Essays on art, politics and life from the best-selling author of GomorrahGomorrah, Roberto Saviano’s 2006 exposé of Naples’s Camorra mafia, was an international bestseller and became an award-winning film. But the death threats that followed forced the author into hiding. Saviano was ostracized by his countrymen and went on the run, changing his location every few months and compelled to keep perpetual company with his bodyguards. To this day, he ...

The runaway bestselling exposé about Canada's most infamous mafia family is finally available in English, updated to include shocking events and revelations that followed its newsmaking publication in Québec.Queens, New York, 1981. When Alphonse "Sonny Red" Indelicato and two others are found dead in a vacant lot, police fail to solve their murders. For their killer and his Montréal family, their deaths mark the beginning of an epic rise to criminal power that will last over thirty...

The basis of the Sundance TV series GomorrahA New York Times Notable Book of the YearGomorrah is a bold and important work of investigative writing that holds global significance, one heroic young man's impassioned story of a place under the rule of a murderous organization.A groundbreaking major bestseller in Italy, Gomorrah is Roberto Saviano's gripping nonfiction account of the decline of Naples...

The immigrant tenants of a building in Rome offer skewed accounts of a murder in this prize-winning satire by the Algerian-born Italian author ( Publishers Weekly).Piazza Vittorio is home to a polyglot community of immigrants who have come to Rome from all over the world. But when a tenant is murdered in the building's elevator, the delicate balance is thrown into disarray. As each of the victim's neighbors is questioned by the police, readers are offered a...

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...

WIth full-color illustrations throughoutFrom the best-selling author of Sexual Personae and Break, Blow, Burn and one of our most acclaimed cultural critics, here is an enthralling journey through Western art’s defining moments, from the ancient Egyptian tomb of Queen Nefertari to George Lucas’s volcano planet duel in Revenge of the Sith.America’s premier intellectual provocateur returns to the subject that brought her fame, the g...

A blazingly intelligent first book of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the ThiefNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BYTime • The Guardian • Harper's Bazaar • San Francisco Chronicle • The Atlantic • Financial Times • KirkusFinalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

"A fast-paced and engrossing exposé of the shady underbelly of the art world." ―Robert K. Wittman, New York Times –bestselling authorToday, art theft is one of the most profitable criminal enterprises in the world, exceeding $6 billion in losses to galleries and art collectors annually. And the masterpieces of Rembrandt van Rijn are some of the most frequently targeted.In Stealing Rembrandts, art security...

When we think of the Italian Mafia, we think of Marlon Brando, Tony Soprano, and the Corleones-iconic actors and characters who give shady dealings a mythical pop presence. Yet these sensational depictions take us only so far. The true story of the Mafia reveals both an organization and mindset dedicated to the preservation of tradition. It is no accident that the rise of the Mafia coincided with the unification of Italy and the influx of immigrants into America. The Mafia means more than ...

The story begins, as stories do in all good thrillers, with a botched robbery and a police chase. Eight Apuleian vases of the fourth century B.C. are discovered in the swimming pool of a German-based art smuggler. More valuable than the recovery of the vases, however, is the discovery of the smuggler's card index detailing his deals and dealers. It reveals the existence of a web of tombaroli -- tomb raiders -- who steal classical artifacts, and a network of dealers and smugglers w...

You’re no idiot, of course. You know there’s more to Italy’s rich tapestry than spaghetti and the Sicilian Mafia, but you also know you have a lot to learn about the country that brought you the paintings of Michelangelo, the poetry of Dante, and the Ferrari of your dreams.Get ready to indulge! The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Italian History and Culture will satisfy your thirst for all things Italian with its in-depth information about Italian art and literature, wine and c...

In this prescient essay collection, the acclaimed author of Foucault's Pendulum examines the cultural trends and perils at the dawn of the 21st century.In the last decade of the 20th century, Umberto Eco saw an urgent need to embrace tolerance and multiculturalism in the face of our world's ever-increasing interconnectivity. At a talk delivered during the first Gulf War, he points out the absurdity of armed conflict in a globalized economy where the flow o...