Paris cafés, Pamplona bulls, and a crowd of the beautifully damaged — the novel that named a generation.
394 books. No filler. Every one explained.
This is not a warehouse — it's a shelf. Titles arrive when an editor can argue for them and leave when the argument stops holding. Save the ones that call to you.
Book catalog
An old Cuban fisherman, eighty-four days without a catch, and the fish of his life — the whole method in one afternoon's read.
Hemingway's memoir of being young, poor, and absurdly talented in 1920s Paris — the most seductive book ever written about writing.
An American ambulance driver, an English nurse, and the Italian front — the Great War's great love story.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1932 first novel, which follows one man from the First World War through colonial Africa and industrial America to the Paris slums.
Broke, shameless, and ecstatically alive in 1930s Paris — the banned book that ended American censorship.
Three days behind enemy lines in the Spanish mountains — the longest novel, the biggest canvas, and the warmest heart.
Before Paris: the Brooklyn years, the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company, and the fury that made the flight necessary.
The debut story collection where the modern American short story was invented — trout streams, war flashes, and Nick Adams.
Céline's shrieking, hilarious portrait of a Belle Époque Paris childhood in the Paris arcades — poverty as opera.
Ten hallucinatory riffs between Brooklyn's 14th Ward and the Paris streets — Miller at his most purely musical.
Pound's farewell to London and elegy for the war dead — eighteen pages that indict an entire civilization.
The 'poem including history' — fifty years, 116 cantos, and modernism's most magnificent ruin.
Orwell's second novel: a rector's daughter loses her memory, wakes up on a London street, and finds out what England does with a penniless woman.
Henry Miller's account of inviting a destitute Paris astrologer to live with him at Big Sur, and of how badly it went.
James Baldwin was forty-seven, Nikki Giovanni twenty-eight. A London television studio, one evening in November 1971, and neither of them willing to let the other off easily.
Camus’s abandoned first novel follows a man who believes money can buy the time required for happiness.
Four darker literary fairy tales about sacrifice, beauty, art, poverty, and the harm done when one life is valued above another.
The unexpurgated series completes: fame with the double life still running underneath, and the ending the published Diary declined to print.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's short 1948 attack on Jean-Paul Sartre — a defence against a specific accusation that turns into a comic literary confrontation about who owns postwar French letters.
The century's most famous literary love affair, in its own hand: two decades of the Nin–Miller letters, selected by Gunther Stuhlmann.
James Joyce's first novel — a Dublin boyhood written in the boy's own changing language, from the nursery to the morning he decides to leave Ireland and become a writer.
Sabina, the woman with five lives, pursued through her own masquerade by a conscience she hired herself — Nin's most read novel.
Prague in the months after Munich, written by a correspondent who had just been there and could not report the half of it.
Beauvoir's hundred-page account of her mother's month-long death from cancer in a Paris clinic — the shortest and most direct book she wrote, and the case study The Coming of Age would turn into general argument six years later.
A country-house comedy that turns, in its second act, into an unsparing indictment of the double standard that punished the woman and promoted the man.
The lecture years on the page: creativity, women, and the examined life, gathered from the talks that made her a campus phenomenon.
A dying American colonel, a winter weekend in Venice, a young countess — the valedictory novel the critics panned and time is slowly rehabilitating.
Beauvoir's account of Sartre's last ten years — the blindness, the strokes, the political engagements, the dependence on her care — followed by the 1974 interviews the two of them recorded together, the most direct testimony we have of what fifty years of that partnership actually consisted of.
A twentieth-century Parisian actor meets a man who cannot die, and asks him to remember her. His answer runs seven centuries and every version of that promise.
The fourth and final volume of Beauvoir's memoirs — written at sixty-four with the whole life visible behind her, organised by theme rather than chronology, and containing the reckoning with 'I was cheated' that Force of Circumstance had ended on.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's third story collection, published ten months after The Great Gatsby — nine stories about money and class, including “Winter Dreams” and “The Rich Boy.”
One long letter to Alfred Perlès — Miller sails to New York in 1935, hates it magnificently, and sails back. A round trip, as the title says.
Beauvoir's diary of her four-month lecture tour across the United States in 1947 — the trip on which she met Nelson Algren, an encounter later scored across The Mandarins and her Letters to Nelson Algren.
Sixteen years later, Stearns reruns the great inquiry — thirty-six Americans, and a country he no longer wants to flee.
A political comedy about blackmail, a fortune built on a secret, and the damage caused by demanding moral perfection from another person.
The mail habit, preserved: a small edited collection of Nin's letters to a young admirer, Moira Collins.
Colette's cat and dog talk over the household — the early book she counted as her first step free of the Claudine machine.
The animals drive the farmer out and take over the farm. Orwell's 1945 fable is about what happens after that.
A jazz drummer dies in the first act, and the friends he leaves spend four hundred pages failing to explain it.
The sequel the Cook Book's success demanded — her recipes, annotated for American kitchens by the century's least likely collaborator.
Twenty-four years of letters with the poet-librarian who took her seriously before the world did.
A late gathering of Colette's short prose — first published not as a standalone book but as a named section of her Complete Works.
The trunk's last surprise: collector-era erotica thought lost for seventy years, recovered and published in 2016.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1937 political pamphlet — a hybrid work in which fictional dialogue, three ballet scenarios and an extended racial and political monologue interrupt one another.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1959 collection of five ballet scenarios — witches, sirens, gods and dockworkers, all speaking through movement rather than music.
Four late stories that keep hard subjects under a calm surface — and a title tale built on a revelation that changes everything you have read.
The scandalous exile finds his paradise: fog, cliffs, children, neighbors, pilgrims — and the question of whether paradise can be lived in.
James Baldwin's play about the murder of a young Black man in a Southern town and the all-white jury that lets his killer go, written after Emmett Till and dedicated to Medgar Evers.
