Eridanos Library

"Hans Erich Nossack's work is a link between the titans of early 20th-century German fiction - Mann, Musil and Broch - and the later generation of Boll and Grass. An Offering for the Dead is a small, hard gem set in the crown of that tradition."--BOOK JACKET. ""It was raining again," the narrator of this haunting novel begins. He has survived some unmentionable, perhaps worldwide cataclysm - a biblical flood? nuclear war? - that has stripped him of his memory and most everything else. A woman's room, a notebook, a mirror, her comb - these artifacts in a void are all that remain: his first clues to the past, his own and the world's. His errant musings, reminiscent of the guilt-driven wanderings of Orestes, gradually piece together a history he must both remember and create in order to regain his identity, and, like Noah, repopulate a world in which he may be the only survivor."--BOOK JACKET. "In a delicately allusive prose that resonates with overtones of man's ancient past and darkly apocalyptic warnings, Nossack, like Joyce and Proust before him, exposes the mythical undercurrents of contemporary life. Past, present and future blend into an eternal return of archetypal figures whose stories transform human history into a timeless parable of creative memory and immemorial destruction."--BOOK JACKET.

This powerful novel by Italy's renowned Decadent writer depicts the passionate struggle of two gifted artists for supremacy in love and art. A talented young writer, Stelio Effrena is infatuated with Foscarina, an actress at the peak of her fame. Together they dream of creating an ideal, popular theater. But Stelio's obsession with his own ideas and jealousy of her following steer him away from Foscarina, to ward the attractions of a younger woman. Tormented by this knowledge, Foscarina's love becomes desperate and she is overcome by a sense of foreboding at her own loss of youth. One of the great works of fin-de siecle European literature, The Flame was drawn from D'Annunzio's stormy relationship with Eleonora Duse. Such an exposure of the private lives of two of Italy's most public figures caused a scandal when the book first appeared in 1900.