 1964. The book prints his meeting in Paris that November and his statement on being barred from France.
David tells his own life from a fatherless birth in Suffolk to success as a writer, with his own boyhood hidden inside it.
Twenty-eight short pieces published at eighty for the daughters Maya Angelou never had, from a Stamps childhood to a dinner in Senegal with a friend she met in Paris.
The speeches of Malcolm X's last year, gathered by George Breitman and published within months of the assassination. "The Ballot or the Bullet" is here, and so is his answer to a question in Paris.
Six speeches and interviews, first printed in 1989, ending with the talk Malcolm X gave in Rochester five days before he was killed. He opened it with the week France turned him away.
A workhouse orphan asks for more gruel, walks to London, and falls in with Fagin's gang of child thieves.
Toni Morrison's only published short story: two girls meet in a children's shelter, one Black and one white, and Morrison never tells you which is which.
Toni Morrison's second novel: two Black girls in a small Ohio town become best friends, and one of them grows into the woman the whole town decides to fear.
Four speeches from Malcolm X's years as a minister of the Nation of Islam, edited by the man who introduced him at the Audubon Ballroom on the day he was killed.
Frederick Douglass's only work of fiction: a novella about Madison Washington, who led nineteen enslaved men in taking over the slave ship Creole in 1841.
Every surviving journal Sylvia Plath kept from her first year at Smith College to the last year of her life, printed in full in 2000, with the spelling mistakes left in.
Frederick Douglass's Independence Day speech of 1852: praise for the men who signed the Declaration, then a charge that the country had betrayed it.
Margaret Atwood's novel about Grace Marks, a real Irish servant girl convicted of murder in Canada in 1843, who says she cannot remember the day it happened.
Kurt Vonnegut's 1973 novel, with his own drawings, in which a forgotten science-fiction writer meets a car dealer who is losing his mind.
Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel about a writer, the children of an atomic scientist, and a speck of ice that can freeze all the water on Earth.
Twelve essays from 1841, and the second of them is "Self-Reliance": trust yourself, and stop apologising for it.
Four tales in a 61-page booklet: a soldier with a magic tinderbox, a pea under twenty mattresses, and a reviewer who hoped Andersen would stop.
A girl no bigger than a thumb, carried off by a toad, a beetle and a mole's marriage plans, and saved by a swallow she once nursed.
Two tales in one thin booklet: a mermaid who trades her voice for legs, and an emperor who walks through town in clothes that are not there.
Emerson's first book, 95 pages long and unsigned: the woods of Concord, a transparent eyeball, and an idea he found in a Paris museum.
The collection that made Andersen famous: an ugly duckling, a nightingale in China, and a girl who walks to Lapland to bring her friend home from the Snow Queen.
Margaret Atwood's novel about the last man alive after an engineered plague: Snowman looks after a tribe of gene-spliced people and works out how his best friend ended the world.
Emerson's first book of verse opens with a riddling Sphinx and ends with "the shot heard round the world". Near the end is his lament for his five-year-old son.
Six great men as six kinds of mind: the philosopher, the mystic, the skeptic, the poet, the man of the world and the writer.
Emerson's speech to Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1837, telling American students to stop copying Europe and think for themselves.
Margaret Atwood's Booker Prize winner: an old woman in a small Canadian town finally tells the truth about her sister, who drove off a bridge in 1945.
A shoemaker's son from Odense tells how he became famous, and how Paris met him three times: as a nobody, as a known writer, and as a celebrity.
Kurt Vonnegut's second novel: the richest man in America is sent to Mars, Mercury and a moon of Saturn, and finds out why.
Margaret Atwood's sequel to The Handmaid's Tale: fifteen years on, three women write down what they know about Gilead, and one of them is Aunt Lydia.
Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 collection of magazine stories, including "Harrison Bergeron", the tale of a future America that makes everyone equal by force.
A London gentleman bets half his fortune that he can circle the globe in eighty days, and takes a Parisian valet with him.
An American club of cannon-makers with no war left to fight decides to fire a shell at the Moon, and a Frenchman telegraphs from Paris to ask for a seat inside it.
A Hamburg professor decodes a medieval cipher, drags his nephew to Iceland and climbs down an extinct volcano to see what is underneath.
Five Northerners escape the American Civil War in a stolen balloon, fall onto an unknown island, and rebuild an industrial country there from nothing.
A Paris museum professor is taken prisoner aboard an electric submarine and spends ten months crossing the world's oceans with the man who built it.
A Hartford factory boss wakes up near Camelot in the year 528, fakes a miracle with an eclipse, and tries to bring the nineteenth century to King Arthur's England.
A penniless former student kills an old pawnbroker to prove a theory, then spends the rest of the novel being hunted by his own conscience and a patient detective.
Mary Shelley's first book: sixteen, eloping, stuck for a week in a Paris hotel, then walking out of the city with a donkey.
