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.

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

These early short stories brim with the beauty of the Italian countryside and seaside, telling tales both sumptuous and unnerving.Calvino's war-torn Italy is vivid, intense, almost hyper-real. A trio of greedy burglars rob a pastry shop, a boy offers a girl presents of toads and insects from the garden, a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him. In every story he reveals the hidden meaning beneath the surface of everyday life, and the lu...

Best-selling author Umberto Eco's latest work unlocks the riddles of history in an exploration of the "linguistics of the lunatic," stories told by scholars, scientists, poets, fanatics, and ordinary people in order to make sense of the world. Exploring the "Force of the False," Eco uncovers layers of mistakes that have shaped human history, such as Columbus's assumption that the world was much smaller than it is, leading him to seek out a quick route to the East via the West and thus fort...

A spectacular display of this key European writer's early workThis dazzling collection of stories follows the individual adventures of a varied cast of characters and masterfully illustrates Calvino's unique perspective and narrative gifts. As well as the thirteen tales from his Difficult Loves collection this volume also includes 'Smog', 'A Plunge into Real Estate' and 'The Argentine Ant'.**'The quirkiness and grace of the writing, the originality...

A couple on an epicurean journey across Mexico are excited by the idea of a particular ingredient, suggested by ancient rituals of human sacrifice. Precariously balanced on his throne, a king is able only to listen to the sounds around him - sure that any deviation from their normal progression would mean the uprising of the conspirators that surround him. And three different men search desperately for the beguiling scents of lost women, from a Count visiting Madame Odile's perfumery, to a...

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 ...