Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl, The (Art of the Novel) - Softcover

"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read."
--Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer

"Small wonders."
--Time Out London

"[F]irst-rate...astutely selected and attractively packaged...indisputably great works."
--Adam Begley, The New York Observer

"I've always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it's the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher's fine 'Art of the Novella' series."
--The New Yorker

"The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed--tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are."
--KQED (NPR San Francisco)

"Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... elegant-looking paperback editions ...a good read in a small package."
--The Wall Street Journal

Italo Svevo, born Ettore Schmitz in 1861, was the son of a well-off Jewish couple in Trieste. When his father's glassware business collapsed, teenaged Svevo took a job in a bank to help, abandoning his studies but not his desire to become a writer. He stayed at the bank for 20 years, concurrently writing books no one would publish. Finally, at 32, he self-published a novel, Una vita, under his pseudonym - meaning "An Italian of Swabia" - and five years later another, Senilità. Both were failures, and Svevo gave up publishing for the next 25 years. In 1898 he went to work for his father-in-law, a paint-manufacturer. Because the company did business in England, he signed up for English lessons at the local Berlitz School and was assigned a young James Joyce as his teacher. The two became so close that Joyce modeled the protagonist of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, on Svevo. In 1923 Svevo self-published another novel, La Coscienza di Zeno. The autobiographical story of a man undergoing Freudian analysis while trying to quit smoking is now seen, like Svevo's other works, as a pioneering work of psychoanalytic and stream-of-consciousness narrative. Joyce got it published in France -- where it was a hit -- but couldn't interest an English publisher before Svevo, in 1928, was struck by a car while crossing the street. He died a few days later. Refused a cigarette on his deathbed, his last words were reportedly, "That would definitely have been my last cigarette."

Lacy Collison-Morley (1876-1958) was a translator also known for his books on Italian Literature and Greek and Roman Mythology.