Round-up – New Classics, January 2025

from Baggesen and Buzzati to Morante and Rachilde

Happy New Year! And welcome to the first new classics of 2025. The publishing houses are setting out an array of classics this January. Most significant, perhaps, is Stephen Dodd’s new selection of Yukio Mishima’s short stories, Voices of the Fallen Heroes, which includes previously untranslated stories and marks 100 years since Mishima’s birth on 14 January 1925.

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The Labyrinth by Jens Baggesen (1792-3)

A genre-bending and highly personal travel book that follows the young Danish author’s journey, made in 1789, from Copenhagen through Germany to the Swiss border at Basel. In its outer form, it follows the conventions of travel writing: describing the cities, landscapes, and notable people encountered on the route, while also offering critical commentary on art, architecture, theatre, and literature, mixed with reactions to the unfolding French Revolution. However, Baggesen finds contemporary travel writing to be pedantic and dry and is determined to make his own account as engaging and personal as possible.

Oxford World’s Classics | 528 pages | translated by Jesper Gulddal [UK / US]

The Bewitched Bourgeois by Dino Buzzati (1933-72)

A journalist for much of his life, Buzzati was adept at turning current events into fantasies that depicted social and political nightmares. He challenged the ideological complacencies of his era in accessible stories that solicit the reader’s vicarious response, mixing sentiment, humor, and tragedy. Here Poe and Kafka meet Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. Lawrence Venuti presents a retrospective anthology that ranges from Buzzati’s first publications to texts written as he was dying of cancer.

NYRB Classics | 368 pages | translated by Lawrence Venuti [UK / US]

The Living Stones by Ithell Colquhoun (1957)

Painter Ithell Colquhoun arrives in Cornwall in the late 1940s, searching for a studio and a refuge from bombed-out London. So begins a profound lifelong relationship with Britain’s westernmost county, a land surrounded by sea and steeped in myth, where the ancient Celtic past reaches into the present. Sacred and beautiful, wild and weird, Colquhoun’s Cornwall is a living landscape, where every tree, standing stone and holy well is a palimpsest of folklore – and a place where everyday reality speaks to the world beyond.

Pushkin Press Classics | 240 pages | introduced by Edward Parnell [UK / US]

The Suicides by Antonio di Benedetto (1969)

A reporter’s boss assigns him to cover three unconnected suicides. The news agency wants to syndicate the story to color magazines, “For the blood, so the red is visible.” All he’s given to go on are photos of the faces of the dead. As he starts to investigate, other suicides happen. An archivist colleague, a woman, supplies factoids from history, anthropology, biology, and philosophy: suicide by men, women, families, animals; thoughts on suicide from Diogenes, the Tosafists, Hume, Schopenhauer, Durkheim, Mead.

NYRB Classics | 136 pages | translated by Esther Allen [UK / US]

There Lives a Young Girl in me Who Will Not Die by Tove Ditlevsen (1939-76)

In this playful, mournful, witty poetry collection, little girls stand tip-toe inside adult bodies, achievements in literature and lethargy are unflinchingly listed, and lovers come and go like the seasons. While Tove Ditlevsen is now famous around the world as an extraordinary prose writer, in Denmark she has also long been celebrated as a poet. She published her first collection in her early twenties, and continued writing and publishing poetry until the end of her life. This new selection offers English readers a chance to explore her brilliant, surprising verse across nearly four decades of writing.

Penguin Classics | 192 pages | translated by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith | introduced by Olga Ravn [UK / US]

The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf (1979)

Ellen is an artist living alone on New York in the 1970s. She is beset by irritating ex-boyfriends, paint pigment choices, and, occasionally, by ‘radiances’ – episodes of joyous, reckless unreality during which she becomes Princess Esmerelda, a brightly-dressed star ruling over her kingdom of West 72nd Street. Yet there are those around her, particularly the men in her life, who are threatened by this incarnation, and wish to curtail the giddy freedom it brings her. A rhapsodic work of exuberant invention and deadpan humour, The Princess of 72nd Street sees female liberation and mental health through new eyes.

Penguin Modern Classics | 160 pages | introduced by Melissa Broder [UK / US]

Voices of the Fallen Heroes by Yukio Mishima (1960-70)

A writer is seized by apocalyptic visions; a voyeuristic marquis commits a brutal act; and a trio of beatniks dance to modern jazz in the ruins of an abandoned church. Here, stark autobiography contrasts with pure horror, and the tenderness of first love cedes to obsession, heartbreak and deathly beauty. A new selection of Mishima’s short stories from the 1960s, Voices of the Fallen Heroes traces the final decade of Mishima’s career and offers a unique glimpse into the mind of one of Japan’s greatest writers on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Penguin Classics | 272 pages | edited by Stephen Dodd | various translators [UK / US]

Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante (1948)

The first unabridged English translation of the electrifying novel of secrets and delusions, from one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century. Elisa – orphaned as a child, raised by a ‘fallen woman’, fed by fairy tales – has lived in an outlandish imaginary world for years. When her guardian dies, she feels compelled to confront her family’s tortured and dramatic past, weaving the tale of her mother and grandmother through a history of intrigue, treachery, deception and desire. But as her saga of three generations of Sicilian women proceeds, it becomes something else entirely, taking in a whole legacy of oppression and injustice. By turns flamboyant and intense, raging and funny, Lies and Sorcery is a celebration of the female imagination, and the power of storytelling itself.

Penguin Classics | 800 pages | translated by Jenny McPhee [UK / US]

The Tower of Love by Rachilde (1899)

When Jean Maleux, a young sailor, is appointed assistant keeper of the Ar-Men lighthouse off the coast of Brittany, he is drawn into a dark world of physical peril, sexual obsession and necrophilia. The lighthouse is home to the eccentric, embittered keeper Mathurin Barnabas: an irascible and grizzled old man who appears to be more animal than human. ‘Rachilde’ was the pen name of Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (1860–1953). She was the only female writer for the literary journal Le decadent.

Wakefield Press | 176 pages | translated by Jennifer Higgins | introduced by Melanie C. Hawthorne [UK / US]

The Penguin Book of Demons

For millennia, societies have told tales of their fears incarnate – otherworldly couriers of plague, death, temptation and moral decline. Drawing from three thousand years of religious traditions and world literature, The Penguin Book of Demons follows these supernatural creatures – and the humans who have hunted and been haunted by them – through accounts across cultures and continents, including: the daimones of ancient Greece and Rome; the giant, biblical half humans known as Nephilim who stalked the earth before the Great Flood; corrupted angels, condemned to eternity in Hell; the djinn of Islamic Arabia; the female, child-eating gelloudes of Byzantium; the seductive incubi and succubi of northern Europe; the animal spirits of early modern China; and the cannibalistic wendigo of Native American folklore.

Penguin Classics | 304 pages | edited by Scott G. Bruce [UK / US]

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The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.

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