Upon the death of her husband, Innocenzo Monti, Lalla Romano sought to distil the essence of their long life together. The result was In Farthest Seas: a piercingly intimate retelling of the first four years and final four months of their relationship, built from shard-like moments of connection and revelation.With precise artistry, Romano braids together seemingly minor details-the expressiveness of Innocenzo's hands, the beauty of his face in sleep, a fleeting instance o...

A lonely little boy's unlikely friendship with his grandparents' grizzled old groundskeeper leads him down the rabbit hole from a life lived solely in books to a wonderful and terrifying hell of long-buried secrets, shadowy partisans, murdered Nazis, thefts, lies, doppelgängers, bloodthirsty slugs, and the unquiet dead.

Long before the latest vogue for autofiction, Michele Mari, one of Italy's most beloved authors, cast his mind back to the days of his own childhood, and found it crawling with monsters. Raised on comic books and science fiction, the young Mari constructed an alternate universe for himself untouched by uncomprehending grownups or sadistic peers. Compared to the horrors of real life, Long John Silver and Cthulhu made for positively cuddly company; but little boys raised by beasts may well g...

**BUSTLE BEST BOOK OF THE WEEK PICKNAMED A BOOKSHOP.ORG RECOMMENDED READING OF THE SEASONIn this charming, deeply atmospheric novel set against the Amalfi Coast of the 1950s, two women form an intense and lasting friendship that embodies the paradoxes of Italian society.**Inspired by her own adventurous, unconventional life, actress and writer Goliarda Sapienza’s recently rediscovered novel takes the reader to the sun-drenched town of Positano in southern It...

A close-knit family resists the rise of fascism in Mussolini’s Italy in this WW2 historical fiction classic that blends family memoir with fiction—one of the most famous European post-war novels of all time.“A glowing light of Italian literature.” —The New York Times“Life-changingly good.” —ElleAn Italian family, sizable, with its routines and rituals, crazes, pet phrases, and stories, doubtful, com...

Secrecy and Silence are second nature to Marcello Clerici, the hero of The Conformist, a book which made Alberto Moravia one of the world's most read postwar writers. Clerici is a man with everything under control - a wife who loves him, colleagues who respect him, the hidden power that comes with his secret work for the Italian political police during the Mussolini years. But then he is assigned to kill his former professor, now in exile, to demonstrate his loyalty to the Fascist...

**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...

The seventh Commissario Ricciardi historical mystery is "an intricately layered whodunit set in Fascist Naples . . . A richly textured story" ( Kirkus Reviews).In the middle of a summer heat wave, as Naples prepares for one of its most important holy days, a renowned surgeon falls to his death from the window of his office. For Commissario Ricciardi and Brigadier Maione it is the beginning of an investigation that will bring them into contact with the most...

Classic stories and reportage set in Naples in the 1940s and 50s that inspired Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels A highly evocative classic set in Italy's most vibrant and turbulent metropolis in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. Anna Maria Ortese was one of the most celebrated and original Italian writers of the Twentieth Century. Her stories and reportage, collected in this volume, form a powerful portrait of ordinary lives, both high and low, family dramas, love affairs, and st...

This prizewinning collection of stories and essays set in post-WWII Naples is "required reading for [Elena] Ferrante fans" ( Kirkus Reviews).A classic of European literature, this superb collection of fiction and reportage is set in Italy's most vibrant and turbulent metropolis—Naples—in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Depicting the widespread suffering and brutal desperation that plagued the city, it comprises a mix of masterful storytelling and ...

"A beautifully ingenious memoir, saturated in the history of the European 20th century, and made all the more compelling by Ann Goldstein’s luminous translation.”—Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce AttachmentsThis singular autobiography unfurls from author Marina Jarre’s native Latvia during the 1920s and '30s and expands southward to the Italian countryside. In distinctive writing as poetic as it is precise, Jarre depicts an exceptionally complicated...

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of one of the most poignant and enduringly popular novels of the twentieth century, left only a few other pieces of fiction when he died prematurely at the age of sixty. Childhood Memories and Other Stories, here presented in a new translation by Stephen Parkin and including previously deleted passages and the unpublished fragment 'Torretta', collects all of Lampedusa's extant shorter fiction and provides a revealing glimpse into the writer's worksh...