Meth cooks practice late industrial alchemy—transforming base materials, like lithium batteries and camping fuel, into goldMeth alchemists all over the United States tap the occulted potencies of industrial chemical and big pharma products to try to cure the ills of precarious living: underemployment, insecurity, and the feeling of idleness. Meth fires up your attention and makes repetitive tasks pleasurable, whether it’s factory work or tinkering at home. Users ar...

“In Naples, there are more singers than there are unemployed people.” These words echo through the neomelodica music scene, a vast undocumented economy animated by wedding singers, pirate TV, and tens of thousands of fans throughout southern Italy and beyond. In a city with chronic unemployment, this setting has attracted hundreds of aspiring singers trying to make a living—or even a fortune. In the process, they brush up against affiliates of the region’s violent organized crime networks,...

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...

Meth cooks practice late industrial alchemy—transforming base materials, like lithium batteries and camping fuel, into goldMeth alchemists all over the United States tap the occulted potencies of industrial chemical and big pharma products to try to cure the ills of precarious living: underemployment, insecurity, and the feeling of idleness. Meth fires up your attention and makes repetitive tasks pleasurable, whether it’s factory work or tinkering at home. Users are awake for days ...

"A funny and often moving family history that opens onto wider vistas that he knows and loves equally well—the Italian cultural and political landscape." — Ross King, New York Times–bestselling authorThe child of Italian immigrants and an award-winning scholar of Italian literature, Joseph Luzzi straddles these two perspectives to link his family's dramatic story to Italy's north-south divide, its quest for a unifying lan...

How an oddly attributed $19,000 picture proved to be a $100 million work by Leonardo da Vinci—a true art-world detective storyIn late 2010, art collector Peter Silverman revealed that a "German, early 19th century" portrait he had bought for $19,000 was, in fact, a previously unknown drawing by Leonardo da Vinci—an exquisite depiction of Bianca Sforza, rendered 500 years ago. In Leonardo's Lost Princess, Silverman gives a riveting first-person account of h...

Marco Peroni wanted to picture Olivetti's inspirational way of thinking through Riccardo Cecchetti's unique visions, and an extraordinary plot: it all begins when Olivetti accepts to take a call from the future, to get interviewed by a student of year 2061... Internationally known as a businessman, intellectual, politician, reformer, urbanist and editor, Andriano Olivetti was all these things and much more. He believed in a new kind of society, beyond capitalism and socialism, and had clea...

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...

"A beautifully evocative biography . . . of one of contemporary Western culture's few true Renaissance men." — San Francisco ChroniclePier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75) was one of the most important Italian intellectuals of the post–World War II era. An astonishing polymath—poet, novelist, literary critic, political polemicist, screenwriter, and film director—he exerted profound influence on Italian culture up to his untimely death at the age o...

How our image of the Renaissance’s most famous artist is a modern mythLeonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) never signed a painting, and none of his supposed self-portraits can be securely ascribed to his hand. He revealed next to nothing about his life in his extensive writings, yet countless pages have been written about him that assign him an identity: genius, entrepreneur, celebrity artist, outsider. Addressing the ethical stakes involved in studying past lives, Stephe...

A study of three high-profile Italian murder cases, how they were covered by the media, and what it all says about Italian culture.Looking at media coverage of three very prominent murder cases, Murder Made in Italy explores the cultural issues raised by the murders and how they reflect developments in Italian civil society over the past twenty years. Providing detailed descriptions of each murder, investigation, and court case, Ellen Nerenberg addresses th...

Exploring an overlooked era of Italian history roiled by domestic terrorism, political assassination, and student protests, Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s shines a new light on what was a dark decade, but an unexpectedly prolific and innovative period among artists of comics intended for adults.Blurring the lines between high art and popular consumption, artists of the Italian comics scene went beyond passively documenting history and began act...