The only unabridged prose translation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso - a witty parody of the chivalric legends of Charlemagne and the Saracen invasion of France - this version faithfully recaptures the entire narrative and the subtle meanings behind it.

    Rich in literary delights, filled with spectacular wordplay, and rife with the bawdy humor of Shakespeare’s comedies, Tomato Rhapsody is the almost-true tale of how the tomato came to Italy—at once a brilliantly inventive fable of love, lust, and longing, and a dazzling feast for the imagination.This is a story born from love—a forbidden love—between Davido, an Ebreo tomato farmer, and Mari, a beautiful Catholic girl.…But it’s not only Davido and Mari who have secrets of the heart. Everyone around them yearns for something—from Davido’s grandfather, who tenderly cultivates the tomato plant he stole on his voyages with Columbus, to Mari’s villainous stepfather, whose eye is trained on his stepdaughter’s virginity and his neighbor’s land.Caught in the midst of these passions and machinations is a village full of eccentrics who speak in rhyme, celebrate the Feast of the Drunken Saint, and live a life untouched by the passage of time. The schemes and dreams of these men and women are about to change as what is forbidden becomes too delicious to resist. Tradition, religion, and good taste collide unforgettably in a story about the courage to pursue love and tomato sauce at all costs.

    Pater was shocked at the reaction his book inspired: 'I wish they would not call me a hedonist, it gives such a wrong impression to those who do not know Greek.'.The book had begun as a series of idiosyncratic, impressionistic critical essays on those artists that embodied for him the spirit of the Renaissance; by collecting them and adding his infamous Conclusion, Pater gained a reputation as a daring modern philosopher. But The Renaissance survives as one of the most innovative pieces of cultural criticism to emerge from the nineteenth century.

    Wendelin von Speyer has just arrived from Germany with the foundations of a cultural revolution: Gutenberg's movable type. Together with the young editor Bruno Uguccione and the seductive scribe Felice Feliciano, he starts the city's first printing press. While Bruno and Felice become entwined in an obsessive love triangle with a beautiful Dalmatian woman named Sosia, Wendelin tempts the fates by publishing the first edition of the erotic Roman poems of Catullus -- a move that will enrage the church, scandalize the city, and change all of their lives forever.The Floating Book is a ravishing novel of letters and lust, intrigue and betrayal -- a chillingly beautiful debut that few readers will soon forget.

    Why does he seem so familiar? And what is his connection to the great Renaissance painter? Set in Paris and Italy, this lyrical first novel interweaves two parallel love stories, offering readers a unique view on the research and inspiration that goes into creating historical novels such as The Girl with the Pearl Earring and The Birth of Venus.

    Normally obedient Bess rebels and wrests from her father a year to find a husband more to her liking.Edmund Wyard, a taciturn and scarred veteran of England's campaign in Ireland, is attempting to ignore the pressure from his family to find a suitable wife as he prepares to join the Earl of Leicester's army in the Netherlands.Although Bess and Edmund are drawn to each other, they are aware that they can have nothing more than friendship. Bess knows that Edmund's wealth and family connections place him beyond her reach. And Edmund, with his well-honed sense of duty, has never considered that he could follow his own wishes.With England on the brink of war and fear of Catholic plots extending even into Lady Allingbourne's household, time is running out for both of them.  B.R.A.G. Medallion Honoree - 2018

    Van Gogh arrives at Auvers-sur-Oise, a bucolic French village that lures city artists to the country. It is here that twenty-year-old Maurguerite Gachet has grown up, attending to her father and brother ever since her mother's death. And it is here that Vincent Van Gogh will spend his last summer, under the care of Doctor Gachet - homeopathic doctor, dilettante painter, and collector. In these last days of his life, Van Gogh will create over 70 paintings, two of them portraits of Marguerite Gachet. But little does he know that, while capturing Marguerite and her garden on canvas, he will also capture her heart.Both a love story and historical novel, The Last Van Gogh recreates the final months of Vincent's life - and the tragic relationship between a young girl brimming with hope and an artist teetering on despair.

    The novel opens on a train en route to Verona. A young American woman is on an Italian tour with her famous musician husband. In a moment of fury and despair at their lifeless marriage, she drags down a piece of her luggage and gets off the train in the countryside. Marooned and on her own for the first time in eight years, she returns to Venice, gets a room at the Hotel Gritti Palace, sets out to explore the city, and chances on a group of boys tormenting a small dog, which she rescues and smuggles into the hotel.The following day she is accosted by a man who claims that the dog belongs to his employer. Reluctantly she follows him to a Gothic palazzo and to the dog’s owner, an elderly contessa. The young woman becomes faint. The contessa insists that she stay the night . . .What started off as an impulsive act of defiance opens out into an adventure—and a mystery—that summons up centuries of the Venetian past, the discovery of a lost masterpiece, and the heroine’s reclamation of herself.

    The breast of the mail bore a ragged hole and the heavy links were sticky. It took a moment for Hedyn to realize it was soaked in drying blood.“A bascinet and hauberk?” he asked.“Aye, you shall need these before the night is done.” . . . Treachery, disease, hunger, and death plague their steps as King Henry’s men near their fateful battle with the French army at Agincourt. Eager to see the world that lies beyond his small Cornish village, 12 year ol Hedyn, son of an archer and serf, is thrilled to be chosen to join King Henry’s army as it advances on Normandy. His excitement quickly gives way to exhaustion in body and spirit, as well as worry for the safety of his newfound friends and comrades. Can a mysterious stranger with a secretive past offer Hedyn hope amidst the horrors of battle?

