Steerforth Press: 389 books

Of all my memories, of all my life's innumerable sensations, the most onerous was that of the single murder I had committed.' A man comes across a short story which recounts in minute detail his killing of a soldier, long ago - from the victim's point of view. It's a story that should not exist, and...

Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, a sharp, photo-realistic novella of memory and thwarted hope: part of our Japanese novella series, showcasing the best contemporary Japanese writing Divorced and cut off from his family, Taro lives alone in one of the few occupied apartments in his block, a block...

Consisting of 13 books written across 26 years, the adventure-filled epic Fortunes of France is one of France's best-loved historical fiction series. Never before published in English, book one, The Brethren, makes its debut in the US in the spring of 2015, followed in the fall by book two, City of...

"It is after experiencing life that I have returned here to think about myself." Paul Morand was a diplomat, traveller, socialite and one of the most erudite and original writers of the twentieth century. Venices is his typically unconventional autobiography: an evocative account of a remarkable...

The first bicycle was invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it wasn't until the 1890s that the craze really took off. This brought with it the fears, scaremongering, worries and uncertainties that inevitably accompany any new fashion. Women (often unchaperoned and oddly dressed)...

Numerous writers have made declarations of love to cities, but Against Venice speaks not of love, but of dislike. It is a counterblast to intellectuals who regard Venice as the city where existentialism should be experienced, at parties in the palazzi of friends. Debray criticises this world in a refreshingly irreverent way, luring the traveller back to this seductive city.

The novelist Henry James arrived in Venice as a tourist, and instantly fell in love with the city – particularly with the splendid Palazzo Barbaro, home of the expatriate American Curtis family. This selection of letters covers the period 1869-1907 and provides a unique record of the life and work...

Tsugami, the editor-in-chief of a newspaper in war-scarred Osaka, agrees to sponsor a bullfight. For months this great gamble consumes him, makes him as wary and combative as if he was in a ring himself. And, as he becomes ever more distant, his lover Sakiko is unsure if she would like to see him...

On 22 February 1942 Stefan Zweig, one of the most popular authors of his generation, committed suicide with his wife Lotte. The final, desperate gesture of this great writer has fascinated ever since. Zweig was an exile, driven from his home in Austria by the Nazis. Fleeing first to London,...

Stefan Zweig was a leading talisman of a united Europe of unfettered movement, of pro-active cultural exchange, humane decency and tolerance, all polar opposites of the Nationalist regimes he loathed, and which came to power in the 1930s. In these poignant essays and addresses, forged in the last...

In August 1785, Paris buzzed with a scandal that had everything—an eminent churchman, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. Its centrepiece was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled, and the tangle of fraud, folly, blindness and self-delusion it provoked....

First published as a feuilleton in a left-wing newspaper in 1850, The Salt Smugglers provides a political satire of the waning days of France’s short-lived Second Republic. With nods to Diderot and Sterne, this shaggy-dog story deals less with contraband salt smugglers than with the subversive power...

Written during the Second World War, Zweig's typically passionate and readable biography of Michel de Montaigne, is also a heartfelt argument for the importance of intellectual freedom, tolerance and humanism. Zweig draws strong parallels between Montaigne's age, when Europe was torn in two by conflict...

Paul Morand's last book, one of the most appealing of his oeuvre, brings together around the figure of Chanel, portraits of Misia Sert, Erik Satie, Serge Lifar, Georges Auric, Raymond Radiguet, Jean Cocteau, Picasso and Churchill, among others. Based on a series of intimate conversations between Morand...