Books like The Aspern Papers
An American editor takes rooms in a crumbling Venetian palazzo, posing as a lodger, to get his hands on the love letters a dead Romantic poet wrote to the very old woman who lives there with her niece.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Aspern Papers
The Portrait of a Lady
A young American woman in 1870s Europe navigates suitors, social codes, and the trap of a marriage that looks like freedom but feels like a prison.
The Wings of the Dove
A dying heiress in London is surrounded by people who love her for her money, and the novel's delicate moral architecture reveals who is capable of genuine feeling.
Death in Venice
Gustav von Aschenbach, an ageing German writer on holiday in Venice, becomes infatuated with a beautiful Polish boy, Tadzio, and stays on as cholera spreads through the city.
Mario and the Magician
On holiday at an Italian seaside resort in the late 1920s, a German family goes to the show of Cipolla, a hunchbacked hypnotist who bends his audience to his will.
Confessions of Zeno
Zeno Cosini, a Trieste businessman, writes out his life for his psychiatrist, his last cigarettes, his choice of the wrong sister to marry, his father's death, in a comic confession that keeps missing the point.
Hunger
A young writer starving in Kristiania wanders the streets, pawns his waistcoat, chews wood shavings and tells grand lies to strangers, his pride and his mind fraying as the hunger deepens.
The Late Mattia Pascal
Unhappily married and in debt in a small Ligurian town, Mattia Pascal wins a fortune at Monte Carlo and, reading of his own death in the newspaper, decides to start a new life under a new name.
The True Deceiver
In a snowbound coastal village, a calculating young woman sets out to win the trust and money of a reclusive children's book illustrator, and each woman ends up changing the other.
Cosima
Deledda's late novel of her own girlhood in Nuoro, Sardinia, where a girl from a strict, conventional household secretly writes stories and dreams of a life in literature.
The Charterhouse of Parma
Fabrice del Dongo, a young Italian nobleman, runs off to fight for Napoleon at Waterloo, then makes his way through the court intrigues of Parma, love affairs and a famous imprisonment.
Mysteries
Johan Nagel, a stranger in a yellow suit, steps off a steamer into a small Norwegian coastal town one summer and unsettles everyone with his lies, gifts and provocations.
Dom Casmurro
Bento Santiago, an embittered old lawyer in Rio de Janeiro, sets down the story of his love for his childhood sweetheart Capitu, and of his suspicion that she betrayed him.