    She could neither read nor write, and she was the reviled victim in a public rape trial, rejected by her father, and later abandoned by her husband. Nevertheless, she was one of the first women in modern times to uphold through her work and deeds the right of women to pursue careers compatible with their talents and on an equal footing with men. This edition features a new introduction by the celebrated critic and writer Susan Sontag. Anna Banti, the pen name of Lucia Lopresti, was born in Florence in 1895. Trained as an art historian, she turned to novels, stories, and autobiographical prose in the 1930s. Artemisia, her second novel, published in 1947, is the most acclaimed of the sixteen works of fiction she published during her long life, and is considered a classic of twentieth century Italian literature. Her last, harrowingly confessional novel, A Piercing Cry (Un grido lacerante), appeared in 1981. Banti also wrote art criticism and monographs on painters (Lorenzo Lotto, Fra Angelico, Velázquez, Monet), literary criticism and film reviews, and translated novels by Thackery, Colette, Alain Fournier, and Virginia Woolf. She died in Ronchi di Massa (Tuscanny) in 1985.

    He possesses a virtuosic command of the techniques of the old masters. He can paint like Leonardo, Goya, Gainsborough - artists whose works sell for millions - but this style of painting is no longer popular, and he refuses to shape his talent to fit the fashion of the day. So Wilmot makes his living cranking out parodies for ads and magazine covers. A break comes when an art dealer obtains for him a commission to restore a Venetian palace fresco by the eighteenth-century master Tiepolo, for a disreputable Italian businessman. Once there, Wilmot discovers that it is not a restoration but a re-creation, indeed a forgery. At first skeptical of the job, he then throws himself into the creative challenge and does the job brilliantly. No one can tell the modern work from something done more than two hundred years ago." "This feat attracts the attention of Werner Krebs, an art dealer with a dark past and shadier present who becomes Wilmot's friend and patron. Wilmot is suddenly working with a fervor he hasn't felt in years, but his burst of creative activity is accompanied by strange interludes. Without warning, he finds himself reliving moments from his past - not as memories but as if they are happening all over again. Soon, it is no longer his own past he's revisiting; he believes he can travel back to the seventeenth century, where he lived as the Spanish artist Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velazquez, one of the most famous painters in history. Wilmot begins to fantasize that as Velazquez, he has created a masterpiece, a stunning portrait of a nude. When the painting actually turns up, he doesn't know if he painted it or if he imagined thewhole thing." "Little by little, Wilmot enters a mirror house of illusions and hallucinations that propels him into a secret world of gangsters, greed, and murder, with his mystery patron at the center of it all, either as the mastermind behind a plot to forge a painting worth hundreds of millions, or as the man who will save Wilmot from obscurity and madness." In Chaz Wilmot, we meet the rarest breed of literary hero, one for whom the reader feels almost personally responsible. By turns brutally honest and self-deceptive, scornful of the world while yearning to make his mark on it, Wilmot comes astonishingly alive for the reader, and his perilous journey toward the truth becomes our own.

    It paints an intricate picture of daily life in the courts and streets of fifteenth-century France and gives a fascinating glimpse into the practical considerations of running a household, dressing appropriately and maintaining a reputation in all circumstances. Christine de Pizan’s book provides a valuable counterbalance to male accounts of life in the middle ages and demonstrates, often with dry humour, how a woman’s position in society could be made less precarious by following the correct etiquette.

    When they do talk: Muriel Kemp eyes my pregnant belly and tells me if I really want to succeed, I'd get rid of the baby.Driven to find out more about her curmudgeonly neighbour, Jane Cooper begins to investigate the life of Muriel, who claims to be a famous artist from Sydney's bohemian 1920s. Contemporary critics argue that legend, rather than ability, has secured her position in history. They also claim that the real Muriel Kemp died in 1936.Murderer, narcissist, sexual deviant or artistic genius and a woman before her time: Who really is Muriel Kemp?

    Bess Hardemon, a tough and canny young teacher living in the mid-nineteenth century, is determined to make a difference at her new school, Priors Heath. Under the austere gaze of the Reverend Carnegie and his deputy, Miss Simms, the young girls remain underfed and unstimulated -- until the arrival of the bright, motivated young Bess.At the cost of her own chance of finding love, Bess remains trapped by her duty, a confinement echoed a century later by Sarah, a teacher at the modern-day Priors Heath who must make her own choice between her duty to her pupils and her efforts to save a broken marriage.

    A relative unknown at the time, Sargent won the commission to paint her; the two must have recognized in each other a like-minded hunger for fame.Unveiled at the 1884 Paris Salon, Gautreau's portrait generated the attention she craved-but it led to infamy rather than stardom. Sargent had painted one strap of Gautreau's dress dangling from her shoulder, suggesting either the prelude to or the aftermath of sex. Her reputation irreparably damaged, Gautreau retired from public life, destroying all the mirrors in her home.Drawing on documents from private collections and other previously unexamined materials, and featuring a cast of characters including Oscar Wilde and Richard Wagner, Strapless is a tale of art and celebrity, obsession and betrayal.