An immersive and mesmerizing narrative that reimagines the Mesopotamian myth of the Great Flood A long time ago, the gods grew tired of humans and decided to send a flood to destroy them. But Ea, the god of fresh underground water, didn't agree. He advised one of his devotees, Utnapishtim, to build a quadrangular boat to house humans and animals, and saved these living creatures from the Flood. Rather than punish Utnapishtim for his disobedience, Enlil, King of the gods, granted the mortal eternal life and banished him to the island of Dilmun. Thousands of years later, when Sinbad the Sailor is shipwrecked and arrives on that very same island, the two begin a conversation about courage, loss, salvation and sacrifice.

'It will be read and re-read not as a treatise but as a story: one of the most extraordinary that has ever been written of the origins of Western self-consciousness' Simon Schama The marriage of Cadmus and Harmony was the last time the gods of Olympus feasted alongside mortals. What happened in the distant ages preceding it, and in the generations that followed, form the timeless tales of ancient Greek mythology. In this masterful retelling of the myths we think we know, Roberto Calasso illuminates the deepest questions of our existence. 'The kind of book one comes across only once or twice in one's lifetime' Joseph Brodsky 'A perfect work like no other' Gore Vidal

A sparkling new translation of the classic work on violence and revolution as seen through mythology and art The Ruin of Kasch takes up two subjects: "the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else," wrote Italo Calvino when the book first appeared in 1983. Hailed as one of those rare books that persuade us to see our entire civilization in a new light, its guide is the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, who knew the secrets of the ancien regime and all that came after, and was able to adapt the notion of "legitimacy" to the modern age. Roberto Calasso follows him through a vast gallery of scenes set immediately before and after the French Revolution, making occasional forays backward and forward in time, from Vedic India to the porticoes of the Palais-Royal and to the killing fields of Pol Pot, with appearances by Goethe and Marie Antoinette, Napoleon and Marx, Walter Benjamin and Chateaubriand. At the centre stands the story of the ruin of Kasch, a legendary kingdom based on the ritual killing of the king and emblematic of the ruin of ancient and modern regimes. 'Startling, puzzling, profound . . . a work charged with intelligence and literary seduction' The New York Times 'Unique, idiosyncratic and vaultingly ambitious... essential reading' Independent 'A great fat jewel-box of a book, gleaming with obscure treasures' John Banville

In this revelatory volume, Roberto Calasso, whom the Paris Review has called 'a literary institution', explores the ancient texts known as the Vedas. Little is known about the Vedic people who lived more than three thousand years ago in northern India: they left behind almost no objects, images, ruins. Only a 'Parthenon of words' remains: verses and formulations suggesting a daring understanding of life. 'If the Vedic people had been asked why they did not build cities,' writes Calasso, 'they could have replied: we did not seek power, but rapture.' This is the ardor of the Vedic world, a burning intensity that is always present, both in the mind and in the cosmos. With his signature erudition and profound sense of the past, Calasso explores the enigmatic web of ritual and myth that define the Vedas. Often at odds with modern thought, he shows how these texts illuminate the nature of consciousness more than neuroscientists have been able to offer us up to now.

'Beautiful, intellectually thrilling . . . unlike anything else' Telegraph Promise and separation. Grace and guilt. The chosen and the damned. Roberto Calasso's captivating retelling of key stories from the bible evokes the dramatic world of the Old Testament and casts one of the founding texts of Western civilization in an astonishing - and disquieting - new light. The Book of All Books is the culmination of a lifetime's work and the tenth part of a series that began with The Ruin of Kasch. 'Engaging . . . enlightening' Financial Times 'Surprising . . . vivid' Spectator

'To read Ka is to experience a giddy invasion of stories - brilliant, enigmatic, troubling, outrageous, erotic, beautiful' The New York Times 'Who?' - or 'ka' - is the question that runs through Roberto Calasso's retelling of the stories of the minds and gods of India; the primordial question that continues to haunt human existence. From the Rigveda to the Upanishads, the Mahabharata to the life of Buddha, this book delves into the corpus of classical Sanskrit literature to re-imagine the ancient Indian myths and how they resonate through space and time. 'The very best book about Hindu mythology that anyone has ever written' Wendy Doniger 'Dazzling, complex, utterly original ... Ka is his masterpiece' Sunday Times