Twenty-four letters praising English Quakers, merchants, scientists and playwrights. Paris answered by burning the book in the courtyard of its high court.
A giant from a planet near Sirius and a dwarf from Saturn land on Earth, pick up a shipful of scientists, and ask them what a soul is.
Twelve stories chosen by Poe's publisher, with all three Paris cases of C. Auguste Dupin beside The Gold-Bug, The Black Cat and the House of Usher.
A greedy old father is murdered, one of his sons is tried for it, and the three brothers argue about God, guilt and freedom on the way to the verdict.
A gentle, trusting prince comes home to St Petersburg from a Swiss clinic, falls between two women and a jealous merchant, and finds that goodness alone saves no one.
Two women are killed in a locked room on a Paris street that does not exist, and a poor young reader named C. Auguste Dupin works out how.
A beggar boy and the Prince of Wales swap clothes for a joke, and a palace guard throws the real prince out into the streets of Tudor London.
Virginia Woolf's novel of six friends who speak in turn from childhood to old age, while the sun crosses one day over the sea.
Mary Shelley's second novel: a real fourteenth-century tyrant of Lucca, and the two invented women who love him and refuse to be ruled by him.
A lonely young man meets a crying girl on a St Petersburg canal bank, falls in love with her over four summer nights, and helps her wait for someone else.
Three years after On the Road made him famous, Jack Kerouac hides in a friend's cabin on the California coast to dry out, and his mind comes apart there.
On a street of sardine canneries in Monterey, a group of broke, good-hearted men try to throw a party for the marine biologist everyone loves.
Two families in California's Salinas Valley, one of them Steinbeck's own, act out the story of Cain and Abel across three generations.
James Joyce's last book, written in Paris over sixteen years: one Dublin family's night, told in a dream language made from dozens of languages at once.
An officer shows a visiting traveler the machine that executes prisoners by writing the broken rule into their skin, and asks him to help save it.
Gabriel García Márquez's 1985 novel about a telegraph clerk who loses the girl he loves to a doctor, and waits more than half a century to tell her again.
Gabriel García Márquez's last novel published in his lifetime: on his ninetieth birthday, an old newspaper columnist falls in love for the first time.
Gabriel García Márquez wrote this short novel in a Paris attic while waiting for money that never came. An old colonel waits fifteen years for a pension letter, with a fighting rooster as his last hope.
Two ranch hands in the Salinas Valley share a plan for a small farm of their own, and one terrible afternoon in a barn ends it.
Gabriel García Márquez's 1967 novel follows seven generations of the Buendía family in Macondo, the invented town they found, from its first sight of ice to its last day.
Jack Kerouac flies to Paris in 1965 to prove he descends from Breton nobility. He finds closed archives, long nights in bars and, maybe, a moment of awakening in a taxi.
Ray Bradbury's 1962 novel about two boys, one father, and a carnival that comes to a small Illinois town in late October.
James Joyce's abandoned first try at A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: two years of a Dublin student's life, rescued from a manuscript Sylvia Beach sold from her Paris bookshop.
Jack Kerouac's follow-up to On the Road trades the highway for mountain trails, and a restless young writer tries to learn Buddhism from a poet who climbs peaks.
Ray Bradbury's 1953 collection of twenty-two stories, including "A Sound of Thunder", the time-travel hunt that ends with a crushed butterfly.
An Oklahoma farm family loses its land in the Dust Bowl and drives west to California, where the work it was promised is not there.
Ray Bradbury's 1951 collection of eighteen stories, told as the moving tattoos on one stranger's body, including "The Veldt" and "The Rocket Man".
Ray Bradbury's 1950 book of linked stories about the people from Earth who go to Mars, and the Martians who are there when they arrive.
A Southern schoolteacher with nothing left moves into her sister's two rooms in New Orleans, and her sister's husband sets out to prove she is lying.
Twenty-one magazine stories that neither Fitzgerald had collected, eleven by him, nine by her and one by both, gathered in 1973.
Pablo Neruda's long poem of the whole American continent, finished while the Chilean police were looking for him.
A rich family gathers for the patriarch's birthday on a Mississippi plantation, and nobody will tell the truth: not about his illness, not about the money, and not about why his favourite son drinks.
Dante's plan to serve philosophy to ordinary readers as a banquet, in Italian, with his own poems as the dishes.
Dante's case, in Latin prose, that the world needs one emperor and that the pope has no power to make him.
Dante, writing in Latin, makes the case for poetry in Italian, and mocks nearly every Italian dialect on the way.
More than three hundred letters between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald, from their courtship in Alabama to the clinic years, edited in 2002.
Aldous Huxley's last novel imagines a good society on the island of Pala, and sends a cynical journalist to help oil men take it over.
Dante's first book: the poems he wrote for Beatrice Portinari, and his own account of why he wrote each one.
