John Banville

A work of dazzling imagination, Mefisto, like John Banville's other novels, takes as its theme the price the true scientist or artist must pay for his calling in terms of his own humanity, his ability to live fully. Like his Copernicus, Kepler, and the nameless narrator of The Newton Letter, the central character of …

The Newton Letter is a novel by John Banville, first published in 1982. It was published in the United States in 1987. Drawing comparisons with Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier and John Hawkes's The Blood Oranges for their use of the unreliable narrator, The Newton Letter was described there as Banville's "most …

Hugo von Hoffmannsthal made his mark as a poet, as a playwright, and as the librettist for Richard Strauss’s greatest operas, but he was no less accomplished as a writer of short, strangely evocative prose works. The atmospheric stories and sketches collected here—fin-de-siècle fairy tales from the Vienna of Klimt and …