'A poetic, erudite exploration of history and myth' Financial Times An unforgettable journey through centuries and across cultures to the pivotal moment in evolution - when humans did something that no species had yet tried - when we became the hunter and no longer the prey. Informed by Greek and Egyptian myth, the stories of poets, shamans and gods, Roberto Calasso's expansive exploration of our relationship to animals and sacrifice, encourages us to reframe our understanding of our place in history, and in the world. 'Calasso has created a much discussed original genre for these books ... a dense pastiche of myth, biography, criticism, philosophy, history and minutiae ... woven together by Calasso's unflagging vision' The New Yorker

Roberto Calasso is one of the most original and acclaimed of writers on literature, art, culture and mythology. In Baudelaire's Folly, Calasso turns his attention to the poets and writers of Paris in the nineteenth century who created what was later called 'the Modern.' His protagonist is Charles Baudelaire: poet of nerves, art lover, pioneering critic, man about Paris, whose groundbreaking works on modern culture described the ephemeral, fleeting nature of life in the metropolis - and the artist's role in capturing this - as no other writer had done. With Baudelaire's critical intelligence as his inspiration, Calasso ranges through his life and work, focusing on two painters - Ingres and Delacroix - about whom Baudelaire wrote acutely, and then turns to Degas and Manet, who followed in the tracks Baudelaire laid down in his great essay The Painter of Modern Life. In a mosaic of stories, insights, dreams, close readings of poems and commentaries on paintings, Paris in Baudelaire's years comes to life. In the eighteenth century, a 'folie' was a garden pavilion set aside for people of leisure, a place of delight and fantasy. Here Calasso has created a brilliant and dramatic 'Folie Baudelaire': a place where the reader can encounter Baudelaire, his peers, his city, his extraordinary likes and dislikes, and his world, finally discovering that it is nothing less than the land of 'absolute literature'. Born in Florence, Roberto Calasso lives in Milan, where he is publisher of Adelphi. He is the author of Tiepolo Pink, The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, winner of the Prix Veillon and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, Literature and the Gods, Ka and K.

Tourists, terrorists, secularists, hackers, fundamentalists, transhumanists, algorithmicians: in this book Roberto Calasso considers the tribes that inhabit and inform the world today. A world that feels more elusive than ever before. This book, the ninth part of a work in progress, is a meditation on the obscure and ubiquitous process of transformation happening in societies today, where distant echoes of Auden's The Age of Anxiety give way to something altogether more unsettling.

From the internationally acclaimed author of "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and "Ka: an utterly original, fascinating interpretation of the work of Franz Kafka that is simultaneously an unprecedented exploration into the mystery of Kafka himself.
What are Kafka's stories about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Things that happen every day? But where and when? Countless answers have been offered, but the question still arouses feelings of acute uncertainty. Many solutions have been proposed, but the essential mystery remains intact. In this remarkable book, Roberto Calasso sets out not to dispel the mystery but to let it be illuminated by its own light. To that end, with his unique vision, imagination, and intellectual acumen, Calasso attempts to enter the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of the stories to discover what they are meant to signify and to delve into a puzzling question: why are K. and Josef K.-the protagonists of "The Castle and "The Trial-so radically different from any other characters in the history of the novel? So, in the end, "the most basic question along the way is: Who is K.?
The culmination of the author's lifelong fascination with Kafka, "K. is a book of significant literary importance, the fourth part in a work in progress of which the previous volumes are "The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, and "Ka.

"From the Hardcover edition.

De cmo Zeus, en forma de toro blanco, rapt a la princesa Europa; Teseo abandon a Ariadna; Dioniso viol a Aura; Apolo fue siervo de Admeto, por amor; el simulacro de Helena apareci, junto al de Aquiles, en la isla de Leuk; Ergone se ahorc; Penlope conquist a Hipodama; Cornide, preada por Apolo, lo traicion con un mortal; las Danaides cortaron la cabeza a sus esposos; Aquiles mat a Pentesilea y se uni a ella; Orestes luch con la locura; Demter vag en busca de su hija Core; Core mir a Hades y se vio reflejada en los ojos de l; Jasn muri golpeado por una viga de la nave Argo; Fedra enloqueci intilmente por Hiplito; Tiestes consigui superar al hermano Atreo en la venganza; Atenea acogi en su gida al nio Erictonio con cola de serpiente; Fanes se dej devorar por Zeus; los Cercopes se rieron de las nalgas de Heracles; la cazadora Cirene se uni a Apolo en forma de lobo; Zeus decidi exterminar a los hroes; Ulises vivi junto a Calipso; los Olmpicos bajaron a Tebas para participar en las bodas de Cadmo y Harmona...Las bodas de Cadmo y Harmona fueron la ltima ocasin en que los dioses del Olimpo se sentaron a la mesa con los hombres para una fiesta. Lo que ocurri antes de entonces, durante aos inmemoriales, y despus de entonces, durante escasas generaciones, forma el inmenso rbol del mito griego.En Las bodas de Cadmo y Harmona un soplo de viento vuelve a mover las frondas de ese rbol. Como escribi un antiguo, estas cosas jams ocurrieron, pero existen siempre. Contarlas, urdindolas en sus ms mnimos detalles, impone algunas preguntas, que tambin existen siempre: por qu los dioses del Olimpo asumieron figura humana y por qu esa figura? Por qu sus historias son tan escandalosas y misteriosas? Qu es unsimulacro? Por qu la era de los hroes fue breve, convulsa e irrepetible? Qu hace que Zeus se sienta amenazado?Quiz el mito sea una narracin que slo puede ser entendida narrando. Quiz el modo ms inmediato para pe

