A Romeo-and-Juliet tale told with Stendhal's particular biting realism-- never before available on its own.

     A pair of star-crossed lovers--one a young woman whose family disapproves, the other a fatherless brigand--whose passion has unintended and dangerous consequences.

+ Part of the Art of the Novella Series, an AIGA Design Award-winning set of short, affordable editions

+ A Melville House HybridBook, includes a digital anthology of additional readings and illustrations

+ Attractive edition printed on fine paper stock, with French flaps

+ One of Stendhal's Italian Chronicles, a series of novellas and stories published in the 1830s, but never before available individually.
"Passion was [Stendhal's] raison d'être, and that surely is the religion of all romantics--exaltation through the passions...[F]ew men have conveyed passion with such intensity as he has." -James Joyce

"A maxim of Stendhal's: Never repent." -Marcel Proust

"We should never be finished with Stendhal. I can think of no greater praise than that." -Paul Valéry

Series Overview: Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers but beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. The Art of the Novella Series celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners. The series has been recognized for its "excellence in design" by AIGA.

Author Bio: Marie-Henri Beyle--known primarily by his pen name, Stendhal--was born in 1783 in the southeastern French city Grenoble. An early and great craftsman of both realism and romanticism in prose, Stendhal ultimately preferred Italy to France--having written that Italy possessed something "more sincere and passionate"--and after 1814 spent most of his time there. He is well known for his novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, as well as his 1822 treatise On Love, which set forth a theory of the "birth of love"--a process of crystallization, he argued, analogous to traveling from Bologna (representing indifference) to Rome (representing perfect love). Stendhal died in 1842 at the age of fifty-nine, and rests in the Cimetiére de Montmartre.