Melville House: 350 books

I, Mary MacLane—the follow-up to I Await the Devil’s Coming—available now from Melville House, with a foreword by Emily Gould Fifteen years separate I Await the Devil’s Coming and Mary MacLane’s follow-up memoir, I, Mary MacLane (1917). They were years filled with men and affairs,...

...perhaps I was not living as I ought. Renowned as the greatest short story writer ever, Anton Chekhov was also a master of the novella, and perhaps his most overlooked is this gem, My Life—the tale of a rebellious young man so disgusted with bourgeois society that he drops out to live amongst...

"You know as well as you sit there that you'd put a pistol-ball into your brain if you had written my books!" Exemplifying Henry James's famous belief that "Art makes life," The Lesson of the Master is a piercing study of the life that art makes. When the tale's protagonist—a...

"How dared you, in disregard of all decency, call me a goose?" This lesser-known work is perhaps the perfect distillation of Nikolai Gogol’s genius: a tale simultaneously animated by a joyful, nearly slapstick sense of humor alongside a resigned cynicism about the human condition. In...

"Why, you simple creatures, the weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire." Written on hotel stationary while in Europe on the run from American creditors, soon after the death of a daughter, The Man That Corrupted Handleyburg is often cited as a...

The greater the windbag the greater the calamity. Henry James examines one of his favorite topics—the artist’s place in society—by profiling a “genius” who just can’t seem to support himself. A dazzling intellectual and brilliant speaker, Mr. Saltram has become the most sought-after...

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...

There is a degree of bliss too intense for elation. This little-known novella from one of the masters of the form is so unusual for Joseph Conrad's work in several respects, although not in its exotic maritime setting or its even more exotic prose—it is unusual in that it is one of his very...

From the award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Ecstasy of Influence comes a new collection of essays that celebrates a life spent in books More Alive and Less Lonely collects over a decade of Jonathan Lethem’s finest writing on writing, with new and previously unpublished material,...

“Schiffrin evokes the bittersweet tang of émigré life in New York.” —The New York Times Book Review André Schiffrin was born the son of one of France’s most esteemed publishers, in a world peopled by some of the day’s leading writers and intellectuals, such as André Gide, Jean-Paul...

**"Hettena is a first-rate reporter and wonderful story-teller, and the tale he tells here is mind-boggling."—Jane Mayer, author of New York Times bestseller Dark Money "Hettena skillfully weaves many threads—most fresh or previously hidden—into a rich tapestry tying together...

A hilarious debut  novel about the tricky period between graduating from college and moving out of your parents’ house What to do when you’ve just graduated from college and your plans conflict with those of your parents? That is, when your plans to hang out on the couch, re-read your...

A hilarious spoof on the classic country-house murder mystery, from the Russian masters of sci-fi—never before translated   When Inspector Peter Glebsky arrives at the remote ski chalet on vacation, the last thing he intends to do is get involved in any police work. He’s there to ski, drink brandy,...

A WRY AND HILARIOUS ACCOUNT OF LIFE AT A BOOKSHOP IN A REMOTE SCOTTISH VILLAGE "Among the most irascible and amusing bookseller memoirs I've read." --Dwight Garner, New York Times "Warm, witty and laugh-out-loud funny..."—Daily Mail The Diary of a Bookseller...