A compassionate tale of marriage, manners, and betrayal, from the Portuguese master José Maria Eça de Queirós, the first great modern Portuguese novelist, wrote The Yellow Sofa with (in his own words) “no digressions, no rhetoric,” creating a book where “everything is interesting and dramatic and quickly narrated.” The story, a terse and seamless spoof of Victorian bourgeois morals, concerns a successful businessman who returns home to find his wife “on the yellow damask sofa, leaning in abandon on the shoulder of a man.” The man is none other than his best friend and business partner. While struggling with the need to defend his honor, he fights a stronger inner desire for domestic tranquility and forgiveness. The Yellow Sofa firmly establishes Eça de Queirós in the literary pantheon that includes Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, and Tolstoy.

In this simple tale, the novel's hero is the talented heir to a notable family in Lisbon. He aspires to serve his fellow man in his chosen profession of medicine, in the arts, and in politics. But he enters a society affected by powerful international influences--French intellectual developments, English trading practices--that trouble and frustrate him. In the end he is reduced to a kind of spiritual helplessness and his good intentions are reduced to dilettantism. His passionate love affair begins to suffer a devastating constraint.

Almost twenty-five years after the death of E_a de Queir_s, his son, Jos_ Maria D'E_a de Queirzs, discovered in 1924 an untitled and undated manuscript that contained neither revisions nor corrections. He painstakingly deciphered his father's nearly illegible script, titled the work, and published it as Alves & Co. This work shows Eaa de Queirus going beyond his early novels, The Sin of Fr. Amaro and Cousin Bazilio. The harsh focus of a narrow realism is now tempered by compassion for human folly. Although Eaa deals with the theme of adultery in several of his novels, only Alves & Co. examines the subject from the wronged husband's point of view. The description of Godofredo da ConceiAa? o Alves' efforts to salvage his honor while enduring the suffering that results from ridicule demonstrates E_a's mastery of satire, humor, and psychological insight.

Two friends were kidnapped on the road to Sintra by three masked men and taken to a mysterious house. In the house there is a corpse. The usual questions arise: who was he? How did he die? Was it a natural death or a murder? Who was the perpetrator or the instigator of the crime? The two friends are the two narrators - Eca de Queiroz and Ramalho Ortigao - whose story was published in the form of letters to the editor recounting what happened to them."

As so often with Eca de Queiros, the plot is simple; the fascination of the novel lies in the characters, the incidents and, above all, the warm humanity and mordant wit of this acute observer of the human condition.

This story is about Aleixo de Queiroz Ribeiro, a Portuguese sculptor, and his celebrated marriage in Philadelphia to Sarah Elizabeth Stetson, the widow of the multimillionaire philanthropist John B. Stetson, owner of the biggest and most renowned hat company in the world. Based on real people and events, the novel explores Aleixo’s early years in Paris where he crosses paths with some of the era’s greatest names in sculpture, like Rodin and Saint-Gaudens, his brief and controversial stay in Lisbon, and his departure for the United States, where he becomes Portuguese Consul in Chicago and renowned sculptor. Intrinsic to the narrative itself, the history of an extraordinary era emerges, not as mere background scenery, but rather as it was witnessed and experienced by the actual individuals who lived it: the fall of the monarchy and the turbulent early years of the Republic in Portugal, the Spanish-American War, the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, the First World War, etc. From the end-of-the-century Parisian effervescence to the interaction with the high society of Philadelphia and New York, from early artistic devotion and persistence to a certain mature dandyism in the later years, from public recognition to critical derision, from sensibility to pragmatism, and from ambition to disappointment, My Art and My Stetson dramatically conveys the conflicts and yearnings of a charismatic, controversial, and misunderstood man, as well as the numerous contradictions inherent to the epoch during which the narrative takes place.

* Eca de Queiroz is considered by many to be Portugal's greatest novelist. This volume introduces a dazzling variety of worlds and characters, from a lovelorn Greek poet-turned-waiter working in a Charing Cross hotel to a sainly young woman soured by love."