The Sicilian prince Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa (1896-1957) died just after writing The Leopard, his only novel. Visconti's film adaptation, starring Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale, won the Palme …
Vita Nuova (1292-94) is regarded as one of Dante's most profound creations. The thirty-one poems in the first of his major writings are linked by a lyrical prose narrative celebrating and debating the…
'I regret to see that my book has turned out un fiasco solenne.' James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting the…
Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite Your…
Long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce and Kafka, and now available in a supple new English translation, Italo Svevo’s charming and splendidly idiosyncratic novel conduct…
'Perhaps when Orwell described sheer egoism as a necessary quality for a writer, he was not thinking about the sheer egoism of a female writer. Even the most arrogant female writer has to work over ti…
