The Aspern Papers Henry James - The Aspern Papers is a novella written by Henry James, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1888, with its first book publication later in the same year. One of James' best-known and most acclaimed longer tales, The Aspern Papers is based on the letters Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote to Mary Shelley's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who saved them until she died. Set in Venice, The Aspern Papers demonstrates James'...

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam's "research" becomes a meditation...

"A contemporary story about the insular world of writers, centering on a notable female poet and the young woman to whom she reveals her long-guarded secret about a famous manuscript"--

Inspector Ian Rutledge, still haunted by old war memories, struggles to put his troubles aside and solve the murder of a well-known Cornish poet. But when he finds himself unable to escape the ghosts of the past, Rutledge decides to take an unorthodox route and use his psychological delusions to help him catch a killer.

“Calls to mind such early moderns as Hemingway and Fitzgerald...Some of the most powerful antiwar literature in modern English fiction.”—The Boston Globe

The first book of the Regeneration Trilogy—a Booker Prize nominee and one of Entertainment Weekly’s 100 All-Time Greatest Novels.
 
In 1917 Siegfried Sasson, noted poet and decorated war hero, publicly refused to continue...

This is the story of a woman forging a new life for herself after her marriage has foundered, shutting up her beloved Devonshire house and making a home for her two young children in London, elated at completing the collection of poems she foresees will make her name. It is also the story of a woman struggling to maintain her mental equilibrium, to absorb the pain of her husband's betrayal and to resist her mother's engulfing love. It is the story...

The Anthologist is narrated by Paul Chowder-a once-in-a-while-published kind of poet who is writing the introduction to a new anthology of poetry. He's having a hard time getting started because his career is floundering; his girlfriend Roz has recently left him; and he is thinking about the great poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised to reveal many wonderful secrets and...

A fictional re-creation of the turbulent courtship, marriage, and separation of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. In intense, dramatic prose, Emma Tennant unfolds a story of passion, conflict, and betrayal. Creating a series of unforgettable images, she reconstructs the twentieth century's most famous literary love affair and the tempestuous triangle between Hughes, Plath, and Assia Wevill. Filled with mounting suspense and lurking danger, Sylvia...

Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster's fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and a student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girlfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker is caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life.