Mr. Fortune's Maggot; and, The Salutation
10 best books like Mr. Fortune's Maggot; and, The Salutation (Sylvia Townsend Warner): Apartment in Athens, Manservant and Maidservant, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories, Great Granny Webster, Wish Her Safe at Home, The Fox in the Attic, The Stories of J.F. Powers, Ride a Cockhorse, Eustace and Hilda
| Author | Glenway Wescott |
| ISBN | 1590170814 |
Apartment in Athens concerns an unusual triangular relationship. In this story about a Greek couple in Nazi-occupied Athens who are forced to share their quarters with a German officer, Wescott stages a drama of accommodation and rejection, resistance and compulsion. Apartment in Athens depicts...
| Author | Ivy Compton-Burnett |
| ISBN | 0940322633 |
At once the strangest and most marvelous of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fictions, Manservant and Maidservant has for its subject the domestic life of Horace Lamb, sadist, skinflint, and tyrant. But it is when Horace undergoes an altogether unforeseeable change of heart that the real difficulties begin....
| Author | Joan Chase |
| ISBN | 0345410467 |
(4.5) This modern classic, unfairly forgotten, deserves to be considered on par with A Thousand Acres (Jane Smiley) and Stoner (John Williams). It won a PEN/Hemingway first novel prize in 1984. Luckily, last year’s NYRB Classics reprint might just bring it the attention it deserves.
Told...
The whimsical, macabre tales of British writer H. H. Munro—better known as Saki—deftly, mercilessly, and hilariously skewer the banality and hypocrisy of polite upper-class English society between the end of Queen Victoria’s reign and the beginning of World War I. Their heroes are clever,...
| Author | Caroline Blackwood |
| ISBN | 1590170075 |
Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood's masterpiece. Heiress to the Guinness fortune, Blackwood was celebrated as a great beauty and dazzling raconteur long before she made her name as a strikingly original writer. This macabre, mordantly funny, partly auto-biographical novel reveals the...
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 | Richard Hughes |
| ISBN | 0940322293 |
A tale of enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the widely acclaimed first part of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament." Set in the early 1920s, the book centers on Augustine, a young man from an aristocratic Welsh family who has come of age...
| Author | J.F. Powers |
| ISBN | 0940322226 |
Hailed by Frank O'Connor as one of "the greatest living storytellers," J. F. Powers, who died in 1999, stands with Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver among the authors who have given the short story an unmistakably American cast. In three slim collections of perfectly crafted stories,...
I'm convinced that there is a discrete outpost within the southern climes of my stomach— approximately the size of an average avocado pit—where my loathing resides. In this theory, my loathing, in its neutral state, is a congealed knob of greenish wax-like substance which radiates a faint, mostly...
| Author | L.P. Hartley |
| ISBN | 0940322803 |
The three books gathered together as Eustace and Hilda explore a brother and sister's lifelong relationship. Hilda, the older child, is both self-sacrificing and domineering, as puritanical as she is gorgeous; Eustace is a gentle, dreamy, pleasure-loving boy: the two siblings could hardly be more...
| Author | Maude Hutchins |
| ISBN | 1590172701 |
Victorine is thirteen, and she can’t get the unwanted surprise of her newly sexual body, in all its polymorphous and perverse insistence, out of her mind: it is a trap lying in wait for her at every turn (and nowhere, for some reason, more than in church). Meanwhile, Victorine’s older brother Costello...
| Author | Olivia Manning |
| ISBN | 1590173031 |
Jerusalem in 1945 is a city in flux: refugees from the war in Europe fill its streets and cafés, the British colonial mandate is coming to an end, and tensions are on the rise between the Arab and Jewish populations. Felix Latimer, a recently orphaned teenager, arrives in Jerusalem from Baghdad, biding...
| Author | Edmund Wilson |
| ISBN | 1590170938 |
Hecate is the Greek goddess of sorcery, and Edmund Wilson's Hecate County is the bewitched center of the American Dream, a sleepy bedroom community where drinks flow endlessly and sexual fantasies fill the air. Memoirs of Hecate County, Wilson's favorite among his many books, is a set of interlinked...
| Author | Elizabeth Hardwick |
| ISBN | 1590172876 |
Elizabeth Hardwick was one of America’s great postwar women of letters, celebrated as a novelist and as an essayist. Until now, however, her slim but remarkable achievement as a writer of short stories has remained largely hidden, with her work tucked away in the pages of the periodicals—such...
| Author | William Dean Howells |
| ISBN | 1590171098 |
William Dean Howells's Indian Summer tells of a season in the life of Theodore Colville. Colville, just turned forty, has spent years as a successful midwestern newspaper publisher. Now he sells his business and heads for Italy, where as a young man he had dreamed of a career as an architect and fallen...
| Author | Theodor Fontane |
| ISBN | 1590173740 |
Opposites attract, and Helmut Holk and Christine Arne, the appealing married couple at the center of this engrossing book by one of Germany’s greatest novelists, could not be less alike. Christine is a serious soul from a devout background. She is brooding and beautiful and devoted to her husband...
| Author | Janet Hobhouse |
| ISBN | 1590170857 |
Sirene
Le Furie di Janet Hobhouse, è “un romanzo intimamente autobiografico”, affascinante nella prima parte - perché la famiglia di lei è ebreo tedesca arrivata a New York nella metà dell’Ottocento - spregiudicata nella seconda, quando l’autrice ha circa vent’anni...
| 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 | John Horne Burns |
| ISBN | 1590170806 |
John Horne Burns brought 'The Gallery' back from World War II, and on publication in 1947 it became a critically-acclaimed bestseller. However, Burns's early death at the age of 36 led to the subsequent neglect of this searching book, which captures the shock the war dealt to the preconceptions and...
“The Dog adopted the Ancsas in the spring of ’48”: so the story begins. The Ancsas are a middle-aged couple living on the outskirts of Budapest in a ruinous Hungary that is just beginning to wake up from the nightmare of World War II. The new Communist government promises to set things straight,...
| Author | Iris Owens |
| ISBN | 1590173635 |
Harriet is leaving her boyfriend Claude, “the French rat.” That at least is how Harriet sees things, even if it’s Claude who has just asked Harriet to leave his Greenwich Village apartment. Well, one way or another she has no intention of leaving. She will stay and exact revenge—or would have...
| Author | Bruce Duffy |
| ISBN | 0395900573 |
If I wrote a book called The World As I Found It, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it...
| Author | Gyula Krúdy |
| ISBN | 1590171861 |
Gyula Krúdy is a marvellous writer who haunted the taverns of Budapest and lived on its streets while turning out a series of mesmerizing, revelatory novels that are among the masterpieces of modern literature. Krúdy conjures up a world that is entirely his own—dreamy, macabre, comic, and erotic—where...