At eighty-four, the rememberer goes back to the beginning: the boys of the Fourteenth Ward, named and thanked one by one.
Eleven ports and the sea-word for knocking about the world — with the great Genoa chapter, the tetralogy's buried childhood, at its heart.
A woman past fifty, alone in a Provence summer, decides what a life no longer organized around love can be.
Orwell's first novel: seven English people, one club that has never admitted an Asian member, and a magistrate who wants in.
Four decades of journalism in one volume — Paris cafés for the Toronto Star, Madrid under shells, the Blitz, the liberation ride to the Ritz.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's ten Copenhagen prison notebooks — February to October 1946 — first published in complete scholarly form in 2019, and the workshop in which the postwar novels began.
An emperor turns the discovery that people die unhappy into a program of unlimited logical cruelty.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's unfinished 1949 novel — an eighteen-year-old cavalry volunteer's first terrible night at the barracks.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1957 novel — the first of the German trilogy — about the last months of the Vichy government-in-exile at Sigmaringen.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's two songs — the sailor's chant À nœud coulant and the underworld revenge ballad Règlement, both recorded in his own voice in 1956 and collected as a book in 1981.
An aging courtesan and the beautiful young man she has kept for six years — the novel that made Colette a major writer.
The continuous novel's second book: Djuna, the dancers and the young men who refuse to grow up, and the café where everyone lands.
The five novels of the continuous novel in one volume — Nin's roman-fleuve of women's inner lives, assembled under its true name.
The 1922 symposium that put American civilization on trial — and sent the jury to Paris.
The fourth Claudine novel hands the story to another woman — Annie, learning to leave a husband who has always decided for her.
The sardonic Burgundian schoolgirl whose diary made Colette famous — published, at first, under her husband's name.
Claudine leaves Burgundy for the capital, and the schoolgirl's sharp eye is turned on Parisian society and her own heart.
Marriage does not tame Claudine — the third novel takes the series into its most openly erotic and disenchanted territory.
Nin's last and lightest fiction: a painter named Renate, a gallery of originals, and a book that ends by beginning again.
A fat insurance salesman with new false teeth and seventeen secret pounds drives back to the town he grew up in.
All of Ernest Hemingway's poems in one scholarly edition — school verse, Paris satires, war poems, and the private jokes he never meant to publish.
The interviews, collected: three decades of Nin answering questions, from little magazines to the fame years, in one scholarly volume.
The novel Miller wrote about losing June to another woman — abandoned in 1930, published in 1991, and rawer than anything he ever polished.
Ten wartime essays on Dickens, Kipling, boys' comics and seaside postcards, including the piece on Salvador Dalí that a publisher cut out of a printed book.
Her first book: a defense of Lawrence written in sixteen days, published in Paris in 1932 — the door her whole literary life walked through.
A jilted millionaire sails three artists to Antarctica to see what silence does to them — then comes back and buys the whaling trade.
The complete Toronto Star files, 1920–1924: the twenty-something in Paris, learning the style on deadline for a newspaper an ocean away.
Oscar Wilde's long prison letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, combining accusation, self-criticism, memory, suffering, art, and a new interpretation of Christ.
The bullfight book: a full treatise on the corrida that keeps turning into a book about death, Spain, and how to write.
Written at a dollar a page for an anonymous collector in the forties — published the year she died, and instantly her bestseller.
Orwell's first book: seventeen-hour days in a Paris hotel kitchen, then a month on the road in England.
Fifteen short stories about ordinary people in Dublin — the first book by James Joyce, and a nine-year fight to get it printed.
A husband learns of his wife's old, brief affair, and a close marriage comes apart over a few days in the country.
The life told in her own words — an autobiography assembled after her death from some forty of her books, and the English Colette most readers meet.
The poem where 'Blaise Cendrars' is born: a starving night in Manhattan, addressed to Christ — and modern French poetry changes course.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1955 fictional interview and aesthetic manifesto — a staged conversation about his own style that turns into a comic walk across Paris.
Six hundred letters he ordered never published — Fitzgerald teased, Perkins courted, wives won and lost — the offstage voice, complete with sins.
Small events turned into surprise — Colette's chronicles of the minor, and a seedbed for the books that followed.
Six stories about people reaching toward belonging and finding that the distance remains.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1952 novel — the first volume of his postwar Féerie sequence, a feverish mixture of prison, memory and grievance.
The third unexpurgated volume: New York with Rank, the return to Paris, and a private life running at full burn between two continents.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's first book of short stories, published in September 1920 — eight magazine pieces written for money, one of which became the most famous American story about a haircut.
Twenty-two flower portraits written from memory — late Colette turning description of a rose or a poppy into a kind of self-portrait.
The third and longest volume of Beauvoir's memoirs: the eighteen years from the Liberation of Paris in August 1944 through 1962, the years in which she wrote The Second Sex and The Mandarins, met Nelson Algren, campaigned against French torture in Algeria, and became one of the most-watched public intellectuals in Europe.
Twelve fashionable chronicles that follow the turning year — a private printing for a patron's friends, later folded into Journey for Myself.
Occupied Paris, watched and described from a single window — practical, intimate, and an irreplaceable record of the city's wartime life.
The girl raised to be a rich man's mistress, and the man who changes the terms himself — Colette's most adapted story.
An American in Paris, engaged to one person and in love with another, in Baldwin's shortest novel.
One Saturday in a Harlem storefront church, and the three lives that put a boy on its floor.
The only book of stories he wrote, containing "Sonny's Blues" and, at the end, a title story told from inside a white deputy's head.
The rise and ruin of General Sutter, told at telegraph speed — the little novel that made Cendrars famous and Hollywood hungry.
A month on safari, written as an experiment: can a true book, absolutely truthful, compete with the novel? Plus the Huckleberry Finn verdict.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's recovered 2022 novel — a young Ferdinand comes to on a battlefield, survives a military hospital, and starts moving toward London.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1944 novel — a wounded French veteran drops into a London underworld of pimps, prostitutes, musicians and eccentrics.
