Si cunta e si ricunta—“It is told and retold”—begin these rich and wondrous stories from Italy and Sicily. Weaving the golden thread of stories that connects magical worlds with our everyday lives, acclaimed storyteller Gioia Timpanelli shares the household rituals of a Sicilian family and turns mythic characters into our dear friends. Meet La Fortuna (Lady Luck), a princess with the power to heal, humorous folk characters, and neighbors on the streets of Brooklyn. People of exceptional wi...

Hauntingly beautiful fiction about two women, solitude, art, and transformation.For years, Gioia Timpanelli has held audiences rapt with her retellings of ancient tales, often appearing with Robert Bly, James Hillman, Joseph Campbell, and Gary Snyder. Here, in fiction full of warmth and resonances--characters we can't help but recognize, prose and imagery that play on the strings of the soul--Timpanelli draws on her deep knowledge of these old stories and their wis...

This book is addressed to “lovers of paradoxes” and we have done our utmost to assemble a stellar cast of Neapolitan and American scholars, intellectuals, and artists/writers who are strong and open-minded enough to wrestle with and illuminate the paradoxes through which Naples presents itself. Naples is a mysterious metropolis. Difficult to understand, it is an enigma to outsiders, and also to the Neapolitans themselves. Its very impenetrableness is what makes it so deliriously and irresi...

A luminous story of danger and survival.In a timeless moment in rural Sicily, a boy experiences the brutal killing of his best friend and is kidnapped by the murderers. No child should have to know evil so intimately, and yet once he does, what will save him?His salvation lies in the cycles of the seasons, the sturdy earth and its gifts of lentils and wild asparagus in a time of starvation, the animal sense that enables one to anticipate the whims and impulses of o...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER“At villa Donnafugata, long ago is never very far away,” writes bestselling author Marlena de Blasi of the magnificent if somewhat ruined castle in the mountains of Sicily that she finds, accidentally, one summer while traveling with her husband, Fernando. There de Blasi is befriended by Tosca, the patroness of the villa, an elegant and beautiful woman-of-a-certain-age who recounts her lifelong love story with the last prince of Si...

A “beguiling fairy tale” by the bestselling author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog (The New York Times).The villagers had never seen anything like it: dense white curtains of snow that instantly transformed the landscape. Not in autumn, not here in Burgundy. And on the same night a baby was discovered, dark-eyed little Maria, who would transform all their lives. Hundreds of miles away in the mountains of Abruzzo, another foundling, Clara, astonish...

“A murder mystery, a model of investigative reporting, a celebration of the fierce bonds that hold families together through tragedies…Murder in Matera is a gem.” — San Francisco Chronicle"Tantalizing" — NPR“A thrilling detective story… Stapinski pursues the study of her family’s criminal genealogy with unexpected emotional results.” — Library ...

This book is collection of 81 Masterpieces formatted for the e-readers, with descriptions, dates and Table of Contents.The book demonstrate how fundamental drawing was to van Gogh's art.Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) drew thousands of images to better his style. He believed that drawing was "the roof of everything" and completed over 1000 drawings from 1877 to 1890.At the outset of his career, he left it necessary to master black and white before attempting to work in...

With her usual "sparkling prose and inimitable wit," the award-wining author follows her scholar/sleuth and his wife as they investigate a death in Venice ( Publishers Weekly).Four-month summer holidays, spring break, and regular sabbaticals mean that Harvard professors Mary and Homer Kelly never have trouble finding time to vacation. Unfortunately, Homer's sideline as an amateur sleuth means that they rarely get to relax during their time off. And so, whe...

'Lawrence's translations of Verga's Sicilian short stories are classics in their genre, perfectly capturing their cunning fusion of artlessness, austere detachment and skilfully engineered spontaneity as well as retaining something of that lofty style for which Verga's Italian contemporaries so admired him. For seekers after the truth at the heart of Sicily's enigma, this is required reading.' The Observer 'The best of these stories (Liberty, The Gentry) have the directness, even a brutali...

The story of a troupe of actors in seventeenth- century Italy, from "one of a handful of truly indispensable American writers" (Gary Shteyngart).The Glorious Ones are an unlikely troupe of actors, traveling up and down the seventeenth-century Italian countryside performing commedia dell'arte for kings, for peasants, for anyone with coin. There is Armanda, the cheerful dwarf and ex-nun; chattering Columbina; Pantalone the miser; and the wicked Brighella—all led by...

The thrilling conclusion to the #1 national bestselling historical trilogy by Roberta Rich.In The Midwife of Venice, set in 1575, Hannah Levi was forced to flee Venice with the baby of a Venetian aristocratic family whom she rescued. Roberta Rich followed that action-packed adventure with The Harem Midwife, which exiled Hannah and her beloved husband Isaac to Constantinople--only for Hannah to become enmeshed in the shady politics of a sultan's ha...