In 1995, I was invited to the People’s Republic of China to direct a play at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. It was the first Canadian play to be produced in China. It’s amazing what you can learn in a foreign city, with time to explore on your own, ready to soak up the energy, atmosphere, sights, and sounds. The impact is even greater when that city is on the cusp of historic change. The experience power-charged my imagination and was the spark for my first novels–a series of mysteries featuring the detective Zong Fong, Head of Special Investigations, Shanghai. City Rising and its three sequels followed after extensive research.
It’s 1860, and Garibaldi's Redshirts have landed on the coast. Sicily’s ancient feudal society will soon be overthrown.
These historical events are the backdrop to an intriguing portrait of Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, a quiet, intense, and, in many ways, sympathetic member of the doomed Sicilian nobility. War is upon him, and yet Don Fabrizio continues his stately life and loves with meditative detachment.
This may be a story of civil war and social upheaval, but it is also a depiction of ancient families and allegiances, dusty landscapes, and the night sky. It is filled with rich symbolism and prophecy. The Leopard’s message: revolutions come and go, corruption endures. Its contribution to great historical fiction: Don Fabrizio, the last Leopard.
The Leopard is a modern classic which tells the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution.
'There is a great feeling of opulence, decay, love and death about it' Rick Stein
In the spring of 1860, Fabrizio, the charismatic Prince of Salina, still rules over thousands of acres and hundreds of people, including his own numerous family, in mingled splendour and squalor. Then comes Garibaldi's landing in Sicily and the Prince must decide whether to resist the forces of change or come to terms with them.
I write for middle grade readers because they still dwell in a place of possibility. They know flashy magic doesn’t exist but they’ll still check the back of a wardrobe to see if it leads to Narnia. Middle grade is a period where readers explore their identity, trying to figure out who they are as well as who they’ll become. In these witchy books, the protagonists are exploring their identities, trying to reconcile expectations and the broadening world around them with who they truly are. The resulting books are adventures both external and internal and the start of exciting journeys.
While staying with her aunt in Italy, Lilla comes across a book that reveals she’s a witch. But the Stregamama, an ancient witch, wants to use Lilla for her own means. Meanwhile, Lilla’s crushing on her aunt’s assistant and trying to avoid the local boy her family is trying to set her up with. As a bookish introvert who wanted space to read, draw, and grow on my own terms, I couldn’t help but see myself in Lilla. Slightly artwork brings movement to the story while the palette adds spots of spookiness. A cute, queer graphic novel of realizing and voicing one’s identities, this book charms.
Thirteen-year-old Lilla feels she is a bit different. She's quiet and shy and sometimes feels uncomfortable in the company of boys. She'd much rather spend time by herself drawing and daydreaming. This summer, while staying with her aunt in rural Italy, Lilla discovers a book of magic which reveals that she is a witch with special powers, the magic of 'Strega'.
But unbeknownst to her, an ancient witch, Stregamama, threatens to ruin more than just her summer. Lilla is soon faced with a choice that could change her life forever.
Since 1996 when my first trip to Venice rearranged my interior life, I have been visiting the city and learning everything I can about it. Most of my reading led me to men’s history, but with some digging, I uncovered the stories of Venice’s inspired, undaunted, hardworking women. Their proto-feminism motivated me to share their stories with others in an attempt to redefine beauty. I’ve also created videos showing sites connected to these women’s lives, and I’ve written four books about Venetians, including extensive research into Giacomo Casanova and two anthologies celebrating Venetian life. Reading and writing about Venice helps me connect more deeply with my favorite city.
Giacomo Casanova, mostly remembered as an adventurous lover, wrote over a million words about his own life.
Here in Casanova’s Women, Summers turns the spotlight onto the women whom Casanova loved. I’ve read Casanova’s memoirs and have written a book about Casanova in Venice, but it was Summers’ chapters that made me reconsider perspective: How true is a story when it’s told from only one viewpoint?
Summers elevates the voices of these women, such as Casanova’s actress mother, the nuns who were his lovers, the adventurous sisters that he lost his virginity to, and the hometown girl who created one of London’s premier social spots. Their voices are invaluable in learning the fuller story.
