“Strange walked away and became one of the many black figures on the piazza, all with black faces and no expressions, hurrying across the face of moon-colored Venice. The moon itself was set among great architectural clouds so that there appeard to be aother moon0lit city in the sky, whose grandeur rivaled Benice and whose great palaces and streets were crumbling and falling into ruins, as if some spirit in a whimsical mood had set it there to mock the other’s slow decline.”

From Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

We know that many of you are excited about the upcoming visit by John Berendt, whose book, The City of Fallen Angels, is a lovely tribute/expose of contemporary Venice. So we thought you might be interested in a kind of Venetian reading list—only the finest for the armchair traveler!

Watermark
by Brodsky, Joseph

In this brief, intense, gem-like book, equal parts extended autobiographical essay and prose poem, Brodsky turns his eye to the seductive and enigmatic city of Venice. A mosaic of 48 short chapters--each recalling a specific episode from one of his many visits there (Brodsky spent his winters in Venice for nearly 20 years)--"Watermark" associatively and brilliantly evokes one city's architectural and atmospheric character. In doing so, the book also reveals a subject--and an author--readers have never before seen

Venices
by Paul Morand

DIPLOMAT, WRITER AND POET, traveller and socialite, friend of Proust, Giraudoux and Malraux, Paul Morand was out of the most original writers of the twentieth century. He was French literature's globe-trotter, and his delightful autobiography is far from being yet another account of a writer's life. Instead it is a poetic evocation of certain scenes among Morand's rich and varied encounters and experience, filtered through the one constant in his life - the one place to which he would always return - Venice.

Mistler's Exit
by Begley, Louis

Thomas Mistler is an internationally celebrated advertising whiz who is about to achieve a fabulously lucrative merger for the company that bears his name. He has thought of himself as a happy man, but when his doctor tells him he is terminally ill, he decides to surrender unconditionally, avoid life-prolonging treatment, and has a strange elated feeling that he has been set free. Telling neither his wife nor his grown son of his illness, he decides to indulge himself with ten days in Venice, the city he loves most in the world, allowing himself to drift for the first time. A striving young woman who hopes to get ahead in the advertising business by making love to him turns out to bore him. When he meets the woman who was his unrequited love in college, she rejects him. More and more he thinks of his father and his uncle, pillars of the Establishment, who bequeathed to him his "genetic puritanism, " of his son whose love he has only barely salvaged, of his wife, once beautiful and suitable, now half-scorned by him. Has he discovered himself at last?

Invisible Cities
by Calvino, Italo, Weaver, William

Imaginary conversations between Marco Polo and his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, conjure up cities of magical times. " Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant" (Gore Vidal). Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

By the Grand Canal
by Riviere, William

In the immediate aftermath of World War I, Hugh Thurne, a British diplomat involved in the peace negotiations, decides to flee to his second home in Venice rather than return to his wife and the charade of his marriage in London. Although profoundly disturbed about the long-term prospects for peace, he has faith in the city's power to raise his spirits. Hugh eagerly looks forward to visits with his old friends Giacomo and Valentina Venier in their dilapidated palazzo on the Grand Canal; to dallying with a young opera singer, Emanuela; and to the arrival of Violet Mancroft, the widow of his best friend lost in the war. What he does not anticipate is the shadow lying over the Venier family's future. Nor has he reckoned with the vagaries of his own human heart. Evoking the beauty of Venice, "By the Grand Canal" is a novel about premonition for the future and the war it portends, about death and memory, and also about an unexpected love between two old friends.

In the Company of the Courtesan
by Dunant, Sarah

My lady, Fiammetta Bianchini, was plucking her eyebrows and biting color into her lips when the unthinkable happened and the Holy Roman Emperor's army blew a hole in the wall of God's eternal city, letting in a flood of half-starved, half-crazed troops bent on pillage and punishment."

Thus begins In the Company of the Courtesan, Sarah Dunant's epic novel of life in Renaissance Italy. Escaping the sack of Rome in 1527, with their stomachs churning on the jewels they have swallowed, the courtesan Fiammetta and her dwarf companion, Bucino, head for Venice, the shimmering city born out of water to become a miracle of east-west trade: rich and rancid, pious and profitable, beautiful and squalid.
With a mix of courage and cunning they infiltrate Venetian society. Together they make the perfect partnership: the sharp-tongued, sharp-witted dwarf, and his vibrant mistress, trained from birth to charm, entertain, and satisfy men who have the money to support her.
Yet as their fortunes rise, this perfect partnership comes under threat, from the searing passion of a lover who wants more than his allotted nights to the attentions of an admiring Turk in search of human novelties for his sultan's court. But Fiammetta and Bucino's greatest challenge comes from a young crippled woman, a blind healer who insinuates herself into their lives and hearts with devastating consequences for them all.
A story of desire and deception, sin and religion, loyalty and friendship, In the Company of the Courtesan paints a portrait of oneof the world's greatest cities at its most potent moment in history: It is a picture that remains vivid long after the final page.

Venetian Stories
by Rylands, Jane Turner

In these 12 wry and fascinating stories of a complex, scheming, almost farcical society, Rylands has brilliantly evoked the hidden and day-to-day life of one of Europe's most mysterious cities of profound fragility and an uncertain future.

Across the Bridge of Sighs: More Venetian Stories
by Rylands, Jane Turner

From the author of the acclaimed "Venetian Stories," a captivating new collection about Venice from the perspective of its residents.
A professor writes lectures on Venetian literature for American millionaires. A baroness falls in love with the architect restoring the ancient palazzo of her husband's family. An ambitious gallery owner sells a young artist's work faster than he can paint it. A salesman finds a way to trip up a narcissistic race car driver who seems to be able to get away with anything. As her characters negotiate the conflict between tradition and a rapidly changing city, Jane Turner Rylands draws us deep into a society all but unknown to outsiders.

Stone Virgin
by Unsworth, Barry

A mysterious sculpture of a beautiful and erotic Madonna holds the key to the Fornarini family's secrets. When Raikes, a conservation expert, tries to restore her, he is swept under the statue's spell--and that of Chiara Litsov, a member of the Fornarini family. Raikes finds himself losing all moral grounding as his love for statue and woman intertwine in lust and murder.

The Tempest
by de Prada, Juan Manuel

MURDER, LOVE betrayal, and some of the world's most beautiful objets d'art come together in Juan Manuel de Prada's tempestuous, prize-winning novel set in Venice. Alejandro Ballesteros, a young Spanish art historian, arrives in a damp and wintry Venice to study Giorgione's "The Tempest, a magnificent painting that has absessed him for years. On his first night in the quintessentially enigmatic city, however, Alejandro witnesses a shocking murder and is quickly pulled into a dangerous web of deceit. In a tale with all the complex twists and turns of Venice itself, "The Tempest is a marvelously complex, erotic, and atmospheric mystery reminiscent of the bestselling novels of Arturo Perez Reverte and lain Pears.

Miss Garnet's Angel
by Vickers, Salley

After the death of her longtime friend and flatmate, retired British history teacher Julia Garnet does something completely out of character: She takes a six-month rental on a modest appartamento in Venice. An atheist, a Communist, and a virgin, Julia finds herself falling beneath the seductive spell of the city's intoxicating beauty and sensual religiosity. She befriends a young Italian boy and English twins who are restoring a fourteenth-century chapel. And she falls in love for the first time in her life with an art dealer named Carlo.

"A refreshing, gentle story." (Anita Brookner)

Death in Venice by Mann, Thomas

The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann -- here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim

Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after "Buddenbrooks" had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, "Death in Venice" tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.

In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."