A fascinating tour of the past as it exists today, and of the dangers that threaten it, through incisive portraits of our attempts to maintain it: the high-tech struggles to save the Great Sphinx and the Ganges; the efforts to preserve Latin within the Vatican; the digital glut inside the National Archives, which may have caused more information to be lost than ever before; and an oral culture threatened by a “new” technology: writing itself. Stille explores not simply the past, but our ideas about the past—and how they will have to change if our past is to have a future.

Cocaine is the story of a young man who runs off to Paris to seek fame, fortune, and fun. Pitigrilli's classic novel charts the comedy and pathos of a young man's tragic trajectory. Tito Arnaudi is a dandified hero with several mistresses he juggles. A failed medical student, Tito is hired as a journalist in Paris, where he investigates cocaine dens and invents lurid scandals and gruesome deaths that he sells to newspapers as his own life becomes more outrageous than his phony press reports. Telling of orgies and strawberries soaked in champagne and ether, Tito lives with intensity as he pursues his Italian girlfriend Maud (nee Maddalena) and wealthy Armenian Kalantan, who insists on making love in a black coffin. Provocatively illustrated, filled with lush, intoxicating prose, Cocaine is a wicked novel about the Lost Generation in 1920s Paris. Dizzy and decadent, Pitigrilli leaves nothing unexplored as he presents astonishing descriptions of upper class debauching -- strawberries and chloroform, naked dancing, cocaine aplenty, and guests openly injecting morphine. Despite its wit, Cocaine is a sobering account of the dangers of drugs and sexual obsession. Tito happily trades in his twilight years for moments of wicked ecstasy.

Named Library Journal Best Fiction in Translation 2013. "Cocaine is a brilliant black comedy that belongs on the same shelf as Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and Dawn Powell's The Wicked Pavilion. Pitigrilli is an acidic aphorist and a wicked observer of social folly."--Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City and Brightness Falls "Pitigrilli was an enjoyable writer--spicy and rapid--like lightning."--Umberto Eco "The name of the author Pitigrilli ...is so well known in Italy as to be almost a byword for 'naughtiness' ...The only wonder to us is that some enterprising translator did not render some of his books available in English sooner." -- The New York Times, Paris in the 1920s--dizzy and decadent. Where a young man can make a fortune with his wits ...unless he is led into temptation. Cocaine's dandified hero Tito Arnaudi invents lurid scandals and gruesome deaths, and sells these stories to the newspapers. But his own life becomes even more outrageous than his press reports when he acquires three demanding mistresses. Elegant, witty, and wicked, Pitigrilli's classic novel was first published in Italian in 1921 and charts the comedy and tragedy of a young man's downfall and the lure of a bygone era. The novel's descriptions of sex and drug use prompted church authorities to place it on a list of forbidden books. Cocaine retains its venom even today. Pitigrilli was the pen name of Dino Segre, born in Turin in 1893. He worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris during the 1920s, and became equally celebrated and notorious for a series of audacious and subversive books. He died in 1975.

A MASTERPIECE OF LITERARY MEMORY--A POWERFUL EXPLORATION OF THE INTERSECTIONS OF FAMILY, HISTORY, AND MEMORY.
"One evening in May 1948, my mother went to a party in New York with her first husband and left it with her second, my father." So begins the passionate and stormy union of Mikhail Kamenetzki, aka Ugo Stille, one of Italy's most celebrated journalists, and Elizabeth Bogert, a beautiful and charming young woman from the Midwest.
Their immediate attraction and tumultuous marriage is part of a much larger story: the mass migration of Jews from fascist-dominated Europe in the 1930s and in the shadow of World War II. It is the story of a crucial, painful moment in history that reshaped much of American culture and society--but also that of two seemingly incongruous people who managed to find love. Theirs was an uneasy marriage between Europe and America, between Jew and Wasp; their differences were a key to their bond yet a source of constant strife.
Acclaimed author and frequent "New Yorker" contributor Alexander Stille's "The Force of Things" is a powerful, beautifully written work with the intimacy of a memoir, the pace and readability of a novel, and the historical sweep and documentary precision of nonfiction writing at its best. It is a portrait of people who are buffeted about by large historical events, who try to escape their origins but find themselves in the grip of the force of things.

Award-winning author Alexander Stille has been called ?one of the best English-language writers on Italy? by the "New York Times Book Review," and in "The Sack of Rome" he sets out to answer the question: What happens when vast wealth, a virtual media monopoly, and acute shamelessness combine in one man? Many are the crimes of Silvio Berlusconi, Stille argues, and, with deft analysis, he weaves them into a single mesmerizing chronicle?an epic saga of rank criminality, cronyism, and self-dealing at the highest levels of power.

The great Italian masterpiece of sensuality and seduction, published in a new English translation - the first since the Victorian era - that puts the sex back in Pleasure. Like Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, Andrea Sperelli lives his life as a work of art, seeking beauty and flouting the rules of morality and social interaction along the way. In his aristocratic circles in Rome, he is a serial seducer. But there are two women who command his special regard: the beautiful young widow Elena, and the pure, virgin-like Maria. In Andrea's pursuit of the exalted heights of extreme pleasure, he plays them against each other, spinning a sadistic web of lust and deceit. Gabriele D'Annunzio was born in Italy in 1863. He published poetry and short stories from a young age, quickly gaining a reputation for his frank treatment of erotic subjects. He married in 1883 and had three children, but separated from his wife and began an infamous affair with the actress Elonora Duse. After stints as a journalist and politician, he enlisted as a fighter pilot in World War I, subsequently losing an eye in a flying accident. He became increasingly nationalistic and politically active after the war, and his views had a strong influence on Mussolini. In 1922 he survived a murder attempt, when an unknown assailant defenestrated him. He died in 1938. Lara Gochin Raffaelli is a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Alexander Stille is a frequent contributor on Italy to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The New Yorker and the author of several books, including The Sack of Rome. He lives in New York.

In 1992 Italy was convulsed by two brazen Mafia assassinations of high-ranking officials. The latest "excellent cadavers" were Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the Sicilian magistrates who had been the Cosa Nostra's most implacable enemies. Yet in the aftermath of the murders, hundreds of "men of honor" were arrested and the government that ad protected them for nearly half a century was at last driven from office. This is the story that Stille tells with such insight and immediacy in Excellent Cadavers. Combining a profound understanding of his doomed heroes with and unprecedented look into the Mafia's stringent codes and murderous rivalries, he gives us a book that has the power of a great work of history and the suspense of a true thriller.


"Riveting...a well-paced and highly informative account stocked with well-drawn characters."--Philadelphia Inquirer


"Masterful...[Stille] delivers a stiletto-sharp portrait of the bloodthirsty Sicilian mafia."--Business Week

Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino set out to destroy the Mafia. In 1992, aware that the magistrates didn't have the support of the Italian government, the Mafia assassinated them. The public outcry demanded their work was completed, which led to the toppling of crucial political alliances.