Adolphe

(Paperback)

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Description

The classic French novel first published in 1816, which follows Adolphe, a young man with all the privileges of a noble birth, but who is haunted by the meaninglessness of life. He seeks distraction in the pursuit of the beautiful but older Ellenore, a fictionalised version of Madame de Sta"l. Young Adolphe, inexperienced in love, falls for her and falters under the burden of their illicit love, which isolates them from society at large. Constant's prose eschews the conventional descriptions of exteriors for the sake of detailed emotional accounts.

Reviews

"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read."
Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer

"Small wonders."
Time Out London

"[F]irst-rateastutely selected and attractively packagedindisputably great works."
Adam Begley, The New York Observer

"Ive always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But its the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publishers fine 'Art of the Novella' series."
The New Yorker

"The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumedtiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are."
KQED (NPR San Francisco)

"Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... elegant-looking paperback editions ...a good read in a small package."
The Wall Street Journal

Author Bio

French politician and writer Benjamin Constant combined an extremely lively political career with fertile literary output and an enthusiastic series of liaisons with some of France's most prominent women. Among them were two of his mistresses, Madame de Stael and Madame Recamier, as well as his two wives.