Every year for all the thirty they have been married, Louis Begley and Anka Muhlstein have escaped to Venice to write. In Venice for Lovers, the couple has fashioned an homage to the City of Water. In her essay, Muhlstein charmingly describes how becoming friends with restaurateurs has been an unsurpassed means of getting to know the city and its inhabitants--Venetians like Ernesto, whose restaurant they have dinner in every night for many years, and who tells them of the great flood that nearly destroyed the beautiful city. They spend blissful hours at Da Fiore, named by The International Herald Tribune one of the ten best restaurants in the world but which retains its rustic simplicity.
In his novella, Begley writes a story of falling in love with--and in--Venice. His twenty-year-old protagonist is lured to the city by the older woman he adores, only to be left to fend for himself. But he later discovers a lasting love for Venice itself--not an uncommon occurrence, as Begley's brilliant portrayal of the city's place within world literature demonstrates: Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann were all illustrious predecessors in whom Venice inspired dreams of love and passion.

Each year of their 30-year marriage, Louis Begley, the award-winning author of Wartime Lies, and his wife Anka Muhlstein have spent long, enjoyable months in Venice. They write and live there and over the decades La Serenissima has become their second home. The owners of their favourite restaurants have become their friends and they share the lives of the locals, far off the welltrodden tourist track. Begley tells the story of how he fell in love with and in Venice, though as he makes clear when writing on Venice's pivitol role in world literature, he was not the only one - Henry James, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann are only three of his most illustrious predecessors.

"Tragic and redemptive . . . Updike had Rabbit, Roth has Zuckerman, Richard Ford has Bascombe and Begley has Schmidt. . . . "Schmidt Steps Back"] is""the most ambitious novel yet] in the Schmidt cycle."--"Kirkus Reviews" (starred review)
Full of dark humor, compassion, and heart, "Schmidt Steps Back" is the most romantic installment yet of the drama that began with the acclaimed "About Schmidt." Now seventy-eight, and just as passionate, sharp, and endearingly prickly as ever, Albert Schmidt faces a life alone, with only the crumbs of grandfatherly status and a less-than-demanding position at an international organization to sustain him. His only hope is Alice Verplanck, the French widow of a former partner, as elusive as she is beautiful. Whether his rusty seduction skills can lure her from Paris to the Hamptons won't be known, though, until Schmidt endures one more ordeal by fire. Hilarious, engrossing, and deeply poignant, "Schmidt Steps Back" is Louis Begley's finest novel yet.
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Praise for "Schmidt Steps Back"
"Engaging . . . Begley gets as close to Schmidt as a diarist, inhabiting this man who has been seasoned by a long life."--"The New York Times Book Review"
"Begley gets inside Schmidt's fertile WASP brain . . . with subtlety, intelligence, and wit.""--The Philadelphia Inquirer"
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"The novel grows in Begley's excellent intricacy . . . to the level of art rather than manners. . . . One cannot read one of the Schmidt novels without laughing."--"San Francisco Chronicle"
"Thoroughly absorbing . . . a] cause for celebration."--Salon
" A] superb tragicomedy . . . seductive, subversive, and commanding."--"Booklist ("starred review)

"Extraordinary...Rich in irony and regret... the] people and settings are vividly realized and his prose is] compelling in its simplicity."
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
As the world slips into the throes of war in 1939, young Maciek's once closetted existence outside Warsaw is no more. When Warsaw falls, Maciek escapes with his aunt Tania. Together they endure the war, running, hiding, changing their names, forging documents to secure their temporary lives--as the insistent drum of the Nazi march moves ever closer to them and to their secret wartime lies.

"From the Paperback edition."

In Poland, in 1939, the comfortable, secure world of assimilated Jews is blown away by the invasion of the Third Reich. Maciek's father disappears into the war's vortex, leaving the orphaned child with his acerbic and beautiful Aunt Tania. It is her cool inventiveness, in their dramatic flight through a landscape of oppression, that will ensure their fragile survival.

From the prize-winning author of Wartime Lies, an anatomy of the infamous prosecution of a Jewish officer attached to the French Army's General Staff, with profound implications for our own time. In December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a brilliant French artillery officer and a Jew of Alsatian descent, was court-martialed for selling secrets to the German military attache in Paris based on perjured testimony and trumped-up evidence. The sentence was military degradation and life imprisonment on Devil's Island, a hellhole off the coast of French Guiana. Five years later, the case was overturned, and eventually Dreyfus was completely exonerated. Meanwhile, the Dreyfus Affair tore France apart, pitting Dreyfusards-committed to restoring freedom and honor to an innocent man convicted of a crime committed by another-against nationalists, anti-Semites, and militarists who preferred having an innocent man rot to exposing the crimes committed by ministers of war and the army's top brass in order to secure Dreyfus's conviction. Was the Dreyfus Affair merely another instance of the rise in France of a virulent form of anti-Semitism? In Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, the acclaimed novelist draws upon his legal expertise to create a riveting account of the famously complex case, and to remind us of the interest each one of us has in the faithful execution of laws as the safeguard of our liberties and honor.