...the sin of an old man is equal to about two sins of a young man. The fable-like story of an old man's sexual obsession with a young woman is a distillation of Italo Svevo's concerns--attraction of an older man to a younger woman, individual conscience versus social convention, and the cost of sexual desire. This novella is a marvel of psychological insight, following the man's vacillations and tortuous self-justifications to their tragic-comic end. It is presented here in a translation first commissioned and published by Virginia Woolf for her Hogarth Press. **The Art of The Novella Series **Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Once with him was never enough. I am the girl you dislike. The girl you snub at parties. I am the one who flirts with men and knows no boundaries. I am the one you whisper about. The one who has no rules. I am the one who takes and uses without any regret or excuses. On the outside I am perfect. I have money, looks, and a personality that makes people stand up and take notice, but on the inside I am broken and hurting. Then I met Cash Marshall. He wasn’t what I needed, but I wanted him anyway. It was Cash’s carved, muscular body I thought about. It was his cool, confident touch I craved. I swore he would only be a one-night stand, another distraction to take away the pain. But then our world changed. Our story is not about love. Love is pretty and sweet and full of niceties. Those no longer exist. Our story is about finding each other again in a world gone crazy. It’s about surviving the impossible when war ravaged our land. It’s about saving each other from the darkness and finding out just how strong we could be. And maybe, just maybe, along the way, we’ll find love… Once and for all.

After more than a decade, Richard Ford revives Frank Bascombe, the beloved protagonist from The Sportswriter and Independence Day. Fans will be scrambling for The Lay of the Land, a novel that finds Bascombe contending with health, marital, and familial issues wake of the 2000 presidential election. We asked Richard Ford to tell us a little more about what it's like to create (and share so much time with) a character like Frank. Read his short essay below. --Daphne Durham Richard Ford on Frank BascombeI never think of the characters I write as exactly people, the way some writers say they do, letting their characters "just take over and write the book;" or for that matter, in the way I want readers to think of them as people, or even as I think of characters in novels I myself read (and didn't write). In my own books I do all the writing--the characters don't. And for me to think of them as people, instead of as figures made of language, would make my characters less subject to the useful and necessary changes that occur as I grow in my own awareness about them as I make them up. Writing a character for twenty-five years and for three novels, as I have written about Frank Bascombe, has meant that Frank has, of course, become a presence in my life (and a welcome one). When I wrote Independence Day I began with the belief that Frank was pretty much the same character and presence he was in The Sportswriter. But when I went back later and read parts of The Sportswriter, I found that the sentences Frank "spoke" and that filled that second book were longer, more complex, and actually contained more nitty experience than the first book. This has also been true of The Lay of the Land: longer sentences, more experience to reconcile and transact, more words required to make lived life seem accessible. You could say that Frank had simply changed as we all do. But practically speaking--as his author--what this makes me think is that I've had to make up Frank up newly each time, and have not exactly "gone back" and "found" him--although Frank's history from the previous books has certainly needed to be kept in sight and made consistent. What is finally consistent to me about Frank is that I "hear" language I associate with him, and it is language that pleases me, with which I and he can (if I'm a good enough writer) represent life in an intelligent and hopeful and buoyant spirit a reader can make use of. --Richard Ford

Happy Ever After doesn’t end at the Epilogue. The Epilogue is really only the beginning. For us, it’s meant sharing every high, every low, and loving each other even more when we come out the other side still standing. He’s everything I’ve always wanted. My best friend. My lover. My husband… My Demon. And I’m his Angel. Our life hasn’t always been perfect, but to me as long as I get to wake up to Angel in my arms every morning and get to tuck our girls into bed at the end of each day I’ll be the happiest man in the world. Nothing can come between us, nothing can tear us apart. Only…I have one regret. One that is still a black void in my head. Every year it’s the same. The regret. The self-loathing for the man I was back then. The anger that I’d taken something from the woman who has given herself to me so freely and being unable to remember a single second of it. This year it’s worse for me. It’s slowly driving me crazy. Maybe it’s time to hit rewind and give us both a do over for that night. Maybe what I really need is a memory to replace that empty blackness that is trying to swallow me whole. PLUSBonus The Rocker…Series companion in the back.**

Once two souls are joined...When Adam's soul mate rejected him, there was more at stake than his heart. After seven hundred years of searching, his true match would have ended the curse that keeps his spirit in chains. But beautiful, stubborn Eliza May fled-and now Adam is doomed to an eternity of anguish, his only hope for salvation gone...Their hearts will beat together forever...No matter how devilishly irresistible Adam was, Eliza couldn't stand the thought of relinquishing her freedom forever. So she escaped. But she soon discovers she is being hunted-by someone far more dangerous. The only man who can help is the one man she vowed never to see again. Now Adam's kindness is an unexpected refuge, and Eliza finds that some vows are made to be broken...

