Alvina Houghton is the daughter of a widowed Midlands textile merchant James Houghton. Despite her father's best efforts the business is failing. In a desperate attempt to regain his fortune and secure his daughter's proper upbringing, James buys a theatre.There, Alvina meets the sensual Italian performer Ciccio. Together they flee to Naples, Italy. Their relationship leads to Alvina's sexual awakening. She embraces a world of desire with Ciccio while...

I imagined him in his beloved Brooklyn, strolling in Prospect Park and preaching to chance comers about his gospel of good books.
"When you sell a man a book," says Roger Mifflin, the sprite-like book peddler at the center of this classic novella, "you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life." In this beguiling but little-known prequel to Christopher Morley's belovedHaunted Bookshop,...

A Manhattan lawyer turns to master detective Fleming Stone to prove his beautiful neighbor innocent of murder in this classic locked-room mystery
A respectable young attorney in New York City, Otis Landon has barely settled into his new living quarters when an incident occurs in a neighboring apartment that he cannot, in good conscience, ignore. Robert Pembroke, a vicious, miserly man, has been murdered behind locked doors. The only people...

An NYRB Classics Original
 The first of the great Russian novels and one of the indisputable masterpieces of world literature, Dead Souls is the tale of Chichikov, an affably cunning con man who causes consternation in a small Russian town when he shows up out of nowhere proposing to buy title to serfs who, though dead as doornails, are still property on paper. What can he have up his sleeve, the local landowners wonder, even as some...

A collection of 25 short stories: The Last of the Troubadours, The Sleuths, Witches' Loaves, The Pride of the Cities, Holding up a Train, Ulysses and the Dogman, The Champion of the Weather, Makes the Whole World Kin, At Arms with Morpheus, The Ghost of a Chance, Jimmie Payes and Muriel, The Door of Unrest, The Duplicity of Hargraves, Let Me Feel Your Pulse, October and June, The Church with an Overshoot Wheel, New York by Campfire Light, The Adventures

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A detective investigating the murder of a millionaire teams up with master sleuth Fleming Stone in this clever mystery from a pioneer of American crime fiction
Eager to prove himself as talented a crime-solver as his hero, the famous investigator Fleming Stone, young detective Herbert Burroughs takes on a puzzling case: the murder of wealthy businessman Joseph Crawford, who was killed in the study of his New Jersey home. With no shortage...

A classic of detective fiction’s golden age, featuring a mysterious murder, a wrongful accusation, and an intrepid man determined to find the truth
Young Viner is a gentleman through and through. Born into means that blessed him with a life of leisure, one night his tranquil evening walk is nevertheless upset when he stumbles upon a corpse in Markendale Square. The police believe the murderer is an old friend of Viner’s, a...

Horror was my familiar.
Published the same year as her first novel, Adam Bede, this overlooked work displays the gifts for which George Eliot would become famous—gritty realism, psychological insight, and idealistic moralizing. It is unique from all her other writing, however, in that it represents the only time she ever used a first-person narrator, and it is the only time she wrote about the supernatural.

The tale...

The Magician (1909) is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Controversial for its portrayal of infidelity and occult ritual, The Magician was instrumental in establishing Maugham's reputation as a leading author of the late Victorian era. Inspired by stories of Aleister Crowley, an influential occultist and magician, Maugham crafted a masterpiece of fantasy fiction that would inspire Crowley himself to write a hit piece for Vanity Fair erroneously accusing...

The final chapter in the saga of a once-wealthy English family tormented by the sins of their past.
Old loves threaten to jeopardize a family’s future in the final installment of the Forsyte Saga. Part social satire, part melodrama, this captivating novel brings to fascinating life author John Galsworthy’s preoccupations with class, gender, and morality.
 
Soames and Irene Forsyte have finally separated after...