Memoirs, Volume I: Written by Himself

• New English translation

• Critical introduction

A man who has nothing left to hide sits down to tell the truth about himself, and asks only that you listen. Casanova's Memoirs open with one of the boldest prefaces ever written — a whole philosophy of freedom, pleasure and memory in a few pages — and then deliver on it, chapter after chapter, with a life story far richer, funnier and stranger than the legend attached to his name.

This first volume follows his earliest years: a Venetian childhood in a family of actors, a boarding house in Padua where the sheets crawl and the herrings are stolen, lessons in logic and Latin, a brush with the Church, and then the open road — Rome, Bologna, Ancona, Corfu, Constantinople. Along the way the boy learns what the book is really about: how to talk your way past a border, how to be believed, how to read a room, how to fall in love and how to laugh at yourself afterwards. He is a narrator who watches himself as sharply as he watches everyone else, and the result reads like the best kind of conversation — precise, irreverent, generous, and impossible to put down.

This translation is made to be read today: natural, vivid English that carries Casanova's voice, his irony, his warmth and his appetite for detail, so that the pleasure of his company arrives intact on the page.

A critical introduction opens the volume, before the Memoirs begin, and prepares you for the extraordinary journey ahead.

Add it to your library, and let him introduce himself.