The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography
10 best books like The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (A.J.A. Symons): Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, A Time to Keep Silence, Manservant and Maidservant, Hadrian the Seventh, Shakespeare, Mr. Fortune's Maggot; and, The Salutation, The Fox in the Attic, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, The Stories of J.F. Powers, Poets in a Landscape
| Author | Artemis Cooper |
| ISBN | 0719554497 |
Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was a war hero whose exploits in Crete are legendary, and above all he is widely acclaimed as the greatest travel writer of our times, notably for his books about his walk across pre-war Europe, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water; he was a self-educated...
| Author | Patrick Leigh Fermor |
| ISBN | 1590172442 |
While still a teenager, Patrick Leigh Fermor made his way across Europe, as recounted in his classic memoirs, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. During World War II, he fought with local partisans against the Nazi occupiers of Crete. But in A Time to Keep Silence, Leigh Fermor writes about...
| 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 | Frederick Rolfe |
| ISBN | 0940322625 |
One day George Arthur Rose, hack writer and minor priest, discovers that he has been picked to be Pope. He is hardly surprised and not in the least daunted. "The previous English pontiff was Hadrian the Fourth," he declares. "The present English pontiff is Hadrian the Seventh. It pleases Us; and so, by...
| Author | Mark Van Doren |
| ISBN | 1590171683 |
This legendary book by an esteemed poet and beloved professor at Columbia University features a series of smart, witty, deeply perceptive essays about each of Shakespeare's plays, together with a further discussion of the poems. Writing with an incomparable knowledge of his subject but without...
| Author | Sylvia Townsend Warner |
| ISBN | 0940322838 |
After a decade in one South Seas mission, a London bank-clerk-turned-minister sets his heart on serving a remote volcanic island. Fanua contains neither cannibals nor Christians, but its citizens, his superior warns, are like children—immoral children. Still, Mr. Timothy Fortune lights out...
| 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 | Angus Wilson |
| ISBN | 0140174249 |
Gerald Middleton is a sixty-year-old self-proclaimed failure. Worse than that, he’s "a failure with a conscience." As a young man, he was involved in an archaeological dig that turned up an obscene idol in the coffin of a seventh-century bishop and scandalized a generation. The discovery was in...
| 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,...
| Author | Gilbert Highet |
| ISBN | 1853753017 |
Gilbert Highet was a legendary teacher at Columbia University, admired both for his scholarship and his charisma as a lecturer. Poets in a Landscape is his delightful exploration of Latin literature and the Italian landscape. As Highet writes in his introduction, “I have endeavored to recall some...
| 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...
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 | Elizabeth Hardwick |
| ISBN | 0940322781 |
The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America's most brilliant writers, and Seduction and Betrayal, in which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the presence of women in literature, is her most passionate and concentrated work...
| Author | Erich Auerbach |
| ISBN | 1590172191 |
Erich Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World is an inspiring introduction to one of world’s greatest poets as well as a brilliantly argued and still provocative essay in the history of ideas. Here Auerbach, thought by many to be the greatest of twentieth-century scholar-critics, makes the...
| Author | Christina Stead |
| ISBN | 0940322706 |
One hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarreled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods upon me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village,...
| 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...
Hermit Of Peking: The Hidden Life Of Sir Edmund Backhouse
Hermit of Peking is one of the most remarkable pieces of literary detection of recent years.
It all began when Hugh Trevor-Roper acquired the voluminous memoirs of Sir Edmund Backhouse, uo till then known only as a distinguished Chinese scholar who had lived quietly until his death in 1944.
The...
| Author | Geoffrey Wolff |
| ISBN | 1590170660 |
Includes an afterword by the author
Harry Crosby was the godson of J. P. Morgan and a friend of Ernest Hemingway. Living in Paris in the twenties and directing the Black Sun Press, which published James Joyce among others, Crosby was at the center of the wild life of the lost generation. Drugs,...
| Author | Gregor von Rezzori |
| ISBN | 0679731814 |
The Snows Of Yesteryear is an uncompromising account of Gregor von Rezzori's aristocratic childhood in Romania in the days before World War II.
He was born in Czernowitz, a one-time provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was later to be absorbed successively into Romania,...
| Author | J.R. Ackerley |
| ISBN | 0940322250 |
In the 1920s, the young J. R. Ackerley spent several months in India as the personal secretary to the maharajah of a small Indian principality. In his journals, Ackerley recorded the Maharajah's fantastically eccentric habits and riddling conversations, and the odd shambling day-to-day life of...
| Author | S. Josephine Baker |
| ISBN | 1590177061 |
New York’s Lower East Side was said to be the most densely populated square mile on earth in the 1890s. Health inspectors called the neighborhood “the suicide ward.” Diarrhea epidemics raged each summer, killing thousands of children. Sweatshop babies with smallpox and typhus dozed in garment...
| Author | Gershom Scholem |
| ISBN | 1590170326 |
Gershom Scholem is celebrated as the twentieth century's most profound student of the Jewish mystical tradition; Walter Benjamin, as a master thinker whose extraordinary essays mix the revolutionary, the revelatory, and the esoteric. Scholem was a precocious teenager when he met Benjamin, who...
| Author | Thomas Browne |
| ISBN | 1590174887 |
Sir Thomas Browne is one of the supreme stylists of the English language: a coiner of words and spinner of phrases to rival Shakespeare; the wielder of a weird and wonderful erudition; an inquiring spirit in the mold of Montaigne. Browne was an inspiration to the Romantics as well as to W.G. Sebald,...