Eighteenth-century Venetian adventurer Giacomo Casanova, history's most famous seducer, talked his way into the beds of more than 200 women. Charming, brilliant and devastatingly attractive, the compulsive womaniser claimed to like and understand his conquests. But he could also be ruthless, cruel, selfish and dishonest. Who were these women who established Casanova's extraordinary reputation? From the two sisters with whom he had his first sexual experience to the libidinous Venetian nun who defied God in order to sleep with him, from the wealthy widow he tricked out of a fortune to the love of his life, the glamorous and daring…
My wife introduced me to this gripping crime thriller. Set during a roasting summer within a rural southern Italian community, the tale is told through the eyes of a child.
Part of a little gang of faithless so-called friends, and surrounded by untrustworthy adults, the young hero is the only sympathetic character in the story. But what a story! Ammaniti brilliantly evokes a sense of place and time, and the sheer desperation of the poor.
The hottest summer of the twentieth century. A tiny community of five houses in the middle of wheat fields. While the adults shelter indoors, six children venture out on their bikes across the scorched, deserted countryside. In the midst of that sea of golden wheat, nine-year-old Michele Amitrano discovers a secret so momentous, so terrible, that he dare not tell anyone about it. To come to terms with what he finds, he will have to draw strength from his own imagination and sense of humanity. The reader witnesses a dual story: the one that is seen through Michele's eyes, and…
Full disclosure, this was the
second time I’ve read this book, which is not something I often do.
I was in
Italy when I read it, which felt entirely appropriate, and re-immersing myself
in this relatable family unit that Giordano created was like meditating. The
characters were luminescent, especially Signora A, the nanny who soon becomes
indispensable and whose gentle influence changes the dynamic of the family she
works for.
It is beautifully written and a poignant look at what influences our
choice of who we consider family. It appears to be a simple tale at first, but
it is intricately layered with emotion and realism. My only criticism is that
it was over too soon.
“From aide to nanny and housekeeper . . . Paolo Giordano examines this unusual relationship in the context of one household of three. . . . Spare, elegant.”–The New York Times
“Like Family. . . demands to be savored. . . Giordano's emphasis on how we choose to live and love offers subtle hope that our decisions actually matter.”—NPR.org
From the author of the international bestseller The Solitude of Prime Numbers, an exquisite portrait of marriage, adulthood, and the meaning of family
Paolo Giordano’s prizewinning debut novel, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, catapulted the young Italian author into the literary…
I grew up in New Orleans around Cajun French and Italians. My father spoke Cajun French, English, and Sicilian. I grew up thinking his Sicilian was Italian mixed with Cajun French. We considered ourselves Italian, never aware that my grandparents, paternal and maternal, emigrated from Sicily and were born just after Sicily became part of Italy (1861). Knowing nothing of Sicily, including the Sicilian spelling of my own surname and my father’s Sicilian first name, I used the computer to contact distant relatives in Sicily, discover records online, and eventually visited Sicily to find actual documents. My research led to my passion and my first book, After Laughing Comes Crying.
Mark Hehl gathered a bunch of Sicilian American writers to contribute pieces about their remembrances of their grandparents, those 1st or 2nd waves of immigrants that came to this country. American readers can relate better to the settings of Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Boston, and New Orleans than to the small Sicilian villages like Bisacquino, Sant’Anna, Chiusa Sclafani, the towns from which many immigrants embarked, and the towns from which these customs were carried into American cities.
The volume is a collaborative effort by twenty-eight talented writers to describe their Sicilian culture while living in the United States. Each contributor offers interesting personal insights in what it meant for him/her to grow up in a Sicilian environment while navigating through the difficulties posed by the encounter with the American way of life.
Hello. My name is Mike Russell. I write books (novels, short story collections, and novellas) and make visual art (mostly paintings, occasionally sculptures). I love art and books that are surreal and magical because that is the way life seems to me, and I love art and books that are mind-expanding because we need to expand our minds to perceive just how surreal and magical life is. My books have been described as strange fiction, weird fiction, surrealism, magic realism, fantasy fiction… but I just like to call them Strange Books.
If, like me, you like to wonder at the cosmos and its apparent absurdity, this is a great collection. A lot of the humour comes from juxtaposing the mundane with the cosmic and taking a simple premise to extremes, rather like Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
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 sardines?'