A thousand pages of argument by mail — Miller and Michael Fraenkel start with Shakespeare and end with everything, from the Villa Seurat to the war.
Before Paris, before the war, before everything: the school newspaper and literary magazine work of Hemingway, sixteen years old.
The craft doctrine, extracted: every passage where Hemingway explains the work — icebergs, morning hours, and stopping while it's going good.
The unexpurgated year — what the 1966 Diary couldn't print about Henry, June, and the winter that changed all three.
Everything Miller ever said about the work itself, gathered into one volume — the accidental craft book of the century's least teachable writer.
A Left Bank bachelor, two rich mistresses, and an arrangement that stops working. The only one of Gellhorn's novels set in Paris.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Oriental fairy tale, written around 1923 for his young daughter and illustrated by his first wife — a wandering child who is repeatedly offered safety and repeatedly leaves.
George Orwell went to Spain to write newspaper articles and joined a militia instead: a winter in the Aragón trenches, street fighting in Barcelona, a bullet through the throat.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1933 speech at Médan — instead of praising Émile Zola, he asks what has happened to the reality naturalism tried to describe, and predicts that literature committed to it will not be tolerated for long.
A Colette-like narrator, alone in a provincial hotel, is drawn into the private drama of the strangers around her.
Her first fiction: a surrealist prose poem of mirrors, sisters, and drowned rooms, printed on the Villa Seurat's own press in 1936.
Four pages that end the war literature of glory: the poet-legionnaire's confession, with drawings by Fernand Léger.
The most famous of Maya Angelou’s seven autobiographies: a Black girl’s childhood in the segregated South, and how she got her voice back.
The sequel to The Big Sea: Cuba, Haiti, the Soviet Union, and besieged Madrid, ending in Montmartre on New Year's night.
A nineteen-year-old in Harlem is pregnant, and the father of her child is in the Tombs for something he did not do.
Late prose of landscape, memory, and homage — Colette on familiar ground, seeing it new through the eye of a painter friend.
The late essays: masculinity reconsidered, women's becoming, travel, and craft — the last collection published in her lifetime.
Short chronicles of the street and the throng — Colette watching the anonymous life of the city pass.
The second unexpurgated volume: the analysts, the abortion chapter, and the reunion with her father that the 1966 Diary could only gesture at.
George Orwell's first book of essays: Charles Dickens, the twopenny school-story papers, and Henry Miller's Paris.
Old age falls in love and can't sleep: the last great infatuation, confessed in prose and painted through the small hours.
Four essays and dialogues in which Oscar Wilde argues that criticism is creative, art need not copy life, and a work should not be reduced to a moral lesson.
A collectible late volume that is not, despite its title, a diary — a mixed gathering of chronicles and tales, printed in a small run.
A painter, three sons, a war at sea — the unfinished masterpiece that shows what Hemingway was still reaching for.
The only book of poems James Baldwin published, brought out in London in 1983 when he was fifty-nine and almost nobody knew he wrote them.
The last portrait in the gallery is the best friend of all: Fred Perlès — Carl of Clichy — thanked at last under the old pet name.
Short prose of weather, illness, waiting, and travel — a mutable self-portrait Colette reworked heavily between 1922 and 1928.
The matador who invented modern bullfighting tells his life to Spain's greatest reporter — night swims, secret capework in the dark, and the melancholy of surviving the golden age.
A proud, aging aristocrat, reduced but unbroken, is drawn back into the schemes of the ex-husband she still half-loves.
A gospel singer is dead in a London basement, and his brother spends six hundred pages telling you who he was.
George Orwell's third novel: a bookshop assistant and failed poet has declared war on money, and lives on two pounds a week to prove it.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1933 play in five acts — Doctor Bardamu moves through colonial Africa, New York, the League of Nations and the Paris suburbs, everywhere finding institutions absorbed by hierarchy, money and paperwork instead of the people they claim to serve.
Dr. Louis Destouches's medical essay on the Ford factories in Detroit — a physician's report on what mass production does to the human body and what factory medicine is actually for.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's recovered short story, published in La Nouvelle Revue française in 2023 — a humiliated elderly woman in Pontabon carries her private mythology of a dead captain to his grave and walks away.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's recovered 2023 legendary novel — an imaginary Middle Ages of kings, troubadours, murder and personified Death, drawn from two overlapping manuscripts he never completed.
The first Cities of the Interior novel: Lillian's hungers, Jay's Paris, and the party where the whole cast finally assembles.
A mock almanac about the lesbian circle around the American writer Natalie Clifford Barney in 1920s Paris, written by Djuna Barnes in deliberately archaic English, printed privately in 1928 and sold by hand.
Colette's last book — a short return to the old women of her childhood village, published in the year she died.
D. H. Lawrence's last novel: printed privately in Florence in 1928, reprinted cheaply in Paris in 1929 to beat the pirates, and legal in Britain only from 1960.
A society comedy in which a young wife suspects her husband, an excluded woman returns, and a fan becomes evidence that tells the wrong story.
The first great trench novel — written in the mud by a forty-one-year-old private, Goncourt-crowned while the war it describes still ran.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's posthumous 1964 novel — Guignol's Band II picks up in wartime London with gas-mask experiments, a fourteen-year-old niece, and the criminal past that will not release Ferdinand.
The sequel to Duo: widowed Alice returns to her sisters and the battered old couch where the family regroups and survives.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1938 political pamphlet — a short grotesque opening beside the Seine gives way to a sustained argument against another war with Germany.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1941 political pamphlet — written after the fall of France, its later sections turn from defeat toward a social programme built around leisure, family and the arts.
Beauvoir's late short novel about a Paris advertising executive and the polished consumer world that has trained her, her family, and her ten-year-old daughter to see other people's suffering as a stain to be removed from the picture.
