Irretrievable

Author	Gabriele D'Annunzio
ISBN	1595690581

The Child of Pleasure (written in 1888 and published in 1889) and its protagonist Andrea Sperelli introduced the Italian culture of the late 1800s to Aestheticism and a taste for decadence. Sperelli is a young count, who - like Joris Karl Huysmans' Baron Des Esseintes or Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray - following...

Author	Barbara Comyns
ISBN	1590170296

The Vet’s Daughter combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. The vet lives with his bedridden wife and shy daughter Alice in a sinister London suburb. He works constantly, captive to a strange private fury, and treats his family with brutality and contempt. After his wife’s death, the vet...

Author	Dubravka Ugrešić
ISBN	1847670660

"Baba Yaga is an old hag who lives in a house built on chicken legs and kidnaps small children. She is one of the most pervasive and powerful creatures in all mythology."

"But what does she have to do with a writer's journey to Bulgaria in 2007 on behalf of her mother?"

"Or with a trio of women...

Author

Barbara Comyns

On the banks of the River Avon, six sisters are born. The seasons come and go, the girls take their lessons under the ash tree, and always there is the sound of water swirling through the weir. Then, unexpectedly, an air of decay descends upon the house: ivy grows unchecked over the windows, angry shouts...

Author

Theodor Storm

I´ve read the book “Der Schimmelreiter” written by Theodor Storm, and plays in North Friesland. Storm illustrates the typical life at the North Sea Coast, which was in the past a permanent fight against the unpredictability of our nature. It´s a fact that the life at the coast gives barely any...

Author	Dezső Kosztolányi
ISBN	1590173392

It is 1900, give or take a few years. The Vajkays—call them Mother and Father—live in Sárszeg, a dead-end burg in the provincial heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Father retired some years ago to devote his days to genealogical research and quaint questions of heraldry. Mother keeps house....

Author	Peter Handke
ISBN	1590170199

Peter Handke's mother was an invisible woman. Throughout her life, which spanned the Nazi era, the war, and the postwar consumer economy, she struggled to maintain appearances, only to arrive at a terrible recognition: "I'm not human any more." Not long after, she killed herself with an overdose of...

Author

Stephen Benatar

Rachel Waring is deliriously happy. Out of nowhere, a great-aunt leaves her a Georgian mansion in another city--and she sheds her old life without delay. Gone is her dull administrative job, her mousy wardrobe, her downer of a roommate. She will live as a woman of leisure, devoted to beauty, creativity,...

Author	Millen Brand
ISBN	1590173597

The Outward Room is a book about a young woman’s journey from madness to self-discovery. It created a sensation when it was first published in 1937, and has lost none of its immediacy or its power to move the reader.
 
Having suffered a nervous breakdown after her brother’s death in a car...

Author	Georges Simenon
ISBN	1590172280

On the outskirts of Paris, a prostitute is found murdered in a vacant lot. In a seedy apartment house nearby lives pasty, fat Mr. Hire. Mr. Hire, who earns his living through a petty postal scam, is a convicted pornographer, a peeping Tom, and, once a week, the unlikely star of a Parisian bowling club, where...

Author	Penelope Mortimer
ISBN	0747518874

4.5 stars rounded up
I must admit I haven’t read anything by Mortimer before and on the evidence of this book I should have. It is about a woman in a downward spiral and is an acerbic and humorous (in a very bleak way) comment on marriage, gender relations and being a woman being controlled by men (husbands...

Author	Emilia Pardo Bazán
ISBN	8437615372

Emilia Pardo Bazán reivindicó un naturalismo autóctono. Esta obra muestra la saga de una clase social en decadencia: la aristocracia rural gallega. Dramáticas escenas entre personajes y descripciones intensas de una estructura política corrupta alternan con las evocaciones del campo....

Author	Elizabeth Gaskell
ISBN	0141397373

This is exactly why I bought this collection: to find authors I may not have normally come across. I love Gaskell’s style of writing, and I will most certainly be reading more of her work in the future. These two stories are everything I adore in Victorian literature; they are gothic and fear evoking,...