"A wonderful collection of short pieces-gossipy, chatty, full of overheard conversations, unexpectedly sharp judgments, remarkable predictions. During his lifetime, Henry McBride was the best known and most widely read American art critic, and reading The Flow of Art you can see why. Never doctrinaire or solemn, he managed to write in such a way that the widest audience-artists, curators, collectors, people with a broad interest in the arts and even the general public, with its marginal interest could find something in him. . . . He] is one of that small band who have made art criticism a...

Italo Svevo's early novel Senilita (1898) remained unknown for many years until James Joyce encountered the novelist in Trieste and came to admire Senilita as a preeminent modern Italian novel. Joyce helped to launch Svevo's career, and years later Svevo achieved great fame with his masterpiece, Confessions of Zeno. In Senilita, Svevo tells the story of the amorous entanglement of Emilio, a failed writer already old at thirty-five, and Angiolina, a seductively beautiful but promiscuous young woman. A study in jealousy and self-torment, the novel traces the intoxicating effect of a...