Richard Howard

Written in just fifty-two days in the year 1839, "The Charterhouse of Parma" has since become known as Stendhal's finest work. Evidence of haste is infrequently apparent in this remarkable story, which follows the eventful life of the young Italian nobleman Fabrizio del Dongo. From his childhood in the family castle by Lake Como to the battlefields of Waterloo, Fabrizio proves himself charmingly headstrong and painfully naïve. Upon returning injured...

"On the 200th anniversary of Baudelaire's birth comes this stunning, landmark translation of the book that launched modern poetry. A shocking, controversial work in its own time and the most influential book of poetry of the nineteenth century-"the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language" (T.S. Eliot)-Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil is a gritty, often perverse, exploration of the underbelly of urban modernity. Acclaimed translator...

First published nearly one hundred years ago, André Gide's masterpiece, translated from the original French by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Howard, draws from the disciplines of biology, philosophy, and history to support the author's assertion that homosexuality is a natural human trait At the time of his death in 1951, having won the Nobel Prize in Literature only four years prior, André Gide was considered one of the most important literary...

"Olivier Bertin is at the height of his career as a painter. After making his name with his Cleopatra, he went on to establish himself as "the chosen painter of the Parisiennes, the most adroit and ingenious artist to reveal their grace, their figures, and their souls." And though his hair may be white, he remains a handsome, vigorous, and engaging bachelor, a prized guest at every table and salon. Anne, the comtesse de Guilleroy, is a youthful forty,...

Alien Hearts "was the last novel that Guy de Maupassant completed before succumbing to the effects of tertiary syphilis of which he was to die at forty-three. It is the most original and surprising of his novels and the one in which he attains a truly tragic perception of the wounded human heart. "Alien Hearts "is the story of lovers bound by bitterness as much as by passion. Maupassant's hero falls for a woman of the world, a glacially dazzling beauty...

"Sex, and death. All of Marguerite Duras's writings are suffused with the certitude that absolute love is both necessary (sex) and impossible to achieve (death). But no book of hers embodies this idea so powerfully, so excessively, as No More (C'est Tout), the book she composed during the last year of her life until just days before her death. No More (C'est Tout) is literature shorn of all its niceties, a shout from the depths of Duras's being, celebrating...

A New York Review Books Original One of Honore de Balzac's most celebrated tales, "The Unknown Masterpiece" is the story of a painter who, depending on one's perspective, is either an abject failure or a transcendental genius--or both. The story, which has served as an inspiration to artists as various as Cezanne, Henry James, Picasso, and New Wave director Jacques Rivette, is, in critic Dore Ashton's words, a "fable of modern art." Published here...