In Naples, Lucky Luciano fixes horse races and launches the global heroin trade. And in Bologna, a bartender searches for true love and his missing communist father.Set during the height of the Cold War - with the world divided into East and West - 54 features Italian partisans, KGB agents, Parisian lowlifes, and cameos by David Niven, Marshal Tito, and Grace Kelly. Wu Ming brings us a cinematic romp that is by turns edgy social satire and modern comic send up.

    Their lives are shaped by hunger, theft, betrayal, and prostitution, and they celebrate their triumphs with brutal abandon and die bleak deaths. This harsh world is portrayed with an understanding that humanity and even humor can exist amidst a hard and amoral society. A novel that caused a scandal upon its first publication more than 50 years ago, this new translation eloquently captures the gritty Roman slang of the Italian original and tells a story that still resonates powerfully to this day.

    “Over there!” he cries to his brother, Carlo, sunning beside him. “Over there!”So begins the adventure that will tear a hole in Pietro’s life. For while he and his brother struggle to save two drowning swimmers, a tragedy is unfolding down the road at his summer cottage. Instead of coming home to a hero’s welcome, Pietro is greeted by the flashing lights of an ambulance, the wide-eyed stare of his young daughter, Claudia, and the terrible news that his fiancée, Lara, is dead.Life must go on. Or does it? Pietro, a true iconoclast, has to find his own way. When he drops Claudia off for the first day of school, he decides to wait outside for her all day, and then every day. To protect her. To protect himself. To wait for the heavy fist of grief to strike. But as the days and weeks go by, the small parking lot in front of the school becomes his refuge from the world as well as the place where family and colleagues come to relieve their own suffering—among them, the woman he rescued from the waves. And Pietro plunges deeper into the depths of his life before seeing the simple truth before his eyes.Sandro Veronesi makes art of every detail, creating a mosaic of humor, hope,profound insight, and emotional resonance. Quiet Chaos is an unprecedented portrayal of a life set adrift by death.

    It is a deceptively simple story – five characters, the events of a few days, the intrigues of families and lovers.The place is Rome. The central figure is Michele, a young man in confused but furious rebellion against the emptiness of bourgeois life. His father is dead; his mother, Mariagrazia, desperately clings to her bored lover, Leo; his sister has no hope of marriage or career and bleakly prepares to give herself to Leo as well. A frequent visitor is Leo's former lover, Lisa, ostensibly Mariagrazia's friend, a woman who feels she is in the final late bloom before age destroys beauty. She longs to make Michele her lover, but he is bored and disgusted by her pretenses, her vanity, her desperation.All five are cast loose on the sea of modern life – obsessed with what they want, what they feel they are owed, the wrongs that have been done them, their loneliness. What Moravia destroys forever in this pitiless novel is the illusion that a world of ever-growing material comfort can ever feed the human soul.

    Published here for the first time in the English language, it is presented with Foscolo's highly acclaimed poem, Of Tombs. Banished from his homeland and from the woman he loves, Jacopo Ortis lives with the insufferable feelings of disillusionment and betrayal. Gone are his youthful dreams of literary glory, and in their place only his embittered laughter at fortune, at men, and at God. In the anguish of his state he feels himself compelled to make one final, titanic, and tragic gesture to the rulers of his age.

    Forced to flee, they are then cruelly separated, and must face many dangers including plague, famine and imprisonment, and confront a variety of strange characters—the mysterious Nun of Monza, the fiery Father Cristoforo and the sinister “Unnamed”—in their struggle to be reunited. A vigorous portrayal of enduring passion, The Betrothed‘s exploration of love, power, and faith presents a whirling panorama of seventeenth-century Italian life and is one of the greatest European historical novels.“The 19th-century Italian literary classic renowned for its vivid descriptions of the 1630 pestilence that gutted Milan.” —The New York Times“Compulsory reading for Italian high school students, The Betrothed gives a historically accurate account of the bubonic plague that wiped out a quarter of Milan’s population in 1629-1631.” —Politico“This is not just a book; it offers consolation to the whole of humanity.” —Giuseppe Verdi

    Her life has been characterized by honor and fierce passion, and above all by an abiding search for perfect love that has spanned much of the twentieth century. Ever in the background of this remarkable woman's story is the stunning Sardinian landscape, the deep blues of the Mediterranean, the rugged mountains of the Sardinian back-country dotted with charming villages lost in time.With warmth, great humor, and deep insight Milena Agus writes about the customs and the beauty of her native Sardinia, about love, family, immigration, war, and peace. From the Land of the Moon is the moving English debut of one of Italy s most important new literary talents.