Pablo Neruda's own story of his life, finished by others after he died and still argued over today.
A hundred love poems Pablo Neruda wrote for Matilde Urrutia, arranged from morning to night.
A crowded London novel of the late 1920s, built like a piece of music, with D. H. Lawrence at its moral centre and a murder near the end.
The dark, difficult poems Pablo Neruda wrote alone in Asia in his twenties, and the book that made other poets take him seriously.
Zelda Fitzgerald's only novel. A Southern judge's daughter marries a painter, follows him to the Riviera and Paris, and trains as a ballet dancer years too late.
A handsome drifter drives a fading film star back to the Gulf Coast town he left, hoping she will make him famous and win him back the girl he loved. The town has been waiting for him.
Zelda Fitzgerald's novel, play, eleven stories, twelve magazine pieces and a selection of her letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald, in one volume.
A Florentine in exile walks down through hell, up a mountain and into the sky, naming the people he knew on the way.
Aldous Huxley takes mescaline in May 1953 and writes down what happens to the world when he looks at it.
A son remembers the St. Louis flat he escaped: his mother's stories of her girlhood suitors, his shy sister's glass animals, and the one evening a young man came to dinner.
A clergyman thrown out of his church leads a coach party of schoolteachers to a run-down hotel on the Mexican coast, and falls apart over one stormy night.
Aldous Huxley gathers the saints and sages of East and West into one book, and argues that they were all describing the same thing.
The book of love poems Pablo Neruda published at nineteen, and the most read book he ever wrote.
William Faulkner's most famous short story: a proud old woman dies in her decaying house, and the town finally breaks open the room upstairs.
William Faulkner's 1936 novel: four people try to piece together the story of Thomas Sutpen, who built a plantation out of nothing and was destroyed by the son he refused to acknowledge.
A woman leaves her husband for a cavalry officer, and a landowner in the country tries to work out what life is for.
William Faulkner's fifth novel: a poor Mississippi family hauls their mother's coffin to town through flood and fire, and fifteen voices tell the trip.
Rousseau tells his own life, the stolen ribbon and the five abandoned children included, and promises to hide nothing.
Rousseau's essay on how people who were born roughly equal ended up rich and poor, masters and servants, starting with the first man to fence off a field.
Rousseau raises an imaginary boy from birth to marriage, by nature instead of books, and the Parlement de Paris orders the result burned.
William Faulkner's 1932 novel: a pregnant girl walks into a Mississippi town on the day a woman is murdered, and a man who does not know his own race is hunted down.
A prince sits on a jury and recognises the prisoner as the young servant he seduced and abandoned ten years before.
Rousseau's last book: ten walks around the edge of Paris, a dog that knocks him flat at Ménilmontant, and a boat drifting on a Swiss lake.
On a night train, a man tells a stranger how jealousy, a violinist and a Beethoven sonata led him to kill his wife.
Rousseau's short book on when anyone has the right to rule, which opens with people born free and everywhere in chains.
William Faulkner's fourth novel: the fall of a Mississippi family told four times, first by a man who cannot tell yesterday from today.
Three young Russians grow up while Napoleon's armies march from Austerlitz to a burning Moscow and back out again.
A village carpenter loves a pretty dairymaid who has been seduced by the squire's heir, and the secret ends in a prison cell.
A Wall Street lawyer hires a quiet copyist, who one day answers an ordinary request with "I would prefer not to" and never stops.
An American captain spends a day aboard a drifting Spanish slave ship and fails to see that the enslaved people have taken it over.
A well-loved young sailor on a British warship is falsely accused of plotting mutiny, and answers with a single blow.
A spoiled young beauty marries for money and is trapped, while the young man who once watched her gamble discovers who his parents were.
A clever young woman marries a dry old scholar, an ambitious young doctor marries the prettiest girl in town, and a Midlands town watches both go wrong.
A young sailor signs onto a Nantucket whaler whose captain means to spend the whole voyage hunting one white whale.
The collection that holds "Young Goodman Brown", a young Puritan's night in the forest among his neighbours at a witches' meeting.
A lonely weaver loses the gold he has hoarded for fifteen years, and finds a sleeping child with golden curls on his hearth instead.
A wizard's curse from the Salem witch trials hangs over a family house for two hundred years, until the last Pyncheons open a cent-shop.
A young Italian count who looks exactly like an ancient statue of a faun kills a man for the woman he loves, and grows up.
A clever, passionate girl grows up at a mill on a tidal river, loving a brother who never quite forgives her.
A woman in Puritan Boston is sentenced to wear a red letter A for life, and refuses to name her child's father.
Hawthorne's first book of stories, from a minister who hides his face behind a black veil to four old friends who drink from the Fountain of Youth.
Two young sailors desert their whaler in the Marquesas Islands and walk into the valley of a people feared as cannibals.