There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope—and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.

    Living in a small provincial town, he and his wife spend their time planning journeys to faraway places - journeys they never take. Dino's only passion is billiards, and he spends his evenings in the local billiards hall honing his technique. One day, however, Dino's quiet life is interrupted - his wife falls pregnant. This the first in a series of events that shake him from his slumber and force Dino to test himself for the first time. As in his widely praised Fists, Pietro Grossi's stripped-down prose brings out the epic human drama in a tale of everyday life.

    Both a calendar of daily rituals and a witty sequence of stories recounted in a variety of styles, it weaves together tales of gods and citizens together to explore Rome's history, religious beliefs and traditions. It may also be read as a subtle but powerful political manifesto which derides Augustus' attempts to control his subjects by imposing his own mythology upon them: after celebrating the emperor as a Jupiter-on-earth, for example, Ovid deliberately juxtaposes a story showing the king of the gods as a savage rapist. Endlessly playful, this is also a work of integrity and courage, and a superb climax to the life of one of Rome's greatest writers.

    "If America has a folksinger today he is Carl Sandburg, a singer who comes out of the prairie soil... who can hand back to the people a creation that has scraps of their own insight, humor, and imagination" (Padraic Colum).

    Narayan has few rivals when it comes to bringing alive people and places. Most of his timeless novels are set in the fictional town of Malgudi, located somewhere in South India, a town as real to his readers as any they will find on the map. This volume contains three quintessential Malgudi novels — Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The Vendor of Sweets. Swami and Friends, published in 1935, was the first novel Narayan wrote. Described by Graham Greene as a novel in ten thousand, it recounts the adventures of ten-year-old Swaminathan and his friends Rajam and Mani. The Bachelor of Arts, the second novel in the collection, is a brilliantly realized account of the workings of a young man’s mind. It is the story of Chandran, in his final year at college, who falls hopelessly in love and is forced to exile himself from the familiar surroundings of Malgudi until he is able to arrive at a satisfactory resolution to his problems. The Vendor of Sweets showcases a classic cross-generational battle, between Jagan, a widower of firm Ghandian principles, and his ‘modern’ son Mali, who returns to Malgudi with a half-American wife and a grand plan for selling story-writing machines.The third in the series of Penguin India’s collectors’ editions of the Malgudi novels, The Magic of Malgudi, with an introduction by S. Krishnan, will delight first-time readers as well as devoted Narayan fans.

    Biting, tragic, and endlessly quotable, this translated edition features an introductory appreciation from longtime fan New York Times bestselling author André Aciman.In a city smothering under the summer sun and an overdose of la dolce vita, Leo Gazarra spends his time in an alcoholic haze, bouncing between run-down hotels and the homes of his rich and well-educated friends, without whom he would probably starve. At thirty, he’s still drifting: between jobs that mean nothing to him, between human relationships both ephemeral and frayed. Everyone he knows wants to graduate, get married, get rich—but not him. He has no ambitions whatsoever. Rather than toil and spin, isn’t it better to submit to the alienation of the Eternal City, Rome, sometimes a cruel and indifferent mistress, sometimes sweet and sublime? There can be no half measures with her, either she’s the love of your life or you have to leave her.First discovered by Natalia Ginzburg, Last Summer in the City is a forgotten classic of Italian literature, a great novel of a stature similar to that of The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye. Gianfranco Calligarich’s enduring masterpiece has drawn comparisons to such writers as Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, and Jonathan Franzen and is here made available in English for the first time.