The fame years by airmail: Nin's letters to the Australian bookseller David Pepperell, 1968 to 1974.
Four wartime letters distinguish love of one’s country from the nationalism that makes murder a virtue.
Four decades of letters to the third member of the Villa Seurat triangle, from the Booster days to the last year of her life.
The richest man on a Caribbean island marries a young mixed-race woman to settle a score, and neither side of the island will have her.
Where the whole project begins: the diary an eleven-year-old started on the boat to New York, as a letter to the father who left.
The second book from the dollar-a-page trunk: thirteen more stories written for the collector, published two years after Delta of Venus.
James Baldwin's only children's book: a four-year-old named TJ on a Harlem block, written for his nephew and illustrated by a French painter he had known since 1959.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's recovered 2022 novel Londres, arriving in English as London on 13 October 2026 in Charlotte Mandell's New Directions translation — a French criminal underworld in wartime London destroys itself around Ferdinand.
A wartime gathering of short pieces and memories — miscellaneous by design, and revealing precisely because it is unsettled.
Comic and supernatural stories about murder as duty, a ghost who cannot frighten Americans, a secretless socialite, and a disputed Shakespeare portrait.
Two war correspondents wrote a farce about two war correspondents. A hit in London in 1946, it closed on Broadway after four performances.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's ~905-page preliminary manuscript of Féerie pour une autre fois — memories of Montmartre before the flight from Paris, and the bombing that reorganises the narrative into escape.
The Villa Seurat portfolio — portraits, surrealist manifestos, and the essay on Brassaï, gathered by Obelisk in 1938 and never quite reprinted whole.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1936 political and philosophical pamphlet — a short, disillusioned report from the Soviet Union that quickly widens into an argument against political utopianism.
The first volume of Beauvoir's memoirs: a bourgeois Catholic Paris childhood, the loss of faith, philosophy at the Sorbonne, and a friendship whose ending she said cost her her freedom.
The second story collection — 'The Killers,' 'Hills Like White Elephants' — the iceberg method at its coldest and most perfect.
A sheltered Paris girl feeds on romantic fantasy until it pulls her out into the night — the first of the Minne novels.
The sequel takes Minne past sheltered fantasy into the harder education of marriage, dissatisfaction, and desire.
The series resumes after seventeen years: the war decade uncut, from the flight out of Paris to the night the mirages ended.
A music-hall performer and a young officer conduct a wartime romance by letter, and the wit the title promises turns out to be hard-won.
Miller's first surviving novel — Western Union, a failing first marriage, and New York as a machine for grinding men down, written in 1927 and unpublished for sixty-five years.
A French curiosity of the shelf: Marcel Moreau's book, published with a group of Nin's letters to him — her contribution, not her volume.
A young psychiatrist frees the world's most dangerous patient and follows him into the abyss — the monster-novel Henry Miller pressed on everyone.
The music hall seen from behind — the tired, precarious, intimate world of performers, by a writer who had lived it.
Beauvoir's long 1951–52 essay on the Marquis de Sade for Les Temps modernes — the philosophical argument that turned Sade from a scandal into a serious moral problem for postwar existentialism.
Colette's cold, exact memoir of her first marriage — the writing factory in which the Claudine novels were made and signed by another man.
Volume two of the friendships — opened, without apology, by the truest friend of all: the bicycle.
The life, told aloud at eighty: taped talk, photographs, watercolors — the scandalous century recollected from a sunny room.
Short, luminous memories of a Burgundy childhood, gathered around the mother who presides over them.
A chance encounter becomes a map of 1920s Paris, Surrealist wonder and the danger of turning another person into a symbol.
James Baldwin and Sol Stein were classmates at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. Fifty years later Stein opened the file drawer that held their letters.
The last prewar volume: the houseboat, Moré at the center, and the Paris world running out while the diary refuses to look away.
The trilogy's last act: a third party in the marriage, the darkest New York winter — and at the end of it, a boat to Paris.
A 1955 mass-market paperback of Henry Miller's legal writing, sold for twenty-five cents while his major books were still banned in America.
The 1936 novel about a woman named Robin Vote and the four people who cannot stop following her — edited for Faber by T. S. Eliot, who cut about thirteen pages and then wrote the introduction.
Orwell's last novel: a clerk in a London ministry falsifies the past for a living, then starts a diary of his own.
Poems that stretch to fit the century — nineteen dispatches from the studios of Chagall, Léger, and Delaunay, and the last verse before the novels.
The book Baldwin wrote after the funerals: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and a friend he could not get out of jail.
Thirteen essays from the years Baldwin came home: Harlem, the segregated South, a writers' congress at the Sorbonne, and the end of his friendship with Richard Wright.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1954 novel — the second volume of the Féerie sequence, a single night of Allied bombing over Montmartre.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1960 novel — the second of the German trilogy — about his 1944 flight into a collapsing Germany.
Ten essays, a stepfather's funeral on the day Harlem burned, and eight days in a Paris jail.
James Baldwin and the photographer Richard Avedon had been at the same Bronx high school. Thirty years later they made a book about what America looked like in 1964.
Four Mediterranean essays about bodily happiness, ruins, summer and the refusal to postpone life.
The 1924 philosophical opening Louis Destouches wrote for La Vie, Pasteur, Semmelweis et la Mort — cut by La Presse médicale, lost to the League of Nations archive in Geneva, and rediscovered in 2014.
The Paris dispatches alone, in a pocket volume — the city these pages map, reported by its most famous arrival at twenty-two.
The 1947 credo: writing from the unconscious outward — Nin's working method, stated in a pamphlet's span.
The Malcolm X film Columbia Pictures hired James Baldwin to write and never made. He published the screenplay as a book instead.
Seven uncles scattered to the world's ends, one boy reading their letters — the wander-poem John Dos Passos loved enough to translate.
Colette's prose set against fifty photographs by Izis — a late book-club photobook, and not the 1932 art book of nearly the same name.
