Paris in the 1920s – dizzy and decadent. Where a young man can make a fortune with his wits … unless he is led into temptation. Cocaine’s dandified hero Tito Arnaudi invents lurid scandals and gruesome deaths, and sells these stories to the newspape
Here are two major works by the famed Polish novelist and dramatist Witold Gombrowicz. The first, Cosmos, a metaphysical thriller, revolves around an absurd investigation. It is set in provincial Poland and narrated by a seedy, pathetic, and witty student
Sixteenth-century Prague provides the setting for the story of the forbidden love between emperor Rudolf II and Esther, the wife of an influential financier, and of the efforts of the city's Great Rabbi to right a situation angering God.
Stille uses the incredible and appallingly entertaining story of Silvio Berlusconi's rise to power to paint a portrait of Italy today that's invaluable for anyone who wants to understand that country or put the United States' problems in perspective.
In 1992 Italy was convulsed by two brazen Mafia assassinations of high-ranking officials. The latest "excellent cadavers" were Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the Sicilian magistrates who had been the Cosa Nostra's most implacable enemies. Yet in t
A profoundly moving history of Italy’s Jews under the shadow of the Holocaust, told through the lives of five Jewish Italian families: the Ovazzas of Turin, who prospered under Mussolini and whose patriarch became a prominent fascist; the Foas of Turin,
A masterpiece of literary memory—a powerful exploration of the intersections of family, history, and memory"One evening in May 1948, my mother went to a party in New York with her first husband and left it with her second, my father." So begins the pass
One of the 20th century's essential novels depicting Fascism's rise in Italy. Set and written in Fascist Italy, this book exposes that regime's use of brute force for the body and lies for the mind. Through the story of the once-exiled Pietro Spina, Italy
The God That Failed is a classic work and crucial document of the Cold War that brings together essays by six of the most important writers of the twentieth century on their conversion to and subsequent disillusionment with communism. In describing their
