Our Titles

Story of a Blackcap March 2027

Storia di una capinera  ·  Giovanni Verga, 1871

Translated and introduced by Idara Crespi

Giovanni Verga’s first popular success, published in 1871: the novel that established his reputation before the darker realist work for which he is best known. Written entirely in letters, it tells the story of a young woman confined to a convent against her will, whose correspondence with a childhood friend becomes her one connection to the world outside. Heartbreaking and formally precise, it has been read in Italy for 150 years and comes into English here in a new literary translation. This edition is the first.

Paperback edition available March 2027.

More about this edition →

Marta, or Faith September 2026

I Misteri di Napoli, Vol. I  ·  Francesco Mastriani, 1869–70

Translated and introduced by Idara Crespi

When Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris captivated Europe in the 1840s, it inspired writers across the continent to attempt their own versions: portraits of city life seen from below, tracing the lives of the poor alongside the powerful. In Naples, no one answered that challenge more ambitiously than Francesco Mastriani.

I Misteri di Napoli is Mastriani’s most ambitious novel: a panoramic portrait of nineteenth-century Naples, running to hundreds of chapters and read across the Italian peninsula. Marta, or Faith is the first complete volume, introducing a cast of characters whose stories unfold across the series, set against a city of startling beauty and severe inequality.

This will be the first English translation of any volume of I Misteri di Napoli.

Paperbacks ordered direct are held and printed to ship for publication day. Two books or more, twenty per cent off with the code EPHREADER20.

More about this edition →

L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas Forthcoming

L’Arrabbiata, Die Stickerin von Treviso, Die Hochzeit auf Capri, Nerina  ·  Paul Heyse, 1854 to the mid-1890s

Translated by Renata Lenz

A fisherwoman rowing between Sorrento and Capri bites the hand of the man who has loved her for a year. In a walled workshop in Treviso, a banner worked in thread puts a woman in the sight of the man the whole city has turned out to see. On Capri, a single toast at a wedding crosses a line the island was built to keep uncrossed. In the house at Recanati, a silk case holds one underlined line of poetry that a young Giacomo Leopardi cannot say aloud.

Paul Heyse called the hinge of every true novella its falcon: one object or gesture so exact that you could cut its outline from black paper and know the whole story. These four are studies in exactly that. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1910. This volume brings all four stories into English in a new translation made directly from the German.

The Garnet Bracelet Forthcoming

Гранатовый браслет  ·  Alexander Kuprin, 1911

Translated by Mira Sorokina

For eight years a minor civil servant has been writing to a woman he has never spoken to. The letters are unsigned, or signed with initials only. Princess Vera Nikolaevna Sheina has never replied. She is married, aristocratic, entirely removed from his world. On her name day he sends her a garnet bracelet: a gold setting, five stones, one of them ringed by smaller ones that flash green in the right light. It is the last thing he will ever send her.

The Garnet Bracelet is Kuprin’s most celebrated work: a story about the kind of love that asks nothing in return and cannot be answered, told by a writer who understood that the feeling would carry the prose if the prose stayed out of its way. Most English versions of it reach the reader inside an anthology. This is its first modern standalone English edition.

More about this edition →