Austin Returns with a Multi-Generational Historical NovelGeesje de Jonge crossed the ocean at age seventeen with her parents and a small group of immigrants from the Netherlands to settle in the Michigan wilderness. Fifty years later, in 1897, she's asked to write a memoir of her early experiences as the town celebrates its anniversary. Reluctant at first, she soon uncovers memories and emotions hidden all these years, including the story of her one true love. At the nearby Hotel Ottawa Resort on the shore of Lake Michigan, twenty-three-year-old Anna Nicholson is trying to ease the pain of a broken engagement to a wealthy Chicago banker. But her time of introspection is disturbed after a violent storm aboard a steamship stirs up memories of a childhood nightmare. As more memories and dreams surface, Anna begins to question who she is and whether she wants to return to her wealthy life in Chicago. When she befriends a young seminary student who is working at the...

A con artist and seductress, Meredith Spooner lived fast—and died young. But her final scam—embezzling more than a million dollars from a college endowment fund—is coming back to haunt Leonora Hutton. The tainted money is stashed away in an offshore account for Leonora. And while she wants nothing to do with the cash, she discovers two other items in the safe-deposit box: a book about Mirror House—the place where Meredith engineered her final deception and a set of newspaper stories about an unsolved murder that occurred there thirty years ago. Now Leonora has an offer for Thomas Walker, another victim of Meredith's scams and seductions. She'll hand over the money—if he helps her figure out what's going on. Meredith had described Thomas as "a man you can trust." But in a funhouse-mirror world of illusion and distortion, Leonora may be out of her league...

NOTHING BURNS HOTTER . . .Sophea Long knows that escorting her octogenarian client to Europe will be an adventure. Mrs. P has a habit of stealing anything shiny, and the former "hoochikoo dancer" is a lot faster than she looks. But Sophea hadn't counted on Mrs. P leading her right into the arms of a smoldering, dark-haired stranger who kisses like a dream. If only he'd give up all this nonsense about Sophea being some kind of dragon...THAN THE FIRE INSIDEThere's a reason Rowan Dakar is known as the Dragon Breaker. The last thing he needs is to fall for a woman who literally sets him aflame every time they kiss. After all, he has a mission-one that will finally free him of dragonkin for good. He can't afford to be distracted by the funniest, most desirable woman he's ever set eyes on. But no prophecy in the world can ever stop true love . . .

In Debbie Macomber's delightful take on Beauty and the Beast, an idealistic teacher and a mysterious mogul prove that opposites do attract . . . all the way to happily ever after. Unspoiled by the trappings of wealth, Judy Lovin shunned the family fortune to take a job teaching preschool. But with her father's empire on the verge of collapse thanks to a hostile corporate takeover, Judy reluctantly rides to the rescue. Her negotiations bring her face to face with the beast himself, a ruthless tycoon who takes what he wants—and what he wants is Judy. Shocked at her attraction to a man she was prepared to loathe, Judy agrees to his terms: alone time with him at his island getaway. Sexy, smart, and ruggedly untamed, John McFarland lives by his own rules. He's never met a woman as pure and kind and lovely as Judy, who seems so fearless in the face of the demons that haunt him. As John's rough edges soften in the magic of the moonlight, and as he learns to...

How could anyone move on from a betrayal so devastating, it cut down to the bone and rooted itself deep within? You could never forgive such heartache… Or could you? From the moment Tyler was six, she fell in love with that cocky eight-year-old boy with the black spiky hair, captivating blues eyes, and scruffy uniform. From the moment he punched a boy for hurting her, Tyler knew there was no going back. They were always meant to be together... Always. Then everything changed. The stage was set like a tragic Shakespearean play, and Tyler’s and Dean’s world—as they knew it—had ended. Or had it? Tyler My name was Jessica now. I faked my own death, changed my identity, and moved thousands of miles across the ocean just to escape the one man I would never get out of my heart. I had a four-year-old son I adored more than anything in the world. On one fateful, horrific night, the life I knew disappeared in the blink of an eye. I left people behind. People I cared about. People I would never forget. People I loved. But had I truly moved on? No one said leaving behind the one man you had loved since you were six would be easy. I lived life day-to-day. I even met a man and tried to settle down. Evan was a man any woman would desire. So why could I not love him the way he obviously loved me? Why couldn’t I move past the dark-haired, blue-eyed boy who consumed my every thought? I may have left him, but he had never truly left me. I could never love another man. Dean made sure of that the day he breezed into my life. I was only half a woman now. I had been broken and bruised by the one man I thought I could always love and trust. How could I let go of something like that? I suppose I just had to. I was just getting by with each day that passed. I was coping. I was managing, and that was keeping me from falling apart. But then disaster struck again. And it was on that day… Everything changed. Dean You can’t hide forever, Tyler. I will always be hunting you, always be searching, and will never give up. If there was ever one certainty in your life, it was that. You slipped through my fingers, not once but twice. You took my heart with you when you left me that day. No amount of alcohol, women, or punching bags would block you from my mind. You couldn’t be dead. I wouldn’t allow you to be dead. You’re out there somewhere. I must congratulate you that you had evaded me for this long. You always were a smart girl. How could I not have fallen in love with you? You did escape me this time, but I will find you, Tyler. I promise you that. And when that day comes… I will finally make you MINE.