A. J. A. Symons

Part detective story, part spiritual journey, and part meditation on biography. Steeped in arcane learning, queer encounters, and fanciful symbolist prose, it is a very peculiar operation indeed, leaving he reader unconvinced that there was ever such a real person as Frederick Rolfe - or, possibly, his biographer

A slender book, an odd book, a completely original book ... a masterpiece

One of the genre's most notable - if also quirkiest - triumphs

Extraordinary ... a new template for twentieth-century biography

An Experiment in Biography

One summer afternoon A.J.A. Symons is handed a peculiar novel called Hadrian the Seventh and, captivated by this forgotten masterpiece, determines to learn everything he can about its mysterious author. Symons proceeds as a detective might, investigating leads, collecting evidence and corresponding with witnesses. The object of his search is Frederick Rolfe, the self-appointed Baron Corvo - artist, rejected candidate for priesthood and author of serially autobiographical fictions - and its story is told in The Quest for Corvo: a dazzling portrait of an insoluble tangle of talents, frustrated ambitions, arrogance and paranoia. 
 
The book, which reads with all the excitement of detective fiction, is at once a literary pilgrimage and reflection on the obsessions and deceptions which lie at the heart of biography.

The Quest for Corvo

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A. J. A. Symons

Praise for The Quest for Corvo

Part detective story, part spiritual journey, and part meditation on biography. Steeped in arcane learning, queer encounters, and fanciful symbolist prose, it is a very peculiar operation indeed, leaving he reader u ...

A slender book, an odd book, a completely original book ... a masterpiece

One of the genre's most notable - if also quirkiest - triumphs

Part detective story, part spiritual journey, and part meditation on biography. Steeped in arcane learning, queer encounters, and fanciful symbolist prose, it is a very peculiar operation indeed, leaving he reader u ...

A slender book, an odd book, a completely original book ... a masterpiece

One of the genre's most notable - if also quirkiest - triumphs

Part detective story, part spiritual journey, and part meditation on biography. Steeped in arcane learning, queer encounters, and fanciful symbolist prose, it is a very peculiar operation indeed, leaving he reader u ...

A slender book, an odd book, a completely original book ... a masterpiece

One of the genre's most notable - if also quirkiest - triumphs

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