The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl

This deceptively light, fable-like story of an old man's sexual obsession with a young woman is the perfect distillation of Italo Svevo's life-long preoccupations: the attraction of an older man to a younger woman, individual conscience versus social convention, the phobias of aging, and---above all---the cost of sexual desire. It is, in short, a marvel of psychological insight.

But as it follows the old man's vacillations and tortuous self-justifications over the "pretty girl" to their tragic-comic end, this novella is also a showcase for what is perhaps Svevo's greatest gift: an ability to be utterly charming while writing about matters of life and death.

It is presented here in a translation first commissioned and published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf for their legendary Hogarth Press.

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art of the Novella Series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.