The tales are bawdy and irreverent but also tender and whimsical, acute in psychological characterization and encyclopedic in description. They are also evocative of marvelous worlds of fairy-tale unreality as well as of the everyday rituals of life in seventeenth-century Naples. Yet because the original is written in the nonstandard Neopolitan dialect of Italian—and was last translated fully into English in 1932—this important piece of Baroque literature has long been inaccessible to both the general public and most fairy-tale scholars.Giambattista Basile’s “The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones” is a modern translation that preserves the distinctive character of Basile’s original. Working directly from the original Neopolitan version, translator Nancy L. Canepa takes pains to maintain the idiosyncratic tone of The Tale of Tales as well as the work’s unpredictable structure. This edition keeps the repetition, experimental syntax, and inventive metaphors of the original version intact, bringing Basile’s words directly to twenty-first-century readers for the first time. This volume is also fully annotated, so as to elucidate any unfamiliar cultural references alongside the text. Giambattista Basile’s “The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones” is also lushly illustrated and includes a foreword, an introduction, an illustrator’s note, and a complete bibliography.The publication of The Tale of Tales marked not only a culmination of the interest in the popular culture and folk traditions of the Renaissance period but also the beginning of the era of the artful and sophisticated “authored” fairy tale that inspired and influenced later writers like Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Giambattista Basile’s “The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones” offers an excellent point of departure for reflection about what constitutes Italian culture, as well as for discussion of the relevance that forms of early modern culture like fairy tales still hold for us today. This volume is vital reading for fairy-tale scholars and anyone interested in cultural history.

    The final days of the Fascist Republic. World War II is nearing it's frantic conclusion. The regime's days are numbered, it's disgraced leaders know it, and their quibbling over pieces of the post-war pie is getting more desperate by the minute. Commissario De Luca has been handed a murder investigation that will draw him into the private lives of the rich, priviledged, and powerful. With Mussolini's house of cards ready to collapse, he faces a world mired in sadistic sex, dirty money, drugs, and murder.Carte Blanche, the first installment in Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca Trilogy, is more than a first-rate crime story. It is also an investigation into the workings of justice in a state that is crumbling under the weight of profound historic change. The De Luca Trilogy is set during one of modern history's seminal moments and describes a nation's ardent search to rediscover its moral bearings after being torn in two by civil strife and political corruption. Threatened by the machinations of a decaying political class, De Luca, himself reminiscent of the disenchanted Dashiell Hammett PI, is a simple man doing a tough job as best he can. Even when he has wrapped up his investigation, Commissario De Luca will still have to face one final, fateful decision.

    Just like a "real boy." Until he learns that to become truly real, he must open his heart and think of others.

    By wearing them, she believes, she will escape the suffocating life of her small Sicilian village. Convinced that nuns wear trousers under their habits, she runs away to a convent, only to be disappointed. The only people who do wear trousers, her mother tells her, are men and puttane - whores. She embarks on an apprenticeship in manhood under the expert eye of a cousin, who trains her to spit, strut, and scratch herself as effectively as the next man, but in a squalid little episode she discovers the biological nature of sexual differences. With virility thus denied her, there is nothing left but to give the second option a try - becoming a whore. Taken under the wing of an older, "liberated" classmate, Annetta is trained in the arts of flirtation and seduction. The lessons are so effective that shortly thereafter, when she is spied ardently kissing a young man, Annetta is immediately taken out of school and banished to live with her aunt and uncle, presumably out of man's way. But there, to her distress, she finds herself trapped in dark family secrets of incest and adultery. Good Girls Don't Wear Trousers, which provoked a storm of controversy in Italy, has sold over two million copies in Europe.

    So begins the last hundred days of Lucio’s life, as he attempts to care for his family, win back his wife (the love of his life and afterlife), and spend the next three months enjoying every moment with a zest he hasn’t felt in years. From helping his hopelessly romantic, widowed father-in-law find love, discovering comfort in enduring friendships, and finding new ones, Lucio becomes, at last, the man he’s always meant to be. In 100 epigrammatic chapters, one for each of Lucio’s remaining days on earth,100 Days of Happiness is as delicious as a hot doughnut and a morning cappuccino. Wistful, often hilarious, and always delectable, 100 Days of Happiness reminds us all to remember the preciousness of life and what matters most.

    It has since been performed all over the world and is widely recognised as a classic of modern drama. A sharp and hilarious satire on political corruption, it concerns the case of an anarchist railway worker who, in 1969, 'fell' to his death from a police headquarters window.This version of the play was premiered in London in 2003.Commentary and notes by Joseph Farrell.Content: Dario Fo Plot Commentary Further reading Accidental death of an anarchist NotesQuestions for further study.

