The Abyss by Marguerite Yourcenar. Translated by Grace Frick in collaboration with the author. 1976, Farrar Straus Giroux, first U.S. edition, 374 pages. Yourcenar was a gay French novelist and translator, notably of Virginia Woolf. Much of her work was translated by her partner Grace Frick while Frick was alive. According to the New York Times: "Marguerite Yourcenar, who was born in 1903 and died in 1987, was the last echo of a heroic chorus of European writers that included Thomas Mann and Andre Gide, older men whom she particularly admired and whose work influenced hers. Like them, she was a philosophical writer with a deep and wide culture, a moralist with a taste for historical perspectives and a virtuoso equally at home in novels, stories and essays (she also wrote rather bad plays and poems)." The Abyss takes place in 16th-century Europe.

Condition: Jacket in good condition, tear on the spine, book in VG condition with some shelf wear.

"The bones of contention between King and Emperor were nothing to him; what counted was that the peace signed only a few months back was already fraying away, like a garment the worse for wear."