The Cosmicomics tell the story of the history of the universe, from the big bang, through millennia and across galaxies. It is witnessed…
I am an award-winning New Zealand-born Canadian author with a love of fairy tales and female empowerment. I grew up reading books about boys for boys and found it hard to find a strong female heroine I could relate to. I wrote Contest of Queens, Queen's Catacombs, and Queendom Come to give young readers that character I so longed for as a child and set the series in a world where gender norms are reversed to expose some of the silly gender norms we adhere to in our own lives. I hope to make my readers think while also shining a little more kindness into their lives.
This one I read when I was much younger and think about often.
Georgia, a tomboy with an awful stepbrother and a serious lack of parental support, makes friends with an old man in an antique store who gives her the key to traveling to another world.
What sticks with me most about this book is that she spends the majority of it ashamed of her own skin, hiding who she is, dressing as a boy, and shrinking from who she truly is. Throughout the course of the novel, she finds her voice, discovers her strength, and claims the beauty what she has to offer the world.
This was such an important book when I was a teenager, as I felt incredibly uncomfortable in my rapidly changing body. To read about a girl who earns her own love was truly empowering.
Sequel to City of Masks, the setting is again Talia, the parallel world very similar to 16th-century Italy, but the main character in this book is Georgia - who has a love of horses. She is desperate to buy a little, dusty winged horse that has appeared in a local antique shop. This tiny, winged horse proves to be the talisman that transports Georgia right into the rivalries and the high-octane excitement of the hugely competitive Stellata horse race. Mary Hoffman proved herself a mistress of a narrative tour-de-force with City of Masks and this sequel will not disappoint. Fans…
Born into a family with friction between parents, I never thought relationships could get much worse. When my parents divorced, father became estranged, then died by apparent suicide, memoirs by diverse voices opened my world and made me feel less alone. When I went through a sexual and gender identity crisis of my own, they helped me navigate the turmoil in my own life. I spent more than twenty-five years writing professionally for corporate and academic employers before writing biography and memoir became a coping skill.
Preston and Spezi’s memoir helped me learn how to write from inside a murder investigation. I knew I needed to write about my father’s unusual death and my suspicions, but I didn’t have the tools to tackle it. The two journalists describe how they solved an infamous serial killer case only to become suspects themselves. Preston and Spezi drive their story with a momentum I tried to match in telling mine.
The Monster of Florence, which was shortlisted for the prestigious CWA Gold Dagger Award for Non Fiction in 2010, is a true account of brutal serial murder in idyllic Florence. After settling in Italy in 2000, Douglas Preston discovered that the olive grove in front of his family's new home had been the scene of one of the most infamous double-murders in Italian history, committed by a serial killer who had never been found and was known only as the Monster of Florence. Preston, intrigued, met Italian journalist Mario Spezi, who had followed the case since the first murders in…
My first encounter with Venice was as a PhD student consulting the state archives in the former monastery attached to the basilica of the Frari, a place redolent of the history and culture of the city, lined with the tombs of doges. This inspired me to learn more about this improbable city, a curiosity that has never waned. Since then, I have visited the city more times than I can count, taking students, cultural tours, and visiting my many friends. Consequently, I was invited to produce my Essential Italy for Smithsonian Journeys and later their first virtual reality tour of the city. I can never tire of Venice nor completely know it.
Every visitor, regardless of how often he or she has been somewhere, needs an engaging, accurate, and timely guidebook. Hugh Honour’s Companion Guide to Venice is my choice because it was written by an art historian who lived in Italy (he died sadly in 2016) and because it falls into that rarified category of guides that not only describe what you are seeing and how to get there but also places the artwork, building or site in a broader context. Thus, the book functions as a history of Venice and Venetian culture and an insight into its unique society. It is also beautifully written in carefully crafted and modulated sections that evoke the grandeur of the city and its lagoon.
Offers all that the visitor with a concern for beauty and for leisurely sight-seeing will require. FINANCIAL TIMES
The best guide book I have ever encountered... and a book I found it impossible not to read from beginning to end. OBSERVER
There are few pleasanter ways of passing a summer's evening than sitting over a cup of coffee, and perhaps a glass of Aurum, in the Piazza San Marco. It is especially agreeable on those nights when the Venetian city band thunders away at some throbbingly romantic piece... And all the while the younger inhabitants parade around the square, chattering,…
