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“Emily Dickinson springs to life in this remarkable, long-out-of-print biography written by her niece . . . Though millions of pages have been written about Dickinson . . . few have provided such a thrilling close-up portrait. Readers will be rapt from the first page.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)What would it be like to have Emily Dickinson as your babysitter? In this astonishing memoir, out of print for almost a century, Martha “Matty” Dickinson describes the childhood she spent next door to—and often in the care of—her Aunt Emily. We see Matty as a little girl, hiding from the other grownups in Emily’s upstairs rooms, helping Emily in the kitchen, venturing with her into the cellar for the gingerpead she wasn’t supposed to have. As Matty becomes a teenager, she finds a confidante in her aunt, who is fascinated by the latest youth fads, school gossip, and the recurring question of what to wear to a party (“her ‘vote’ was for my highest-heeled red slippers”)—not to mention the music, novels, and poems she and Matty both love. From an early age, Emily teaches Matty the joys of solitude and independence: “No one,” Emily said, “could ever punish a Dickinson by shutting her up alone.” First published in 1932, this is the most intimate record we have of Emily Dickinson, whose death sparked a long family struggle over her work and her image. In a foreword to this new edition, the poet and critic Anthony Madrid provides a biographical frame for Matty’s recollections, and explains how such a remarkable document could spend so long out of sight.

When, in 1927, Dorothy Parker became a book critic for the New Yorker, she was already a legendary wit, a much-quoted member of the Algonquin Round Table, and an arbiter of literary taste. In the year that she spent as a weekly reviewer, under the rubric “Constant Reader,” she created what is still the most entertaining book column ever written. Parker’s hot takes have lost none of their heat, whether she’s taking aim at the evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson (“She can go on like that for hours. Can, hell - does”), praising Hemingway’s latest collection (“He discards detail with magnificent lavishness”), or dissenting from the Tao of Pooh (“And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up”).Introduced with characteristic wit and sympathy by Sloane Crosley, Constant Reader gathers the complete weekly New Yorker reviews that Parker published from October 1927 through November 1928, with gimlet-eyed appreciations of the high and low, from Isadora Duncan to Al Smith, Charles Lindbergh to Little Orphan Annie, Mussolini to Emily Post

“A compact, intricately patterned story of unrequited erotic obsession, focused on the relationship between a closeted English novelist and a beautiful Italian philosopher . . . Among the novel’s daring ideas is its suggestion that closetedness and English taciturnity are part of a common condition, each an art of concealment.” —Charlie Tyson, Harper’s MagazineA witty, heartbreaking tale of unrequited love by “one of the finest and most remarkable English novelists of our time.” (The Scotsman)Antonio Valli, a gifted Italian philosopher in his thirties, has left his wife and children behind in Florence for a one-year research fellowship at a provincial English university. Handsome and charming, Antonio is irresistible to men and women both—and he knows it. One who falls under his spell is Dick Thompson, a successful middle-aged novelist from whom Antonio rents a room. For the first time in years, Dick finds himself desperately, passionately in love, but the games the manipulative Italian plays with him throw the older man’s life into chaos.Published only three years after the decriminalization of homosexuality in the UK, A Domestic Animal is Francis King’s most intimate and daringly autobiographical novel: a “wry, anguished study . . . of love and jealousy [that] is hard to forget” (Robert Baldick, The Daily Telegraph).

“Like the diary of Samuel Pepys or the memoirs of François-René de Chateaubriand, Beloved Son Felix [is] an invaluable and entertaining firsthand exploration of a bygone era . . . We are allowed a rare glimpse into the street-level experiences of a common Renaissance man.” —Michael Patrick Brady, The Wall Street JournalThe wildly vivid, rare, and revealing journals of a sixteenth-century medical student.In 1552, sixteen-year-old Felix Platter left Basel, Switzerland, and journeyed 370 miles to Montpelier, France to study medicine. His journals chronicle five astonishing years of youth in a time of plague, war, and awakening. A Protestant in a Catholic kingdom, Felix witnessed blood-chilling executions and engaged in secret religious discussions with his landlord, a Marrano Jew. He learned to play the lute, tasted olive oil for the first time, and swam in the sea. He flirted (unsuccessfully) and danced (disastrously), fled from highway robbers, saw John Calvin preach, survived an outbreak of the bubonic plague, joined in a massive, orange-throwing food fight, acquired a dog, and spent one Christmas Eve alone and afraid of the dark.Most astonishing of all, he wrote it down.As Stephen Greenblatt writes in his introduction to this new edition, “Keeping diaries and writing autobiographies did not become a widespread practice until the mid-seventeenth century”—but Felix created an astonishing document: an intimate, sometimes hilarious chronicle of Renaissance adolescence from the inside, whose “vividness, intimacy, candor, and charm” lend it an “altogether rare and revealing character.”

