Venice Stories

The sublime city of Venice has long offered inspiration to the world’s storytellers. This anthology gathers an array of dazzling stories with Venetian settings, including Daphne Du Maurier’s haunting 'Don’t Look Now', Anthony Trollope’s wartime romance 'The Last Austrian Who Left Venice' and Vernon Lee’s spine-chilling 'A Wicked Voice', together with scenes from Proust's In Search of Lost Time and from The Wings of the Dove, Henry James’s tale of passion and betrayal in a Venetian palazzo. The Venetian adventurer and diarist Giacomo Casanova describes his escape from the Doge’s prison in his amazing Memoirs, and there are enthralling contributions from Camillo Boito, Baron Corvo and Jeannette Winterson.In its multi-faceted portrait of La Serenissima,Venice Stories showcases a line-up of literary classics worthy of the magnificent city they celebrate.

Jonathan Keates has written extensively about Italy. He has also published acclaimed biographies of Handel, Purcell and Stendhal, and his fiction includes the short story collection Allegro Postillions (winner of both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hawthornden Prize) and the novel The Strangers' Gallery set in 19th-century Italy. He is Chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund and for thirty-nine years taught English at the City of London School.