"A giddy invasion of stories--brilliant, enigmatic, troubling, outrageous, erotic, beautiful." --The New York Times Book Review

"So brilliant that you can't look at it anymore--and you can't look at anything else. . . . No one will read it without reward."
--The Boston Globe

With the same narrative fecundity and imaginative sympathy he brought to his acclaimed retelling of the Greek myths, Roberto Calasso plunges Western readers into the mind of ancient India. He begins with a mystery: Why is the most important god in the Rg Veda, the oldest of India's sacred texts, known by a secret name--"Ka," or Who?
    What ensues is not an explanation, but an unveiling. Here are the stories of the creation of mind and matter; of the origin of Death, of the first sexual union and the first parricide. We learn why Siva must carry his father's skull, why snakes have forked tongues, and why, as part of a certain sacrifice, the king's wife must copulate with a dead horse. A tour de force of scholarship and seduction, Ka is irresistible.

"Passage[s] of such ecstatic insight and cross-cultural synthesis--simply, of such beauty."  --The New York Review of Books

"All is spectacle and delight, and tiny mirrors reflecting human foibles are set into the weave,turning this retelling into the stuff of literature." --The New Yorker

'Tiepolo: the last breath of happiness in Europe' The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life creating frescoes that are among the glories of Western art, yet he remains shrouded in mystery. Who was he? And what was the significance of the dark, bizarre etchings depicting sacrifice and magic, which he created alongside his heavenly works? Roberto Calasso explores Tiepolo as the last artist of the ancien regime and at the same time the first example of the "painter of modern life" evoked by Baudelaire. He was the incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura: the art of not seeming artful. Translated by Alastair McEwen 'A brilliant, eccentric, provocative . . . and thoroughly splendid celebration of a great painter' John Banville, The New Republic 'Calasso is a myth-maker ... a book that treats paintings as a kind of sorcery' Peter Conrad, Observer

What are Kafka's stories about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Things that happen every day? But where and when? In this remarkable book, Roberto Calasso sets out not to dispel the mystery but to let it be illuminated by its own light. With his unique vision, imagination, and intellectual acumen, Calasso attempts to enter the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of the stories to discover what they are meant to signify and to delve into the most basic question: Who is K.?

'All the books published by a certain publisher could be seen as links in a single chain' In this fascinating memoir and manifesto the author and publisher Roberto Calasso meditates on the art of book publishing. With his signature erudition and polemical flair, Calasso transcends Adelphi to look at the publishing industry as a whole, from the essential importance of graphics, jackets and cover flaps to the consequences of universal digitization. And he outlines what he describes as the 'most hazardous and ambitious' profile of what a publishing house can be: a book comprising many books, akin to that of other twentieth-century publishers, from Giulio Einaudi to Roger Straus, of whom the book offers brief portraits.

Brilliant, inspired, and gloriously erudite, Literature and the Gods is the culmination of Roberto Calasso’s lifelong study of the gods in the human imagination. By uncovering the divine whisper that lies behind the best poetry and prose from across the centuries, Calasso gives us a renewed sense of the mystery and enchantment of great literature.

From the banishment of the classical divinities during the Age of Reason to their emancipation by the Romantics and their place in the literature of our own time, the history of the gods can also be read as a ciphered and splendid history of literary inspiration. Rewriting that story, Calasso carves out a sacred space for literature where the presence of the gods is discernible. His inquiry into the nature of “absolute literature” transports us to the realms of Dionysus and Orpheus, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and prompts a lucid and impassioned defense of poetic form, even when apparently severed from any social function. Lyrical and assured, Literature and the Gods is an intensely engaging work of literary affirmation that deserves to be read alongside the masterpieces it celebrates.