In this “enormously accomplished and compelling novel,” a man crisscrosses Scandinavia to solve the mystery of his wife’s death—and of his own life (Paul Auster, bestselling author of 4 3 2 1). Jonas Wergeland, a famous TV documentary producer with an almost magical knack for infidelity, returns one evening from the World’s Fair in Seville to find his wife dead on the living room floor. What follows is a quest to find the killer, and an endlessly inventive look at the conditions that have brought Wergeland to this critical juncture in life. From his hairsbreadth escape from a ravenous polar bear while filming in Greenland to a near-death experience aboard a passenger ferry in the icy Baltic, the experiences that comprise the narrative of Wergeland’s life provide a fascinating portrait of a media icon at the crux of his journey as an artist.

Claudia Moscovici is a Romanian-American fiction writer and art/literary critic. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Velvet Totalitarianism (2009), as well as Dangerous Liaisons (2011), a nonfiction book on psychopathic social predators. She has also written several scholarly books on Romantic art and literature, including Romanticism and Postromanticism (2007).

Which sort of seducer could you be? Siren? Rake? Cold Coquette? Star? Comedian? Charismatic? Or Saint? This book will show you which. Charm, persuasion, the ability to create illusions: these are some of the many dazzling gifts of the Seducer, the compelling figure who is able to manipulate, mislead and give pleasure all at once. When raised to the level of art, seduction, an indirect and subtle form of power, has toppled empires, won elections and enslaved great minds. In this beautiful, sensually designed book, Greene unearths the two sides of seduction: the characters and the process. Discover who you, or your pursuer, most resembles. Learn, too, the pitfalls of the anti-Seducer. Immerse yourself in the twenty-four manoeuvres and strategies of the seductive process, the ritual by which a seducer gains mastery over their target. Understand how to 'Choose the Right Victim', 'Appear to Be an Object of Desire' and 'Confuse Desire and Reality'. In addition, Greene provides instruction on how to identify victims by type. Each fascinating character and each cunning tactic demonstrates a fundamental truth about who we are, and the targets we've become - or hope to win over. The Art of Seduction is an indispensable primer on the essence of one of history's greatest weapons and the ultimate power trip. From the internationally bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, and The 33 Strategies Of War.

She has captivated fans with unforgettable romance novels filled with suspense, seduction, mystery, and passionate love. Now bestselling author Madeline Hunter introduces “the Seducer” in a dazzling tale of a powerfully sensual man, a headstrong young innocent, and a scandalously perilous affair as forbidden as it is irresistible . . . From the moment he arrived to rescue her, Diane Albret saw more in the darkly handsome, charismatic gentleman than just a guardian. Over the years that have passed since she first laid eyes on Daniel St. John, he had become, quite simply, the most dangerously irresistible man she could ever have imagined. Diane herself has changed from a bewildered schoolgirl, tragically orphaned, into a determined young woman of alluring charm and beauty. Now, leaving the cloistered life of her school, she has been brought to Daniel’s home with dreams of her own amid rumors and hints of scandal. But the legendary seducer seems to have other plans for Diane—and he possesses a secret about her lost past that he will do everything to keep: a secret that will put both their lives in jeopardy, even as the passion they have denied for so long threatens to break out of all control. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Madeline Hunter's The Accidental Duchess.

A passionate new historical romance in Madeline Hunter's nationally bestselling Seducer series. This one features a fifth member of the London Dueling Society, the reserved, enigmatic lawyer to the Laclere family: Julian Hampton. All his life, it seemed, Julian had been in love with Penelope, now Countess of Glasbury. And when he learned the horrors she had endured at the hands of her vicious husband, Julian was instrumental in arranging for her escape to Italy. But he has never forgotten the love of his childhood, the woman he had rescued first as a "damsel in distress" when she was a girl, and then for real once she had blossomed into woman. When Penelope returns secretly to London, Julian is the one she turns to, even though her trust in him puts both their reputations, and ultimately their lives, in peril.

"In the vast literature of love, The Seducer's Diary is an intricate curiosity--a feverishly intellectual attempt to reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast," observes John Updike in his foreword to Søren Kierkegaard's narrative. This work, a chapter from Kierkegaard's first major volume, Either/Or, springs from his relationship with his fiancée, Regine Olsen. Kierkegaard fell in love with the young woman, ten years his junior, proposed to her, but then broke off their engagement a year later. This event affected Kierkegaard profoundly. Olsen became a muse for him, and a flood of volumes resulted. His attempt to set right, in writing, what he feels was a mistake in his relationship with Olsen taught him the secret of "indirect communication." The Seducer's Diary, then, becomes Kierkegaard's attempt to portray himself as a scoundrel and thus make their break easier for her. Matters of marriage, the ethical versus the aesthetic, dread, and, increasingly, the severities of Christianity are pondered by Kierkegaard in this intense work.

A classic novel of love, sex, and the vagaries of the literary life, as witnessed by a young woman on the verge of success Dina Reeve is a talented writer with a dry, urban sense of humor and a tendency to worry about sharks in bathtubs. Howard Ritchie is an editor of a literary magazine and a boozing, compulsive womanizer. Newman Sykes is a philandering, acerbic critic. They are among the seducers and the seduced in this witty and elegantly written novel, which follows its richly drawn characters as they move between bed and typewriter. Praise for Elbowing the Seducer “The debut of an enormously gifted writer.”—The New York Times “A juicy slice of life—intelligent, bitingly honest, funny.”—Kansas City Star “Wonderfully witty and sharp-eyed writing.”—Ms. “Excellent satire.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

A grand, perturbing erotic novel in which the wealthy, amoral Karl records his sexual life and search for meaning in letters with a surprising legacy “Maybe all women wonder what men would be like without their posturing, but it seems to me Hilst had more than an inkling...” – Dodie Bellamy This epistolary novel tells the story of Karl, a wealthy, amoral and erudite man who records his daily life in a series of 20 letters to his sister Cordelia. She is cloistered and chaste, but the letters are wildly promiscuous – not just in their explicit sexual content, which have earned the novel the epithet ‘pornographic’, but in their form. Ranging in style and register from modernist fragments worthy of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, to letters that could have been penned by Enlightenment libertines like Choderlos de Laclos and the Marquis de Sade, the letters make up a polyphonic text that pushes the boundaries both of fiction and of decency. The novel – a standalone masterpiece which originally appeared as part of a Brazilian tetralogy – changes form again partway through, when the indigent poet Stamatius finds Karl’s record of his erotic adventures in a trash can, and begins to write stories based on what he reads, and then to break down those stories into even briefer fragments. Karl’s letters inspire Stamatius’ writing, and their narratives and identities become ever more fragmented, until we begin to doubt whether they are truly separate people. What unites them is an abundantly lewd imagination and a fantastically creative relationship to the greatest seducer of all: language.

Diary of a Seducer records Johannes's discovery of a girl with the Shakespearean name Cordelia, whom he sets out to control. Intricately, meticulously, cunningly, the seduction proceeds. No detail is too small to escape Johannes. "She sits on the sofa by the tea table and I sit on a chair at her side. This position has an intimate quality and at the same time a detaching dignity." Less erotic than an intellectual depiction of seduction, Diary of a Seducer shows the casuist Kierkegaard in what he characterized as the aesthetic mode. A new introduction by Michael Dirda puts this influential novella into high relief.

The author of "Seductress" examines the ladies' man and answers the eternal question: what do women want?