In their lovely old Cotswolds village, Janet and Susan are known to all the other villagers as “the girls” - a fixture. Partners in love and work, co-proprietors of a picturesque shop specialising in the work of local artisans and farmers, they lead an enviable, enviably settled life.So it’s no catastrophe when Sue, the younger of the two, feels the need to take a month to travel on her own, leaving Jan alone to run their stall at the Inland Waterways Rally Craft Fair. Nor is it any real threat when a kindly gay man named Alan lends Jan a hand in Sue’s absence, or when the two wind up sharing some wine and even a bunk for the night.If Jan turns out to be pregnant some weeks after Sue’s return to the nest, what’s that but cause for joy? And when Alan happens to come visiting, by and by, finding the delighted girls raising a beautiful baby boy, who can blame him for wanting to share in a small part of their bliss?Yes, theirs is an enviable, enviably settled life. And the girls will defend it with every tool at their disposal.

“A precocious literary triumph . . . Élisabeth is far more than a footnote. It would be a rewarding, exciting read even if the identity of its author were unfamiliar.” —Richard Brody, The New YorkerWitty banter, lust, ennui, and an undercurrent of violence percolate beneath a seemingly paradisiacal summer on the eve of World War II, in this landmark translation of the first and only novel by Éric Rohmer, the French New Wave’s most prolific and beloved filmmaker.Fifteen years before completing his first feature film—and ten before beginning a transformative editorial stint at Cahiers du cinéma that would usher the journal, and French cinema, into a new era—the man who would become known worldwide as Éric Rohmer published a single novel. Released by Éditions Gallimard alongside the early works of Claude Simon and Marguérite Duras, Élisabeth was part of the first flowering of what would come to be known as the nouveau roman—and was also the “matrix,” as Rohmer himself later put it, of the images, ideas, and formal concerns of his first sequence of films, Six Moral Tales.Set in the sunstruck countryside east of Paris during the summer of 1939, a year ahead of the German invasion, where the upper-middle-class Roby family and its eponymous matriarch are spending a listless summer, Élisabeth is a war-novel awaiting a war. While the teenage Roby children and their friends swim, flirt, and lie to one another among the baking fields and icy meanders of the Marne, the novel becomes the scene of an anticipatory haunting. The simmering paranoia, calculated blankness, and potential violence of the coming Occupation are already present—as it were, in mufti. With a cool, kaleidoscopic eye, Rohmer lays out his protagonists and their precarious peace—their restlessness, their desperate boredom, their petty romantic agonies—with the unsettling chilliness and the sinister exactitude of details on a tactical map.

“The best book about Sin City ever written . . . [Dunne’s] grotesqueries aren’t drug-induced, they’re very real. His is the genuine Vegas.” —Sean Manning, Esquire“A fine, wry, perceptive, graceful book that does as much for the dark side of the American funhouse as Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas did for the manic side.” —Jonathan Yardley, The New York Times Book Review“In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada.” So begins John Gregory Dunne’s neglected classic of first-person writing, a mordant, deadpan, grotesque tale that blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, confession and reportage.Panicked by his own mortality, despondent over his many failings as a writer and a man, Dunne leaves his wife and their three-year old child for the solitude of a crummy apartment off the Vegas Strip. There he plans to write an account of the city as he finds it; the book he ends up writing is “a fiction which recalls time both real and imagined.” The remarkable central characters are Artha, a student at cosmetology college by day, a sex worker by night; Buster Mano, a private detective whose specialty is tracking down errant husbands; and Jackie Kasey, a lounge comic who opens for Elvis at $10,000 a night and wonders why he is still only a “semi-name.” Pimps, bail bondsmen, parking-lot moguls, used-car tycoons, ex-jockeys, and women who look as if they had “spent a lifetime meeting guys in Vegas or Miami Beach or Louisville for the Derby”: these are the people who wander through the lives of Artha, Buster, and Jackie—and, for a dark season, the life of the narrator.John Gregory Dunne captures a low point in American culture and in one American life with rare vitality, honesty, and perception. Sad, powerful, wildly funny, Vegas is like no memoir before or since.

