My Fantoms
10 best books like My Fantoms (Théophile Gautier): The Pure and the Impure, The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, Adventures of Sindbad, Berlin Stories, Novels in Three Lines, The Unknown Masterpiece, The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays, Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn, The Letter Killers Club, Pages from the Goncourt Journals
Colette herself considered The Pure and the Impure her best book, "the nearest I shall ever come to writing an autobiography." This guided tour of the erotic netherworld with which Colette was so intimately acquainted begins in the darkness and languor of a fashionable opium den. It continues as a series...
The New York Stories of Edith Wharton
| Author | Edith Wharton |
| ISBN | 1590172485 |
A New York Review Books Original
Edith Wharton wrote about New York as only a native can. Her Manhattan is a city of well-appointed drawing rooms, hansoms and broughams, all-night cotillions, and resplendent Fifth Avenue flats. Bishops’ nieces mingle with bachelor industrialists; respectable...
| Author | Gyula Krúdy |
| ISBN | 9639116122 |
In these marvellously written tales, Sindbad, a voyager in the realms of memory and imagination, travels through the centuries in pursuit of an ideal of love that is directed as much at the feminine essence as at his individual lovers. Whether the women he seduces and loves are projections of his desire,...
| Author | Robert Walser |
| ISBN | 1590174542 |
A New York Review Books Original
In 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an important stage-set designer, and immediately threw himself into the vibrant social and cultural life of the city. Berlin Stories collects his alternately...
| Author | Félix Fénéon |
| ISBN | 1590172302 |
A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL
Novels in Three Lines collects more than a thousand items that appeared anonymously in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906—true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life presented with a ruthless economy that provokes laughter even as it shocks. This...
| Author | Honoré de Balzac |
| ISBN | 0940322749 |
One of Honore de Balzac's most celebrated tales, "The Unknown Masterpiece" is the story of a painter who, depending on one's perspective, is either an abject failure or a transcendental genius--or both. The story, which has served as an inspiration to artists as various as Cezanne, Henry James, Picasso,...
| Author | Vasily Grossman |
| ISBN | 1590173619 |
The Road brings together short stories, journalism, essays, and letters by Vasily Grossman, the author of Life and Fate, providing new insight into the life and work of this extraordinary writer. The stories range from Grossman’s first success, “In the Town of Berdichev,” a piercing reckoning...
| Author | Harvey Swados |
| ISBN | 1590170849 |
There was a time when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca, when I could no more have wanted to live any place else than I could have conceived of myself as a daddy, disciplining my boy and dandling my daughter.
So begins "Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn", which gives...
| Author | Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky |
Biography Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950) studied law and classical philology at Kiev University. His philosophical and satirical stories with fantastical plots ignored official injunctions to portray the new Soviet state in a positive light, and three separate efforts to print different...
Pages from the Goncourt Journals
No evocation of Parisian life in the second half of the nineteenth century can match that found in the journals of the brothers Goncourt
The journal of the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt is one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century French literature, a work that in its richness of...
| Author | Stephen Romer |
| ISBN | 0199569274 |
'He had become the dandy of the unpredictable.' A quest for new sensations, and an avowed desire to shock possessed the Decadent writers of fin-de-siècle Paris. The years 1880-1900 saw an extraordinary, hothouse flowering of talent, that produced some of the most exotic, stylized, and cerebral...
| Author | Vivant Denon |
| ISBN | 1590173260 |
A Bilingual New York Review Books Original
Vivant Denon's No Tomorrow is one of the masterpieces of eighteenth-century French libertine literature, a book to set beside Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses, except that where Laclos' icy novel tells of hellish depravity, Denon's ravishing...
The Colour Out of Space: Tales of Cosmic Horror by Lovecraft, Blackwood, Machen, Poe, and Other Masters of the Weird
| Author | Douglas Thin |
| ISBN | 1590170261 |
"The true weird tale has something more than a secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains. An atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; a hint of that most terrible conception of the human brain--a malign and particular suspension...
| Author | Nescio |
| ISBN | 1590174925 |
No one has written more feelingly and more beautifully than Nescio about the madness and sadness, courage and vulnerability of youth: its big plans, and vague longings, not to mention the binges, crashes, and marathon walks and talks. No one, for that matter, has written with such pristine clarity...
| Author | Jakov Lind |
| ISBN | 0809015269 |
Soul of Wood made Jakov Lind's reputation as one of the most boldly imaginative postwar writers, and it remains his most celebrated achievement. In the title novella and six subsequent stories, Lind distorts and refashions reality to make the deepest horrors of the twentieth century his own.
Set...
Gerard de Nerval (1808-1855), a contemporary of Poe, De Quincey, Gogol, and Heine, introduced into French literature a mode of writing rooted in German romanticism yet already recognizably modernist in its explorations of the uncertain borderlines between dream and reality, irony and madness,...
| 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 | Guy de Maupassant |
| ISBN | 1590172590 |
Afloat, originally published as Sur l’eau in 1888, is a work of dazzling but treacherously shifting currents, a seemingly simple logbook of a sailing cruise along the French Mediterranean coast that opens up to reveal unexpected depths, as Guy de Maupassant merges fact and fiction, dream and documentation...
| Author | Georges Bernanos |
| ISBN | 1590171519 |
One of the great mavericks of French literature, Georges Bernanos combined raw realism with a spiritual focus of visionary intensity. Mouchette stands with his celebrated Diary of a Country Priest as the perfection of his singular art.
“Nothing but a little savage” is how the village school-teacher...
| 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 | Mavis Gallant |
| ISBN | 1590170601 |
Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own. The irreducible complexity of the very idea of home is especially at issue in the stories...
| 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 | Raymond Queneau |
| ISBN | 1590170318 |
Seated in a Paris café, a man glimpses another man, a shadowy figure hurrying for the train: Who is he? he wonders, How does he live? And instantly the shadow comes to life, precipitating a series of comic run-ins among a range of disreputable and heartwarming characters living on the sleazy outskirts...
