His poetry, whether dealing with art, war, memories of childhood, or the loneliness of everyday life, is powerful and moving. A poet of colloquial language, ample generosity, and intimacy, Jarrell wrote beautifully "of the American landscape," as James Atlas noted in American Poetry Review, "[with] a broad humanism that enabled him to give voice to those had been given none of their own."The Complete Poems is the definitive volume of Randall Jarrell's verse, including Selected Poems (1955), with notes by the author; The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; and The Lost World (1965), "his last and best book," according to Robert Lowell. This volume also brings together several of Jarrell's uncollected or posthumously published poems as well as his Rilke translations.

    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.

    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.

    Inventive, humorous, inexhaustible, the story recounts Orlando's love-stricken pursuit of "the fairest of her Sex, Angelica" (in Milton's terms) through a fairyland that combines the military valors of Charlemagne's knights and their famous horses with the enchantments of King Arthur's court. Today it seems more than ever appropriate to offer a new, unabridged edition of Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, the first Renaissance epic about the common customs of, and the conflicts between, Christian Europe and Islam. Having extensively revised his earlier translation for general readers, Charles Ross has added headings and helpful summaries to Boiardo's cantos. Tenses have been regularized, and terms of gender and religion have been updated, but not so much as to block the reader's encounter with how Boiardo once viewed the world. Charles Stanley Ross has degrees from Harvard College and the University of Chicago and teaches English and comparative literature at Purdue University. "Neglect of Italian romances robs us of a whole species of pleasure and narrows our very conception of literature. It is as if a man left out Homer, or Elizabethan drama, or the novel. For like these, the romantic epic of Italy is one of the great trophies of the European genius: a genuine kind, not to be replaced by any other, and illustrated by an extremely copious and brilliant production. It is one of the successes, the undisputed achievements." -C. S. Lewis

    This powerful and disturbing study in the pathology of modern life is one of the masterworks of a writer whom as Anthony Burgess once remarked, was "always trying to get to the bottom of the human imbroglio."

    Along their treacherous and sometimes heartbreaking journey, the bears encounter an army of wild boars, a wily professor who may or may not be a magician, ghosts, snarling Marmoset the Cat, and, worst of all, treachery within their own ranks.If The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily sounds too distressing to read alone, that's because it is. Lemony Snicket's introduction to this extraordinary tale is unlikely to make you feel any better, and a careful study of Snicket's Reader's Companion, cleverly hidden at the back, may actually make you feel worse. For that reason, among many others, it is recommended that you either abandon this book, abandon plans to read it, or abandon all hope.

    Set against the political upheavals of Italy in the 1860s, it focuses on Don Fabrizio, a Sicilian prince of immense sensual appetites, wealth, and great personal magnetism. Around this powerful figure swirls a glittering array of characters: a Bourbon king, liberals and pseudo liberals, peasants and millionaires.

    A man who does not struggle does not live, he survives." (quote from the book)The book is a pseudo-biography about Alexandros Panagoulis written in the form of a novel. Fallaci had an intense romantic relationship with Panagoulis. She uses the novel to put forth her view that Panagoulis was assassinated by a vast conspiracy, a view widely shared by many Greeks.

    Ashbery fans and lovers of modern poetry alike will recognize here some of the century's most anthologized and critically admired works of poetry, including "Soonest Mended", "Decoy", "Sunrise in Suburbia", "Evening in the Country", the achingly beautiful long poem "Fragment", and Ashbery's so-called Popeye poem, the mordant and witty "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape". The Double Dream of Spring helped cement Ashbery's reputation as a must-read American poet, and no library of modern poetry is complete without it

    Originally published in Italy, "Follow Your Heart" won the coveted Premio Donna Citta di Roma and sold over 800,000 copies in that country alone before hitting bestseller lists throughout the rest of Europe. Now North American readers can enjoy the novel that has won over the world.It begins in late autumn 1992 as an elderly Italian woman, prompted by the knowledge of her encroaching death, sits down to write a letter to her granddaughter now grown and living in far-off America. Through these moving reflections, we see one life laid bare--joys, sorrows, regrets, and all. And through the eyes of a woman nearing the end of her days, we come to understand what life experience has taught her: that no matter what the stakes, we must look within ourselves and gather the courage to follow our hearts.

    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.

    Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but a love of ones neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know." Whether she writes of the loss of a friend, Cesare Pavese; or what is inexpugnable of World War II; or the Abruzzi, where she and her first husband lived in forced residence under Fascist rule; or the importance of silence in our society; or her vocation as a writer; or even a pair of worn-out shoes, Ginzburg brings to her reflections the wisdom and grace of a survivor and the spare, wry, and poetically resonant style her readers have come to recognize.

    In Ocean Sea, Alessandro Baricco presents a hypnotizing postmodern fable of human malady--psychological, existential, erotic--and the sea as a means of deliverance. At the Almayer Inn, a remote shoreline hotel, an artist dips his brush in a cup of ocean water to paint a portrait of the sea. A scientist pens love letters to a woman he has yet to meet. An adulteress searches for relief from her proclivity to fall in love. And a sixteen-year-old girl seeks a cure from a mysterious condition which science has failed to remedy. When these people meet, their fates begin to interact as if by design. Enter a mighty tempest and a ghostly mariner with a thirst for vengeance, and the Inn becomes a place where destiny and desire battle for the upper hand. Playful, provocative, and ultimately profound, Ocean Sea is a novel of striking originality and wisdom.

    This bilingual edition contains a representative selection of poems from different periods and different aspects of his vast output.

    Called in to investigate, melancholy Detective Ciccio, a secret admirer of the murdered woman and a friend of her husband’s, discovers that almost everyone in the apartment building is somehow involved in the case, and with each new development the mystery only deepens and broadens. Gadda’s sublimely different detective story presents a scathing picture of fascist Italy while tracking the elusiveness of the truth, the impossibility of proof, and the infinite complexity of the workings of fate, showing how they come into conflict with the demands of justice and love. Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Alberto Moravia all considered That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana to be the great modern Italian novel. Unquestionably, it is a work of universal significance and protean genius: a rich social novel, a comic opera, an act of political resistance, a blazing feat of baroque wordplay, and a haunting story of life and death in the Eternal City.