Melville House

Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto

by Gianni Rodari & Antony Shugaar

A fable for children and adults: a story of life, death, and terrorism—in the grand tradition of Exupéry’s The Little Prince

When we first meet 93-year-old millionaire Baron Lamberto, he has been diagnosed...

After Midnight

by Irmgard Keun & Anthea Bell

Sanna and her ravishing friend Gerti would rather speak of love than politics, but in 1930s Frankfurt, politics cannot be escaped--even in the lady's bathroom. Crossing town one evening to meet up with Gerti's...

Eeeee Eee Eeee: A Novel

by Tao Lin

“Tao Lin writes from moods that less radical writers would let pass—from laziness, from vacancy, from boredom. And it turns out that his report from these places is moving and necessary, not to mention frequently...

Bed: Stories

by Tao Lin

College students, recent graduates, and their parents work at Denny’s, volunteer at a public library in suburban Florida, attend satanic ska/punk concerts, eat Chinese food with the homeless of New York City,...

Irish Journal

by Heinrich Boll, Leila Vennewitz & Hugo Hamilton

A unique entry in the Böll library, Irish Journal records an eccentric tour of Ireland in the 1950's. An epilogue written fourteen years later reflects on the enormous changes to the country and the people...

The Train Was On Time

by Heinrich Boll

Heinrich Böll’s taut and haunting first novel tells the story of twenty-four-year-old Private Andreas as he journeys on a troop train across the German countryside to the Eastern front. Trapped, he knows...

Parnassus on Wheels

by Christopher Morley

I imagined him in his beloved Brooklyn, strolling in Prospect Park and preaching to chance comers about his gospel of good books.

"When you sell a man a book," says Roger Mifflin, the sprite-like book peddler...

A Sleep and a Forgeting

by William Dean Howells

Unless she was out of her mind there was no way of accounting for her behavior...

Nowhere in the prodigious output of William Dean Howells is there an example more poignant of his heart-felt dedication to the...

The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers

by Curtis White

One of our most brilliant social critics—author of the bestselling The Middle Mind—presents a scathing critique of the “delusions” of science alongside a rousing defense of the tradition of Romanticism...

Cotton Tenants: Three Families

by James Agee, John Summers & Walker Evans

A re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated photographer

In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a 400-page prose symphony about three tenant...

College of One

by Sheilah Graham

The moving story of how F. Scott Fitzgerald—washed up, alcoholic and ill—dedicated himself to devising a heartfelt course in literature for the woman he loved.

In 1937, on the night of her engagement to the...

The Difficulty of Being

by Jean Cocteau & Elizabeth Sprigge

Reflections on life and art from the legendary filmmaker-novelist-poet-genius.

By the time he published The Difficulty of Being in 1947, Jean Cocteau had produced some of the most respected films and literature...

Where There's Love, There's Hate

by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo & Suzanne Jill Levine

A witty yet gripping pastiche of murder mysteries set in an Argentine seaside resort, peppered with literary allusions

In seaside Bosque de Mar, guests at the Hotel Central are struck by double misfortune: the...

Dossier K: A Memoir

by Imre Kertesz & Tim Wilkinson

The first and only memoir from the Nobel Prize–winning author, in the form of an illuminating, often funny, and often combative interview—with himself

Dossier K. is Imre Kertész’s response to the hasty...

A Short History of Nuclear Folly

by Rudolph Herzog & Jefferson Chase

In the spirit of Dr. Strangelove and The Atomic Café, a blackly sardonic people’s history of atomic blunders and near-misses revealing the hushed-up and forgotten episodes in which the great powers gambled...

The Reverberator: A Novel

by Henry James

Henry James, one of the great literary stylists, an incomparable analyst of human relations, and---who knew?---a startlingly prescient media critic. This little-known novel from one of his most fertile creative...

The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran's Future

by Nader Hashemi & Danny Postel

A definitive collection of essays and documents on the movement behind Iran's mass protests

Since June of 2009, the Islamic Republic of Iran has seen the most dramatic political upheaval in its three decades...

The Duke's Table: The Complete Book of Vegetarian Italian Cooking

by Enrico Alliata

An encyclopedic collection of vegetarian recipes from Italy—learn how to make all of the classic dishes without meat

“Even though man can draw all he needs in the way of nourishment from a mere handful of...

Spurious

by Lars Iyer

In a raucous debut that summons up Britain's fabled Goon Squad comedies, writer and philosopher Lars Iyer tells the story of someone very like himself with a "slightly more successful" friend and their journeys...

Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations

by Roberto Bolano & Marcela Valdes

With the release of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in 1998, journalist Monica Maristain discovered a writer “capable of befriending his readers.” After exchanging several letters with Bolaño,...