    Yet, what are they? Miniature psychodramas, prose poems, tall tales, sudden illuminations, malevolent sophistries, fabliaux, paranoiac excursions, existential oxymorons, or wondrous, baleful absurdities? Always provocative, insolent, sinister, and quite often funny, these 100 comic novels are populated by decidedly ordinary lovers, martyrs, killers, thieves, maniacs, emperors, bandits, sleepers, architects, hunters, prisoners, writers, hallucinations, ghosts, spheres, dragons, Doppelgngers, knights, fairies, angels, animal incarnations, and Dreamstuff. Each "novel" construes itself into a kind of Mbius strip, in which, as one critic has noted, "time turns in a circle and bites its tail" like the Ouroborous. In any event, Centuria provides 100 uncategorizable reasons to experience and celebrate an immeasurably wonderful writer. Brilliantly translated from the Italian by Henry Martin.

    is on the verge of just about everything and consumed by a restless, unanswered longing that rebels against jumping through the hoops of school. Staring down the tunnel to a mundane adulthood, he is appalled by the banality and overwhelming predictability of it all: teachers, parents, and above all his classmates - the seething masses of dutiful zombies and sistren of the Evervirgin Sorority. A bicycle bandit with a DeNiro smile, Alex sports a homemade buzzcut, ditches school to drink and trade stories with his posse of delinquents and rogues, and chases away the blues by assailing his eardrums with the Clash. He shares a brief friendship with the privileged, semi-degenerate Martino, who seems to have mastered the devil-may-care stance Alex covets - until he's busted for drugs. And then comes the sudden entrance of Aidi, who seems to instantly understand, complement, and challenge him. A hundred letters and conversations later, she is magnificent, amazing, irreplaceable ... and leaving for a year in America at the end of the summer.

    Though innocent of the crime, he accepts the guilty verdict as punishment for marrying Giovanna Era through a civil ceremony rather than an expensive church wedding. When her husband is taken away, Giovanna has no way to provide for herself, her mother, and her son, who soon dies of malnutrition. Out of desperation she divorces Costantino, according to a new law for wives of convicts, and marries a wealthy but brutish landowner. When the true murderer confesses and Costantino returns, he and Giovanna begin a forbidden and ultimately destructive affair.Deleda's tragic story of poverty, passion, and guilt portrays the primitive and remote world of the church, pre-Christian superstitions, and laws dictated from the mainland, in her native Sardinia, where society hangs in a delicate balance. Once this order is disrupted, none of these characters can escape the spiral of destruction dictated by fate, God, and society.

    Which is how, in 1929, seventeen-year-old Liliana Cattaneo arrives there from Rome on a ship filled with eager colonists to join her brother and his new wife.Liliana is sure she was on the brink of a great adventure, but what awaits her is not the Mediterranean idyll of cocktail parties, smart dances, dashing officers and romantic intrigues she had imagined. Instead she finds a world of persecution, violence, repression, corruption and deceptions both great and small. A child of fascist Italy, blown about by the winds of fascism and Catholicism, Liliana becomes enmeshed in a dark liaison which has terrible consequences both for her and those she loves most. The Fourth Shore is the engrossing and intensely poignant story of Liliana's journey from Rome to Tripoli to a north London suburb where, as plain Lily Jones, she begins to uncover a secret she has buried so deeply that even she is far from certain what it is.

    It is based in a prodigious imagination, a very curious sense of humor and a rare command of irony.The short stories included are:- Gogol's Wife- Pastoral- Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies- The Two Old Maids- Wedding Night- The Death of the King of France- Giovanni and His Wife- Sunstroke- A Romantic's Letter on Gambling

    They arrive to find the city in chaos but they hope to save the spirit of the empire by rescuing the young son of the last Emperor, Romulus Augustus.

    Mazzucco weaves her own family history into a great American novel of the immigrant experience. A sweeping tale of discovery, love, and loss, Vita is a passionate blend of biography and autobiography, of fantasy and fiction.In April 1903, the steamship Republic spills more than two thousand immigrants onto Ellis Island. Among them are Diamante, age twelve, and Vita, nine, sent by their poor families in southern Italy to make their way in America. Amid the chaos and splendor of New York, the misery and criminality of Little Italy, and the shady tenants of Vita's father's decrepit Prince Street boarding house, Diamante and Vita struggle to survive, to create a new life, and to become American. From journeys west in search of work to journeys back to Italy in search of their roots, to Vita's son's encounter with his mother's home town while serving as an army captain in World War II, Vita touches on every aspect of the heartbreaking and inspiring immigrant story.The award-winning Italian author Melania G. Mazzucco weaves her own family history into a great American novel of the immigrant experience. A sweeping tale of discovery, love, and loss, Vita is a passionate blend of biography and autobiography, of fantasy and fiction.

    Using short, encyclopaedic/biographical entries, Wilcock profiles people who are definitely iconoclasts. They tear down traditional beliefs and scientific notions on many different topics, from utopias to biology, offering a riveting array of ideas. Some real people with iconoclastic bents are included along with some bizarre fictional characters.

    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.