Books & Reviews Archive

The book centers on Odysseus’s return to his home and is structured into four parts: the preamble, in which a council of the gods, on Athena’s proposal, resolves to allow Odysseus to resume his journey home by ordering Calypso to release the hero; the decision of Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, to rid himself of the suitors, who continue to frequent the palace and squander his father’s estate. After

We are in 1930s Italy, at the height of the Fascist era. In a small village on Lake Como, four good-for-nothings spend their time lingering in taverns and playing pranks. One day, as a favor to the village prostitute, they poison the pigeons that typically congregate in the squares and streets. One of these pigeons is given to an elderly woman, who dies from the poison. From this incident unfo

The novel is a skein of narratives, set across different times and environments, yet traceable back to two family stories. Mar is the daughter of Miranda, an Argentine woman, and a Somali father she never knew. Zuhra is Somali, the daughter of Maryam and likewise of an unknown father. They grew up and live in Rome and are Italian, yet neither knows what her mother tongue truly is, both feeling

Gee’s Bend is an arm of land, bordered on three sides by the Alabama River, where the water forms a sort of vast, arcing hairpin bend. To reach the nearest town, the "Benders" must undertake an hour-and-a-half drive or a fifteen-minute ferry ride—had the ferry not been abolished in the 1960s by the county sheriff with the following unassailable reasoning: > we didn’t close the ferry because the

The novel opens with a dream. The protagonist, Stefano, who is also the first-person narrator, is taken hunting by his friend Francesco among the hills of his native Piedmont. The woods are a composite of «cascades and pyramids of assembled nightingales», a paradise of happiness; and then, suddenly, the > treetops were mounds of tiny, corroded, greenish skulls, chiming sinisterly against one a

Hans is a young man from a wealthy and influential family who works as a clown and has been left by his girlfriend, Maria. A devout Catholic, the young woman could no longer live with Hans, who is fiercely critical of religion and, more broadly, of bourgeois respectability, and who cannot stand the Catholic circle Maria frequents. Hans turns to drink and finds himself jobless, alone in his flat,

In the first canto of the *Paradiso*, Dante uses the word “trasumanar” to denote that transcending of human limits without which it would be impossible to contemplate God in all His power; then, as we read this cantica, we discover that the journey through the various Heavens will be a transformation of sight and hearing, so as to endure the light and sounds of the Empyrean. But what if, instead,

In 1919, Kyiv was contested by multiple forces: Anton Denikin’s White Army, backed by the Entente, sought to overthrow the Bolsheviks; the Cossacks under the leadership of the *otaman* Symon Petliura fought for Ukraine's independence; the Red Army struggled to halt counter-revolutionary actions and repel Polish claims over Galicia. Although the novel is set in a specific historical moment, the nar

The poem narrates the events of the war between Charlemagne and the Arabs, tracing the journey of Ruggiero, progenitor of the House of Este, toward the Christian faith and his allegiance to the Carolingian king. Alongside Ruggiero, the stories of the other characters unfold, weaving innumerable tales—some grafting onto the main plot, while others appear as seemingly random digressions. From read