Colette's animal pieces printed as a rare Swiss art book, with wood-engraved beasts by Paul Jouve — not to be confused with the 1953 photobook of almost the same name.
A Times correspondent's eyewitness tour of the salons and café tables of 1920s Paris — Joyce, Pound, Sylvia Beach, and the young Hemingway, sketched from the next chair.
A wartime book of animals — an imagined refuge 'where there is no war,' and one of Colette's decisive works about the otherness of beasts.
The Rosy Crucifixion, book two: married to Mona, done with jobs forever, and learning — expensively — how to become a writer.
Six very short parables that use biblical language to unsettle simple lessons about miracles, suffering, knowledge, and desire.
Oscar Wilde's first commercial book, a decorated collection shaped by classical myth, Catholic imagery, travel, love, and the Aesthetic movement.
A farm town in Ohio turns into a factory town inside twenty years, and the man whose machines did it cannot manage a conversation. Sherwood Anderson's novel of 1920.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's preface to Albert Serouille's 1944 history of Bezons — the neglected Paris suburb where Dr. Louis Destouches spent the war working the municipal dispensary.
Three long stories about clever people who cannot see the thing standing in front of them. The title is a joke, and this was her last collection.
A wide gathering of Colette's prose on animals, the Midi, appetite, and secrecy — where confinement and ecstasy turn out to be kin.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's early play — a bourgeois drawing-room comedy that slides through infidelity, a Paris house of assignation and Heaven, where God turns a telescope on the earthly spectacle.
A rare 1913 animal book — printed in just 300 copies, never reissued, and soon absorbed whole into Peace Among the Beasts.
Beauvoir's first philosophical essay, written under the Occupation and published a few months after the Liberation — the shorter, earlier statement of the argument The Ethics of Ambiguity would work out at book length three years later.
The happiest of the Paris books: two broke friends in a Clichy flat, and the era remembered as pure appetite.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1933 article in Candide — his first concentrated public explanation of what his writing is trying to do, six months after Journey to the End of the Night.
A 1946 pamphlet manifesto: why the psychological novel needs the logic of dreams, not the inventory of rooms.
Volume two of the Nightmare: America surveyed again — but the heart of the book is the long, aching essay remembering France.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's ten-page defence memorandum, written from the Copenhagen prison on 6 November 1946 — the primary source for how he answered the treason charges the French judiciary was building against him.
The letters behind the diary's hardest chapter: father and daughter writing to each other after the 1933 reunion.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's posthumous 1969 novel — the final volume of the German trilogy, and the escape at last completed.
The true case of Jean Galmot — rum fortunes, a Guiana seat in parliament, a prison cell, and a death in Cayenne that started a riot.
Djuna Barnes's first novel, published in New York in 1928 with twelve passages cut by her own publisher and replaced by rows of asterisks — a bawdy chronicle of a farm household run by one man, his mother, his wife and his mistress.
Oscar Wilde's one-act tragedy, written in French, in which Salome demands the head of the prophet Jokanaan after he rejects her.
Miller's surrealist film-on-paper, written after Anaïs Nin's House of Incest — 200 copies from Obelisk in 1937, with a drawing by Abraham Rattner.
The continuous novel's finale: Lillian in the Mexican sun, the labyrinth turned inward, and the journey home as the real voyage.
Sixty years of letters, edited by her biographer Caroline Moorehead. Faster, funnier and ruder than the prose Gellhorn published.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1924 medical thesis — a literary account of the Hungarian physician who discovered that doctors were killing their own patients.
Six late chamber pieces in one volume — the old man's small forms, from a dream of his mother to the view from eighty.
The Rosy Crucifixion begins: New York in the twenties, the marriage that must end, the woman who must be Mona — his most banned book.
The bookseller's own story — twenty-two years at 12 rue de l'Odéon, told by the woman who lent the Lost Generation its library and published Ulysses.
Beauvoir's first novel: an established Parisian couple's promise of freedom is tested — and shattered — by the younger woman they invite into their lives.
Colette's portrait of her mother — and, around her, her father and wild siblings — often called the finest thing she wrote.
The tetralogy ascends: a levitating saint, the Brazilian outback — and, unspoken at the center, a son who fell from the sky.
The slim self-published book of 1958 that carried Lillian to Mexico — and later grew into Seduction of the Minotaur.
The first of the four Parade's End novels — an English government statistician, the wife he refuses to divorce, and the war that arrives between the two halves of the book.
Late essays from the sage of Big Sur: Thoreau, the young Beats, the art of staying still while beating your wings.
The twenty-one years the memoir refused to write — the widowhood, in her own mail.
The film actress whose screen self outgrew her: Nin's most portable novella, and the character who wandered her books looking for a home.
A late book of portraits — the writers, performers, and painters Colette had known, drawn from memory in a few exact strokes.
A wartime miscellany with one masterpiece inside: 'Reunion in Brooklyn,' the exile's homecoming to the parents he fled.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's second story collection, published in 1922 — eleven very uneven pieces, two of them among the best things he ever wrote, and a table of contents in which he grades them himself.
A famous Black actor collapses on stage and spends the novel working out how he got there.
Still lifes in words from the studio hung with Picassos — objects, food, and rooms painted in sentences. Modernism at its most playful.
The Riviera at its most enchanted, and the marriage underneath it — nine years after Gatsby, the deeper, sadder masterpiece.
The compilation that put African storytelling on Paris shelves in 1921 — creation myths, trickster tales, and the source of a Ballets Suédois landmark.
Henry Miller's 1945 account of driving across the United States for a year and disliking most of what he found.
Alice B. Toklas's 1954 cookbook, which is also her memoir of fifty years with Gertrude Stein, told through the meals she cooked.
James Baldwin's first play: a woman pastors a Harlem storefront church, and then the husband she has told the congregation nothing about walks in.
