Written by Dante
Illustrated by Gustave Dore
Translated by Anthony Esolen

Format: Trade Paperback

“If there is any justice in the world of books, [Esolen’s] will be the standard Dante . . . for some time to come.”–Robert Royal, CrisisIn this, the concluding volume of The Divine Comedy, Dante ascends from the devastation of the Inferno and the trials of Purgatory. Led by his beloved Beatrice, he enters Paradise, to profess his faith, hope, and love before the Heavenly court. Completed shortly before his death, Paradise is the volume that perhaps best expresses Dante’s...
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Written by W.G. Sebald

Format: Trade Paperback

“W. G. Sebald exemplified the best kind of cosmopolitan literary intelligence–humane, digressive, deeply erudite, unassuming and tinged with melancholy. . . . In [Campo Santo] Sebald reveals his distinctive tone, as his winding sentences gradually mingle together curiosity and plangency, learning and self-revelation. . . . [Readers will] be rewarded with unexpected illuminations.”–The Washington Post Book WorldThis final collection of essays by W. G. Sebald offers profound...
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Written by Leo Tolstoy
Translated by Peter Constantine
Introduction by Cynthia Ozick

Format: Trade Paperback

This 1862 novel, in a vibrant new translation by Peter Constantine, is Tolstoy’s semiautobiographical story of young Olenin, a wealthy, disaffected Muscovite who joins the Russian army and travels to the untamed frontier of the Caucasus in search of a more authentic life. While striving to adopt the rough and ready lifestyle of the local Cossacks, Olenin falls in love with a free-spirited girl whose fiancé turns out to be a formidable opponent. Showcasing the philosophical insight that...
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Written by Giorgio Vasari
Translated by Gaston du C. de Vere
Introduction by Philip Jacks

Format: Trade Paperback

A painter and architect in his own right, Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) achieved immortality for this book on the lives of his fellow Renaissance artists, first published in Florence in 1550. Although he based his work on a long tradition of biographical writing, Vasari infused these literary portraits with a decidedly modern form of critical judgment. The result is a work that remains to this day the cornerstone of art historical scholarship. Spanning the period from the thirteenth century to Vasari’s...
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Written by Voltaire
Translated by Peter Constantine
Introduction by Diane Johnson

Format: Trade Paperback

A flamboyant and controversial personality of enormous wit and intelligence, Voltaire remains one of the most influential figures of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Candide, his masterpiece, is a brilliant satire of the theory that our world is “the best of all possible worlds.” The book traces the picaresque adventures of the guileless Candide, who is forced into the army, flogged, shipwrecked, betrayed, robbed, separated from his beloved Cunegonde, tortured by the Inquisition,...
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Translated by Burton Raffel
Introduction by Guy Davenport

Format: Trade Paperback

“For there is indeed something we can call the spirit of ancient Greece–a carefully tuned voice that speaks out of the grave with astonishing clarity and grace , a distinctive voice that, taken as a whole, is like no other voice that has ever sung on this earth.”–BURTON RAFFEL, from his PrefaceFor centuries, the poetry of Homer, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Sappho, and Archilochus has served as one of our primary means of connecting with the wholly vanished world of ancient Greece....
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Written by Arthur Rimbaud
Translated by Wyatt Mason

Format: Trade Paperback

Translated, edited and with an Introduction by Wyatt Mason“The definitive translation for our time.”–Edward HirschFrom Dante’s Inferno to Sartre’s No Exit, writers have been fascinated by visions of damnation. Within that rich literature of suffering, Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell–written when the poet was nineteen–provides an astonishing example of the grapple with self. As a companion to Rimbaud’s journey, readers could have no better guide...
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Written by Honore De Balzac
Translated by Jordan Stump
Introduction by Adam Gopnik

Format: Trade Paperback

The Wrong Side of Paris, the final novel in Balzac’s The Human Comedy, is the compelling story of Godefroid, an abject failure at thirty, who seeks refuge from materialism by moving into a monastery-like lodging house in the shadows of Notre-Dame. Presided over by Madame de La Chanterie, a noblewoman with a tragic past, the house is inhabited by a remarkable band of men—all scarred by the tumultuous aftermath of the French Revolution—who have devoted their lives to performing anonymous...
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Written by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Ulrich Baer

Format: Hardcover

“You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but by plumbing its depth.”–RAINER MARIA RILKEIn this treasury of uncommon wisdom and spiritual insight, the best writings and personal philosophies of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, are gleaned by Ulrich Baer from thousands of pages of never-before translated correspondence. The result is a profound vision of how the human drive to create and understand can guide us in every...
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Written by Arthur Rimbaud
Translated by Wyatt Mason

Format: Trade Paperback

One of the most written-about literary figures in the past decade, Arthur Rimbaud left few traces when he abandoned poetry at age twenty-one and disappeared into the African desert. Although the dozen biographies devoted to Rimbaud’s life depend on one main source for information—his own correspondence—a complete edition of these remarkable letters has never been published in English. Until now.A moving document of decline, Rimbaud’s letters begin with the enthusiastic artistic...
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