“Can’t sleep tonight. Was lying in bed reading the biography of a great man whose genius deserted him . . . The genius who deserted me was you.” In a series of late-night letters, gorgeous, funny, filled with memory, sensuality, and regret, a seducer calls across the years to the great love of his youth: an older, revered expatriate known, in his adoptive city, as the King of Naples. As the narrator evokes their affair, in scenes of beauty and remorse, his memories range over the men who came after and before, especially the seductive father who still haunts his erotic imagination.First published in 1978, before the trilogy of frankly autobiographical novels that made him famous, Nocturnes for the King of Naples reveals Edmund White at his most poetic, playful, and evocative, a magician on the level of James Salter, James Merrill, or Vladimir Nabokov.

When the phone rang on a cold November afternoon in 1990, Grégoire Bouillier had no way of knowing that the caller was the woman who had left him, without warning, five years before. And he couldn’t have guessed why she was calling: not to say she was sorry, not to explain why she’d vanished from his life, but to invite him to a party. A birthday party. For a woman he’d never met.Here is the unlikely but true account of how one man got over a broken heart, regained his faith in literature, participated - by mistake - in a work of performance art, threw away his turtlenecks, spent his rent money on a 1964 bordeaux that nobody ever drank, and fell in love again. Named one of the year’s best books by Slate and the San Francisco Chronicle when it first appeared in English, The Mystery Guest is a “darkly hilarious . . . odyssey . . . that wends its loopy way toward yes” (O, the Oprah Magazine).

Djuna Barnes is rightly remembered for Nightwood, her breakthrough and final novel: a hallmark of modernist literature, championed by T. S. Eliot, and one of the first, strangest, and most brilliant novels of love between women to be published in the twentieth century. Barnes’s career began long before Nightwood, however, with journalism, essays, drama, and satire of extraordinary wit and courage. Long into her later life, after World War II, when she published nothing more, it was her short fiction above all that she prized and would continue to revise.Here are all the stories Barnes sought to preserve, in the versions she preferred, as well as a smattering of rarities as selected by critic and New Yorker contributor Merve Emre. These are tales of women “‘tragique’ and ‘triste’ and ‘tremendous’ all at once,” of sons and daughters being initiated into the ugly comedy of life, monuments all to a worldview singular and scathing. As Emre writes in her foreword, “[Barnes’s] themes are love and death, especially in Paris and New York; the corruption of nature by culture; the tainted innocence of children; and the mute misery of beasts . . . her characters may be alien to life, but they are alive - spectacularly, grotesquely alive.”

From the groundbreaking author of They comes an "elegantly slender account of a love affair, a death, and a mystery." (Janice Elliott, The Sunday Telegraph)Twenty years ago, Cassandra had an affair with a married woman named Anne. Although begun in passion, their entanglement ended abruptly, shortly after which Anne killed herself. Was Anne beyond help, or did Cassandra bear some responsibility for her lover's demise? Haunted by her memories of their time together, and finally able to tell her story, Cassandra unburdens herself in a letter to her dear friend Francis.Originally published in 1984, and closely based on a tumultuous and ultimately tragic relationship the author had with a married woman two decades earlier, The Shelf is a deeply moving work of autofiction-"Though I shall deny it, of course," Kay Dick told a reporter shortly after its publication. Written with a "quiet elegance" (Elaine Feinstein, The Times), it's a "tour de force" that places Dick "in the same category of sensibility as Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield and Ford Madox Ford" (Gillian Freeman).

Over more than fifty years at the New Yorker, E. B. White came to define a kind of ideal American prose: clear, casual, democratic, and urbane. He also did more than any writer to define his favourite city. His classic Here Is New York captured a moment in the life of Manhattan with precision and love—but his was no fleeting infatuation. In New York Sketches, the first collection of his casual pieces about the city, White ranges at whim from the nesting habits of pigeons to the aisles of a calculator trade-show on Eighth Avenue, from the behaviour of snails in aquariums to the ghosts of old romance that haunt a flower shop or a fire escape or an old hotel. These sketches, some less than a page long, many written for a laugh, or in response to the news of the day, show us White at his most playful and inventive.New York Sketches is a welcome diversion for every New Yorker—native, adoptive, or far from home—and a perfect introduction, not only to what White called “the inscrutable and lovely town,” but to the everyday enchantments of one of her fondest reporters.