The first one-volume Nin: fiction, diary, and criticism selected in 1973, at the height of the fame, as the front door to the shelf.
The memoir tetralogy opens like a lightning strike: war, gypsies, and the art of being astonished — written after a decade of silence.
Malcolm X told his life to Alex Haley across two years of interviews and was murdered before the book appeared. It is the source James Baldwin was hired to turn into a film.
A long poem about a prisoner's execution and the institution that makes every person inside share the waiting, fear, shame, and isolation.
The marriage written in advance — Anthony and Gloria waiting for a fortune while the waiting eats them alive.
Hughes's autobiography to age twenty-nine: Africa by tramp steamer, Paris by dishwater, and the Harlem Renaissance from inside.
Beauvoir's Resistance novel, written in secret in Occupied Paris and published at the Liberation — an ethical thriller about a man who cannot forgive his own privilege and the woman he sends into a mission she may not survive.
Blaise Cendrars's memoir of the Foreign Legion squad he led in the First World War, written thirty years after he lost his right arm in it.
One of Colette's last books — written from her chair as her body failed, and set against decline rather than defeated by it.
The scandalous autobiographer turns to the shelf: a reading life told like an adventure, from boyhood pulp to Cendrars.
A new marriage and a beloved cat, and a jealousy that turns out to run the wrong way — Colette's coldest short novel.
Greece, 1939: the light, the ruins, and a monologuist named Katsimbalis — the book Miller himself called his best.
Beauvoir's six-hundred-page 1970 study of old age — the companion volume to The Second Sex, arguing that Western societies treat their elderly as a scandal to be hidden and that this is a decision, not a fact.
Everything after the forty-nine: the 1987 omnibus adds the later stories and the vault's fiction — the whole short-form career, one spine.
The first Miller book America was allowed to read: stories and essays smuggled home from the Paris years, Tropics not included.
Everything James Baldwin published and never put in a book, gathered twenty-three years after he died: reviews from his early twenties, speeches, open letters, and one short story.
The last book he worked on: Spain, 1959 — two great matadors, one murderous rivalry, and the old aficionado keeping score a final time.
Baldwin on the movies he grew up on, beginning with the film he was taken to at seven and ending with The Exorcist.
The century's most famous journal opens on Louveciennes, 1931 — Miller at the table, June in the doorway, and a woman writing it all down as it happens.
The divided decade: Mexico and California against New York, the fiction out of fashion, and the diary carrying a double life it couldn't print.
After the review: Dutton signs her, the young writers arrive, and the diarist of Paris becomes a figure in postwar New York.
The famous years: lecture halls, honors, a new generation of readers — and the diarist watching her own arrival with a lifetime's practiced eye.
The long approach: Alan Swallow rescues the novels, the diary is readied at last for print, and the volume ends on the edge of fame.
The war years in America: Greenwich Village, the hand press on Macdougal Street, erotica for a dollar a page, and the review that changed everything.
The second volume: New York with Otto Rank, the return to Paris, the houseboat on the Seine, and Europe arming behind every entry.
The seventh unexpurgated volume: two households in balance, the fiction winding down, and the decade-long campaign to publish the diary itself.
An early five-act blank-verse tragedy in which a young man seeking revenge in Renaissance Italy falls in love with the wife of the ruler he plans to kill.
The last early volume: dance, the D. H. Lawrence book, and the approach to the exact doorstep where the famous Diary begins.
The diary switches to English: work, modeling, a long courtship, and a young woman writing her way toward a marriage and a self.
Beauvoir's 1947 essay giving existentialism the ethics Sartre never got around to writing — the philosophical statement of the argument She Came to Stay had put in a novel and The Second Sex would put in a thousand pages two years later.
Late reflections written from an immobile chair — memory, the war years, and lost friends, gathered under the evening star.
Baldwin goes to Atlanta to report on the murders of twenty-eight Black people, most of them children, and comes back unconvinced by the conviction.
Sixty years of war reporting in one book, written by someone who kept going back long after the story stopped being hers.
In an Amsterdam bar, a former Paris lawyer confesses until confession becomes another form of control.
One volume, whole arsenal: every story through 1938 — 'Snows,' 'Macomber' — plus the Madrid play written under actual shellfire.
Two letters written for the centenary of emancipation: one to a fifteen-year-old nephew, one about the night Baldwin had dinner with Elijah Muhammad.
The unfinished novel recovered after Camus’s death returns to his father, his mother and a poor childhood in Algiers.
A late, deliberately mixed gathering — chronicles, tales, and prefaces bound together as one of Colette's collectible last volumes.
Djuna, a guitarist named Rango, and a houseboat on the Seine: the continuous novel's most concentrated love story.
A young writer, two women, and the summer that unmade a marriage — Hemingway's strangest and most vulnerable novel.
'This is the saddest story I have ever heard' — told, perfectly, by the one man in it who understands it least.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel of love, money, and the Jazz Age — written mostly in France, and often called the great American novel.
Five literary fairy tales about generosity, vanity, friendship, poverty, and the cost of seeing other people's suffering.
Her first collection: nine stories written months after Spain and the Winter War, published by Scribner's in 1941 and never reprinted.
Henry Miller's best pages from thirty years of writing, selected by his friend Lawrence Durrell.
Twenty-two short, dark tales of love's hidden side — betrayal, solitude, and illusion, told in the manner of a modern Maupassant.
Stories from the peace that followed the war, written by someone unconvinced by it.
Oscar Wilde's best-known comedy: two men invent useful false identities, two women insist on marrying someone named Ernest, and a handbag resolves the plot.
Colette rebuilds the two Minne novels into one — a young woman whose apparent innocence coexists with the beginnings of her own liberty.
The third early volume: a very young marriage, the move to Paris, and a would-be writer deciding what a wife is allowed to become.
Revolutionaries planning an assassination discover that a just cause does not settle what they may do.
Four wartime stories of frustrated love, shadowed by backward glances at the Paris circles of Colette's youth.
