As Ida Susser writes in reference to Belmonte's Broken Fountain, "good ethnographies have long lives." This classic of urban anthropology, one of the most acclaimed ethnographies of recent years, offers vivid, literary descriptions of Fontana del Re, an impoverished Neapolitan neighborhood. Belmonte documents the struggles of Neapolitans surrounded by crumbling buildings and economic insecurity. He details family dynamics as well as the working of Naples's informal economy, the da...

Dive into the epic military history and sweeping geopolitics of a warrior tribe that conquered three continents. Perfect for an educational commute, this immersive deep dive transports you from dusty frontiers to the dazzling palaces of Constantinople.Beyond brutal wars and palace intrigues, uncover the human stories of everyday citizens navigating centuries of dramatic change. This thought-provoking narrative reveals how one dynasty balanced diverse faiths, seized global power, an...

Dive into the epic military history and sweeping geopolitics of a warrior tribe that conquered three continents. Perfect for an educational commute, this immersive deep dive transports you from dusty frontiers to the dazzling palaces of Constantinople.Beyond brutal wars and palace intrigues, uncover the human stories of everyday citizens navigating centuries of dramatic change. This thought-provoking narrative reveals how one dynasty balanced diverse faiths, seized global power, an...

Dive into the epic military history and sweeping geopolitics of a warrior tribe that conquered three continents. Perfect for an educational commute, this immersive deep dive transports you from dusty frontiers to the dazzling palaces of Constantinople.Beyond brutal wars and palace intrigues, uncover the human stories of everyday citizens navigating centuries of dramatic change. This thought-provoking narrative reveals how one dynasty balanced diverse faiths, seized global power, an...

Dive into the epic military history and sweeping geopolitics of a warrior tribe that conquered three continents. Perfect for an educational commute, this immersive deep dive transports you from dusty frontiers to the dazzling palaces of Constantinople.Beyond brutal wars and palace intrigues, uncover the human stories of everyday citizens navigating centuries of dramatic change. This thought-provoking narrative reveals how one dynasty balanced diverse faiths, seized global power, an...

Join the bestselling author of Ciao, America! on a lively tour of modern Italy that takes you behind the seductive face it puts on for visitors—la bella figura—and highlights its maddening, paradoxical true selfYou won’t need luggage for this hypothetical and hilarious trip into the hearts and minds of Beppe Severgnini’s fellow Italians. In fact, Beppe would prefer if you left behind the baggage his crafty and elegant countrymen have smuggled into...

One of The Guardian's Best Books of the Year: Personal writings by the anonymous author who became a literary phenomenon with My Brilliant Friend.The writer known as Elena Ferrante has taken pains to hide her identity in the hope that readers would focus on her body of work. But in this volume, she invites us into Elena Ferrante's workshop and offers a glimpse into the drawers of her writing desk—those drawers from which emerged her three early st...

From Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present.As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed for his study of modern art, The Shock of the New, he is perhaps America’s most widely read and admired writer on art. In this book: nearly a hundred of his finest essays o...

The writing career of Booker Prize winner John Berger–poet, storyteller, playwright, and essayist–has yielded some of the most original and compelling examinations of art and life of the past half century. In this essential volume, Geoff Dyer has brought together a rich selection of many of Berger’s seminal essays.Berger’s insights make it impossible to look at a painting, watch a film, or even visit a zoo in quite the same way again. The vast range of subjects he addresses, the le...

R enowned French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre references artists such as Tintoretto, Calder, Lapoujade, Titian, Raphael, and Michaelangelo in discussing how great art of the past relates to the challenges of his eraEssays in Aesthetics is a provocative collection that considers the nature of art and its meaning. Sartre considers the artist's "function," and the relation of art and the artist to the human condition. Sartre integrates his deep concern for the...

**An NPR Best Book of the YearVulture • “15 Must-Read Translated Books From the Past 5 Years”Written during the height of the 1970s Italian domestic terror, a cult novel, with distinct echoes of Lovecraft and Borges, makes its English-language debut.**In the spare wing of a church-run sanatorium, some zealous youths create "the Library," a space where lonely citizens can read one another’s personal diaries and connect with like-minded souls in "dialogues across the e...

Arthur C. Danto's essays not only critique bodies of work but reflect upon art's conceptual evolution as well, drawing for the reader a kind of "philosophical map" indicating how art and the criteria for judging it has changed over the twentieth century. In Unnatural Wonders the renowned critic finds himself at a point when contemporary art has become wholly pluralistic, even chaotic-with one medium as good as another-and when the moment for the "next thing" has already passed. So...