Amid wars, failed revolutions and the shifting of frontiers, the bit-part players often have the best tales to tell - an astonishing, genre-blurring travelogue from Italian master Claudio Magris.In the tiny borderlands of Istria and Italy, from the forests of Monte Nevoso, to the hidden valleys of the Tyrol, to a Trieste café, Microcosms pieces together a mosaic of stories - comic, tragic, picaresque, nostalgic - from life's minor characters. Their worlds ...

An illuminating portrait of a world in ferment after the First world War, and a man seeking an authentic life.Early this century Enrico, a young intellectual, leaves the city of Gorizia with its abundant population and culture, to spend several years living on the Patagonian pampas, alone with his ancient Greek texts, his flocks and, every now and then, a woman. He has been taught by his closest friend, Carlo, a philosopher/poet who commits suicide in his early twe...

Hailed as a masterpiece upon its initial publication in Italy, Blindly is a novel of highly original, poetic intensity, a Jacob's Ladder reversed to descend into the nether regions of history and, in particular, of the twentieth century. In a shifting, choral monologue—part confession, part psychiatric session—a man recounts (invents, falsifies, hides, screams out) his life, which has passed through the horrors, the hopes and betrayals, and the revolutions of the last century, as well as t...

In this fascinating journey Claudio Magris, whose knowledge is encyclopaedic and whose curiosity limitless, guides his reader from the river's source in the Bavarian hills through Austro-Hungary and the Balkans to the Black Sea. Along the way he raises the ghosts that inhabit the houses and monuments - from Ovid and Marcus Aurelius to Kafka and Canetti - and in so doing sets his finger on the pulse of Central Europe, the vital crucible of a culture that draws on influences of East and West...

From one of Europe’s most revered authors, a tale of one man’s obsessive project to collect the instruments of death, evil, and humanity’s darkest atrocities in order to oppose them Claudio Magris’s searing new novel ruthlessly confronts the human obsession with war and its savagery in every age and every country. His tale centers on a man whose maniacal devotion to the creation of a Museum of War involves both a horrible secret and the hope of redemption. Luisa Brooks, hi...

A collection of brief, but intimate meditations on life and culture ranging from controversial matters to private momentsThe internationally acclaimed author Claudio Magris offers a collection of brief “snapshots” reflecting on life and culture from 1999 to 2013 through his very personal lens. Some pieces portray private, intimate moments, while others offer views on public, sometimes controversial matters; the tone is sometimes serious, sometimes humorous, sometim...

A writer for whom the journey has always mattered reinvents the very form itself in this inviting collection of in-the-moment impressions of his journeysA writer of enormous erudition and wide-ranging travels, Claudio Magris selects for this volume writings penned during trips and wanderings over the span of several decades. He has traveled through these years with many beloved companions, to whom he dedicates the book, and sought the kind of journey “that occurs w...

Who is the mysterious narrator of Blindly? Clearly a recluse and a fugitive, but what more of him can we discern? Baffled by the events of his own life, he muses, "When I write, and even now when I think back on it, I hear a kind of buzzing, blathered words that I can barely understand, gnats droning around a table lamp, that I have to continually swat away with my hand, so as not to lose the thread."Claudio Magris, one of Europe's leading authors and cultural philosophers...

Who is the mysterious narrator of Blindly? Clearly a recluse and a fugitive, but what more of him can we discern? Baffled by the events of his own life, he muses, "When I write, and even now when I think back on it, I hear a kind of buzzing, blathered words that I can barely understand, gnats droning around a table lamp, that I have to continually swat away with my hand, so as not to lose the thread."Claudio Magris, one of Europe's leading authors and cultural philosophers...

A journalist embarks on the adventure of a lifetime—living in a remote cabin in Siberia—in this Thoreau-esque meditation on escaping the chaos of modern life and rediscovering the luxury of solitude.“…wry, exuberant, and a perfect balm for anyone who dreams of running away to the middle of nowhere.”—San Francisco ChronicleNo stranger to inhospitable places, journalist Sylvain Tesson exiles himself to a wooden cabin on Siberi...

Supernaturally tinged stories from William T. Vollmann, author of the National Book Award winner Europe CentralIn this magnificent new work of fiction, his first in nine years, celebrated author William T. Vollmann offers a collection of ghost stories linked by themes of love, death, and the erotic.A Bohemian farmer’s dead wife returns to him, and their love endures, but at a gruesome price. A geisha prolongs her life by turning into a cherry tree....

Modernism gave us Yeats and Picasso, Stravinsky and Balanchine—and it gave us Guy Davenport, perhaps its finest and most neglected heir, whose four decades of fiction, poetry, essays, and translations are collected here in paperback for the very first time*"The imagination is like the drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re–educate our eyes." —*Guy Davenport