Chéri comes home from the war to a changed Paris and an aged Léa, and cannot live in either — the harsh sequel to Chéri.
Every letter he ever wrote, eventually: the Cambridge edition's decades-long project to publish the complete correspondence — volume by volume.
Chronicles across a single year — wartime hardship and the urge to reclaim ordinary life, with the child Bel-Gazou at the edges.
Written under the Blitz: George Orwell's argument that England could not win the war without becoming a socialist country.
Colette's war album — the First World War seen from hospitals, the rear, and ruined ground, without a word of bombast.
Beauvoir's 1957 book on her two-month trip to Mao's China — the most politically contested of her nonfiction, a document of what a serious European left intellectual could and could not see in the People's Republic in the mid-1950s.
Hollywood's philosopher-king, half-finished — the novel Fitzgerald was writing the day he died, and proof the powers had come all the way back.
A foreign colony in a Mexican village in 1953, half of it driven out by the Red Scare. Gellhorn lived four years among people like them.
Beauvoir's Prix Goncourt novel: a six-hundred-page roman à clef of the Parisian intellectual left in the four years after Liberation — Sartre, Camus, Koestler and Nelson Algren all present under lightly changed names.
The stray pieces, gathered: four decades of essays and reviews, led by the 1930 Lawrence piece that started her public writing.
Camus asks whether life is worth living when the universe supplies no final meaning.
The shadow autobiography assembled: every Nick Adams story in the order of Nick's life, with eight unpublished pieces joining the canon.
The raw feed of the Nightmare: the actual notebook from the 1940–41 American tour, published in facsimile — blots, sketches, and all.
Her criticism at full length: the case for the poetic, psychological novel, written at the height of the Diary's fame.
Author and editor, complete: twenty-two years of letters between Hemingway and Maxwell Perkins — the working marriage behind the shelf.
A wife and her husband's mistress discover that their bond with each other matters more than the man they share.
Oscar Wilde's only novel: a beautiful young man stays unchanged while his hidden portrait records age, cruelty, and guilt.
When Oran closes against an epidemic, ordinary people decide whether decency is enough.
The modern one-volume Nin: thirty-eight selections in chronological order, with the whole posthumous shelf finally in the pool.
Thirty-seven years of essays in one volume, assembled by Baldwin two years before he died — the single book to own if you are only owning one.
The second memoir volume, covering Beauvoir from her 1929 meeting with Sartre through the Occupation and the Liberation of Paris — the years the intellectual partnership at the centre of her life was built and tested.
The two-meter poem: a train across Siberia, a girl asking if they're far from Montmartre, and Sonia Delaunay's colors running the whole way down.
Colette's most personal book — a meditation on desire, pleasure, and the varieties of love, built from portraits rather than plot.
A quotations collection with receipts: 365 verified Nin lines, each with its citation — the antidote to the internet's fake Nin.
The second year of verified Nin: 365 more sourced quotations, arranged across life, love, consciousness, women and men, and art.
A history and critique of rebellion that asks when resistance turns into justified murder.
Two childhood companions on a Breton shore cross into adulthood the summer an older woman intervenes.
Two months in the coal towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, then a long argument with the people Orwell agreed with.
Beauvoir's thousand-page 1949 argument that femininity is made and not born — the founding book of second-wave feminism and the century's most influential work of feminist philosophy.
The fifth and final Claudine book: Claudine spends a winter in her friend Annie's country house while her husband is away being treated, and the cycle closes in a minor key.
The sequel to The Vagabond reverses its ending: the woman who chose freedom gives herself to a dependent, possessive love.
Fourteen novellas written between 1936 and 1978, gathered in one volume. For most of Gellhorn's fiction it is the only edition still in circulation.
A clown, a ladder, a moon: the fable Miller called the strangest story he ever wrote — begun as a favor to Fernand Léger.
An essay arguing that poverty should be ended by changing property relations, not managed through charity, so each person can develop freely.
The words he spoke over the war: the narration of Joris Ivens's 1937 documentary, printed as a small, strange book the next year.
A long, highly decorated poem in which a speaker questions a sphinx about imagined lovers, gods, monsters, and ancient history.
A clerk in Algiers kills a man, then faces a court more interested in his behavior at his mother’s funeral.
The prophet of the exodus tells his own story — the manifesto, the Select's saucers, the blindness, and the trip home.
The early collection in which Colette's short prose became unmistakably her own — lyric reveries, animal pieces, and music-hall sketches side by side.
Miller on Rimbaud — the boy who invented modern poetry and walked away — in the least objective, most alive study ever written of him.
The parody that burned a bridge on purpose: Hemingway lampoons his mentor Sherwood Anderson — and breaks a contract doing it.
Four novellas about Americans out of work, written by a twenty-seven-year-old who had spent a year being paid to go and look.
A divorced music-hall performer is offered love and security, and has to decide what her independence is worth.
The other half of the career: fifty years of reporting on everything that was not a war.
Langston Hughes's first book: the poems of Lenox Avenue, the sea, and the Paris nightclub kitchen, published when he was twenty-four.
Three novellas about Europeans who stayed in East Africa: two sisters at a hotel on Kilimanjaro, a man building a farm in Kenya, a woman out of options.
The 1928 novel about an Englishwoman who loves women and says so, which a London magistrate ordered destroyed four months after it was published and a New York court cleared five months after that.
The novel she made out of the winter fighting and what she found at Dachau — reissued forty years later under a colder title.
Essays from the turn of the decade — writing, Balzac, healers, and bums — where the Paris provocateur starts sounding like a sage.
Three long stories of middle-aged women whose lives are coming apart — Beauvoir at her most Chekhovian, in the fiction that best carries the analysis of women's mid-life she had made in The Second Sex twenty years before.
The white whale of the Villa Seurat: the D. H. Lawrence book that nearly swallowed Miller in 1933, published at last in 1980.
