A novel built from beginnings...You buy a book called If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller and sit down to read. The story stops mid-sentence. When you find another copy, it contains a different opening. Each attempt to continue leads to a new narrative that breaks off just as it gathers momentum.As the Reader, you set out to track down the missing text. Along the way you encounter Ludmilla, another reader pursuing the same vanished book. What follow...

Now available in a deluxe edition featuring never-before-seen illustrations by the author: the beloved internationally bestselling historical mystery about a brilliant monk called upon to solve a series of baffling murders in a fourteenth-century Italian abbey“Explodes with pyrotechnic inventions, literally as well as figuratively. Hold on till the end.” —New York Times“Whether you're into Sherlock Holmes, Montaillou, Borge...

Three editors invent a conspiracy. The world decides it is real.Casaubon, Belbo and Diotallevi work in a Milan publishing house surrounded by manuscripts on the occult and the Knights Templar. Amused by the pattern-seeking of amateur historians and secret-society enthusiasts, they decide to construct their own grand theory.What begins as a game becomes ‘The Plan’, an elaborate network of invented connections linking Templars, Rosicrucians, secret codes, and...

Love & Profanity features more than forty brief, brilliant, and unforgettable true stories from writers both renowned and on the rise. Discover strange and surprising scenes of people coming of age amidst the everyday intensity of teenage life. Witness transformative moments arising from the mundane. Behold the young adult in full splendor and horror, bursting with love and profanity.

Italo Calvino's enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures, The Complete Cosmicomics is translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks and William Weaver in Penguin Modern Classics.'Naturally, we were all there, - dld Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardine...

A "scintillating collection" of essays on Disneyland, medieval times, and much more, from the author of Foucault's Pendulum (Los Angeles Times).Collected here are some of Umberto Eco's finest popular essays, recording the incisive and surprisingly entertaining observations of his restless intellectual mind. As the author puts it in the preface to the second edition: "In these pages, I try to interpret and to help others interpret some 'signs.' These signs ...

Fifty-five fictional cities, each described in beautiful detail - each with a woman's name...In Invisible Cities Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city: Venice. As Gore Vidal wrote 'Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvellous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly ...

Long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce and Kafka, and now available in a supple new English translation, Italo Svevo’s charming and splendidly idiosyncratic novel conducts readers deep into one hilariously hyperactive and endlessly self-deluding mind. The mind in question belongs to Zeno Cosini, a neurotic Italian businessman who is writing his confessions at the behest of his psychiatrist. Here are Zeno’s interminable attempts to quit smoking, his courtship o...

The year is 1643. Roberto, a young nobleman, survives war, the Bastille, exile and shipwreck as he voyages to a Pacific island straddling the date meridian. There he waits now, alone on the mysteriously deserted Daphne, separated by treacherous reefs from the island beyond: the island of the day before. If he could reach it, time - and his misfortunes - might be reversed. But first he must learn to swim...

Matrix analysis of structures is a vital subject to every structural analyst, whether working in aero-astro, civil, or mechanical engineering. It provides a comprehensive approach to the analysis of a wide variety of structural types, and therefore offers a major advantage over traditional metho~ which often differ for each type of structure. The matrix approach also provides an efficient means of describing various steps in the analysis and is easily programmed for digital computers. Use ...

A magical, mystical novella about the art and power of storytelling, this is Italo Calvino's miniature masterpiece.A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then in a tavern. Having mysteriously lost their powers of speech, they must tell their tales using only a deck of tarot cards. As their stories interlink and overlap, a fantastic, surreal and chaotic history of the human quest for meaning unfolds.BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novella...

A poor city worker keeps seeking pockets of nature in modern urban life, with comic and sometimes disastrous results.Marcovaldo is poor, hopeful and unusually alert to the natural world. In the modern Italian city where he lives with his family, he searches for mushrooms, fresh air, moonlight, birds, fish, rest and small enchantments among streets, factories, neon and supermarkets.Each attempt turns comic, tender or disastrous. A cure becomes a problem, a p...