    In an effort to retrieve his past, he withdraws to the family home somewhere in the hills between Milan and Turin. There, in the sprawling attic, he searches through boxes of old newspapers, comics, records, photo albums, and adolescent diaries. And so Yambo relives the story of his generation: Mussolini, Catholic education and guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Fred Astaire. His memories run wild, and the life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the frames to capture one simple, innocent image: that of his first love. A fascinating, abundant novel-wide-ranging, nostalgic, funny, full of heart-from the incomparable Eco.

    To avenge what you have done you will die. But what has Manno the pharmacist done? Nothing that he can think of. The next day he and his hunting companion are both dead. The police investigation is inconclusive. However, a modest high school teacher with a literary bent has noticed a clue that, he believes, will allow him to trace the killer. Patiently, methodically, he begins to untangle a web of erotic intrigue and political calculation. But the results of his amateur sleuthing are unexpected—and tragic. To Each His Own is one of the masterworks of the great Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia—a gripping and unconventional detective story that is also an anatomy of a society founded on secrets, lies, collusion, and violence.

    He spent many years there as director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Lisbon. He even wrote Requiem in Portuguese; it had to be translated into Italian for publication in his native Italy.Requiem's narrator has an appointment to meet someone on a quay by the Tagus at twelve. But, it turns out, not twelve noon, twelve midnight, so he has a long time to while away. As the day unfolds, he has many encounters—a young junky, a taxi driver who is not familiar with the streets, several waiters, a gypsy, a cemetery keeper, the mysterious Isabel, an accordionist, in all almost two dozen people both real and illusionary. Finally he meets The Guest, the ghost of the long dead great poet Fernando Pessoa. Part travelog, part autobiography, part fiction, and even a bit of a cookbook, Requiem becomes an homage to a country and its people, and a farewell to the past as the narrator lays claim to a literary forebear who, like himself, is an evasive and many-sided personality.

    Across the chessboard of Europe, from the German plains to the flourishing Dutch cities and down to Venice, the gateway to the East, our hero, a 'Survivor', a radical Protestant Anabaptist who goes under many names, and his enemy, a loyal papal spy and heretic hunter known mysteriously as "Q" play a game in which no moves are forbidden and the true size of the stakes remain hidden until the end. What begins as a personal struggle to reveal each other's identity becomes a mission that can only end in death.

    In this period the Italian Communist Party is very strong, but the Second World War and fascism are still vividly remembered. Boscaccio has a communist mayor named Peppone. He wants to realise the communist ideals, and the Roman Catholic priest Don Camillo is desperately trying to prevent this. But despite their different views these men can count on each other in the fight against social injustice and abuses.

    One is a Hungarian bastard peasant boy touched by brilliance, the other the sole heir to an Austrian aristocratic family desperately clinging to the prerogatives of noble birth. The key to their bond lies hidden in the secret of a beautiful, strangely carved violin. As their lives unfold through the most violent decades of our century, the two become companions, rivals, and, inevitably, lethal enemies.

    Giovanna, he says, looks more like her Aunt Vittoria every day. But can it be true? Is she really changing? Is she turning into her Aunt Vittoria, a woman she hardly knows but whom her mother and father clearly despise? Surely there is a mirror somewhere in which she can see herself as she truly is.Giovanna is searching for her reflection in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: Naples of the heights, which assumes a mask of refinement, and Naples of the depths, a place of excess and vulgarity. She moves from one to the other in search of the truth, but neither city seems to offer answers or escape.Named one of 2016’s most influential people by TIME Magazine and frequently touted as a future Nobel Prize-winner, Elena Ferrante has become one of the world’s most read and beloved writers. With this new novel about the transition from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, Ferrante proves once again that she deserves her many accolades. In The Lying Life of Adults,/i>, readers will discover another gripping, highly addictive, and totally unforgettable Neapolitan story.

    There she witnessed the full impact of the war and first formed the ambition to write an account of what history - the great political events driven by men of power, wealth, and ambition - does when it reaches the realm of ordinary people struggling for life and bread. The central character in this powerful and unforgiving novel is Ida Mancuso, a schoolteacher whose husband has died and whose feckless teenage son treats the war as his playground. A German soldier on his way to North Africa rapes her, falls in love with her, and leaves her pregnant with a boy whose survival becomes Ida's passion. Around these two other characters come and go, each caught up by the war which is like a river in flood. We catch glimpses of bombing raids, street crimes, a cattle car from which human cries emerge, an Italian soldier succumbing to frostbite on the Russian front, the dumb endurance of peasants who have lived their whole lives with nothing and now must get by with less than nothing.