As a professional hunter passes through a Central European country, he decides to sneak into the dictator's private compound and finds himself thrown in prison, enduring a harrowing escape, and fleeing through enemy territory to find safety in his native England.

"An Ordinary Youth is a novel drawn directly from the author's boyhood in Nazi Germany. Nine-year-old Walter's family is moving house when the novel opens, but Walter's main concerns are his tin soldiers and his older brother's jazz records, his father's fluctuating moods, and his mother's ministrations and anxieties. While Walter is absorbed by his private life, the extraordinary accumulation of contemporary idioms that accompany his point of view--dialogue,...

"To the suburban mansion of a prosperous Milanese businessman comes a mysterious and beautiful young man who invites himself to stay. From the beginning he exercises a strange fascination on the inhabitants of the house, and soon everyone, from the busy father to the frustrated mother, from the yearning daughter to the weak-willed son to the housemaid from the country, has fallen in love with him. Then, as mysteriously as he appeared, the infatuating...

"Each chapter in this remarkable consideration of American culture evokes an actual meeting between two historical figures. In 1854, as a boy, Henry James has his daguerreotype made by Mathew Brady. We encounter Brady again as he photographs Walt Whitman and then Ulysses Grant. Meanwhile, Henry James begins a lasting friendship with William Dean Howells, and also meets Sarah Orne Jewett, who in turn is a mentor to Willa Cather... Cohen brilliantly...

"In the biographical note accompanying one of her books, Cristina Campo said of herself: "She has written little and would like to have written less". That little is almost all collected in this book and will impose an observation on every perceptive reader: these pages belong to the most beautiful Italian prose has been shown in the last fifty years. Cristina Campo was unforgivable, in the sense that the word has in the essay that gives the title...