Miller's own explanation of the banned books — the essay where he tells censors, critics, and readers what he thought the sex was for.
Five early essays in which poverty, silence, sunlight and death already form the vocabulary of the later books.
Hand-set on Nin's own Gemor Press in 1945: the portraits of women that grew into the continuous novel.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, published in March 1920 and sold out in three days: a Princeton student's education in love, money, and disappointment.
Gertrude Stein's first book — three long stories about three working women, written in the flat repeating sentences that Ernest Hemingway and a generation of American writers learned from.
Colette tells her life through the rooms she lived in — an autobiography written as a sequence of Paris addresses.
The first book: three hundred copies from a little Paris press, 1923 — everything Hemingway had that the stolen suitcase spared.
Key West fishing captain, rum-runner, revolutionary — Hemingway's darkest argument about how poor men survive in the Depression.
The double life, documented: eight years swinging between a husband in New York and a lover in California, from the journal that kept both books.
A travel book organised entirely around the trips that went wrong, and the funniest thing she ever wrote.
Kenya, 1953 — the safari that became a marriage story, a meditation on belonging, and Hemingway's most contentious posthumous publication.
Four long stories about marriage, each one titled from a promise made at the altar.
One Dublin day, June 16th, 1904 — the novel that remade the form, published by a Paris bookshop when no one else would touch it.
The stories that broke the silence — hand-set on her own press in 1944, and reviewed into legitimacy by Edmund Wilson.
Oscar Wilde's first play, a Russian political melodrama about a revolutionary torn between a planned assassination and love for the future ruler.
Six dispatches on what the war was doing to civilians, and the reporting that got her barred.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1957 argument for a broad postwar amnesty — nineteen handwritten pages that widen his own case into a general demand for reconciliation.
The apprentice Nin, published at last: stories written around 1930, before the diary's fame, before even House of Incest.
Her actual autobiography — brisk, dry, and stopped dead at 1946: the title says exactly what the book is, and what it declines to be.
Her first novel, at twenty-five, and the one she spent the rest of her life leaving out.
Beauvoir's earliest book — five linked stories about young Catholic bourgeois Paris women written in 1935–37, rejected by Gallimard and Grasset, and published only forty-two years later as a document of the author before she had learned to write.
Beauvoir's only completed play, written under the Occupation and staged in Paris in October 1945 — a besieged fourteenth-century Flanders town choosing which of its own people it will not feed.
Three friends argue about abstract painting in one slim volume — the painter from the Jockey bar, Miller, and Saroyan.
Small-town Ohio after dark — the linked stories that taught American fiction to speak plainly, from the writer who sent Hemingway to Paris.
The darkest of the story collections: insomnia, nada, and 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place' — the code with the lights going out.
Three novellas from the Villa Seurat's last season — including the father story the diary had been rehearsing for twenty-five years.
Gellhorn's letters from 1930 to 1949: the Depression, Spain, Normandy, Dachau and the Hemingway marriage, printed with the replies included.
Gallimard's Cahiers Céline 3 — the collected medical corpus of Dr. Louis Destouches, before he became Céline: the 1924 Semmelweis thesis and the public-health and factory-medicine writings that surrounded it.
Cahiers Céline 6 and 10 — Céline's ten-year correspondence with the writer Albert Paraz, from the Danish exile years through the return to France, and the surviving public campaign to have Céline read again after the war.
Cahiers Céline 5 — Céline's correspondence with the women in his life beyond Lucette: the American dancer Elizabeth Craig, Karen Marie Jensen, Cillie Pam and others, from the pre-Journey years through exile.
Cahiers Céline 9 — the 758-page scholarly edition of Céline's letters to his literary secretary Marie Canavaggia, twenty-four years of the working relationship that saw the novels into print.
Cahiers Céline 11 — 302 pages of the intense, then broken correspondence between Céline in Danish exile and the American Jewish literary scholar Milton Hindus, culminating in Hindus's 1948 visit to Denmark and his 1950 portrait of Céline as a crippled giant.
Cahiers Céline 4 — the young Louis Destouches's surviving letters and earliest known writing from the Sangha-Oubangui trading post in French Equatorial Africa, 1916–1917, the year Journey to the End of the Night's Bikomimbo chapters were quarried from.
The central single-volume selection of Céline's correspondence — 2,080 pages, five decades, and a private voice that changes with every recipient.
A Long Way from Home
Claude McKay
Claude McKay's account of two decades of travel — Harlem, London, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Marseille, Morocco — by a writer who refused to settle anywhere or belong to anyone's programme.
Banana Bottom
Claude McKay
A Jamaican woman educated in England comes home and declines to be improved — the novel Claude McKay wrote furthest from Harlem and rated highest himself.
Banjo
Claude McKay
Black seamen, drifters and musicians on the Marseille waterfront — the novel that gave Négritude its vocabulary, written by a Jamaican who preferred the docks to literary Paris.
Harlem Shadows
Claude McKay
The collection that opened the Harlem Renaissance, written in strict sonnets by a Jamaican who refused to soften either the form or the anger.
Home to Harlem
Claude McKay
The first bestseller by a Black American novelist — written in France, set in Harlem, and denounced by the movement it belonged to.
Romance in Marseille
Claude McKay
Written around 1930, unpublished for ninety years: a novel of the Marseille docks with a disabled Black protagonist and openly queer characters, decades ahead of anything that could be printed.
Amanda Vaill’s biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy opens the Lost Generation story beyond Hemingway and follows the couple at the center of its friendships.
John Glassco’s lively memoir of arriving in Paris at nineteen and spending the end of the 1920s among Montparnasse writers, artists, rented rooms, and late nights.
Gertrude Stein tells the story of her Paris life and artistic circle in the voice of her partner, Alice B. Toklas.
Paula McLain’s historical novel retells Ernest and Hadley Hemingway’s Paris marriage from Hadley’s imagined perspective.