Set in post-war Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy's novel begins simply and innocently enough: `At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell'. But there is nothing truly simple or innocent here. With the offhanded knowingness of a remorseless young Eve, the narrator describes life as a captive of the school and her designs to win the affections of the seemingly perfect new girl, Frederique. As she broods over her schemes as well as on the nature of control and madness, the novel gathers a suspended, unsettling energy.

Tim Parks s books on Italy have been hailed as "so vivid, so packed with delectable details, they] serve as a more than decent substitute for the real thing" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, in his first Italian travelogue in a decade, he delivers a charming and funny portrait of Italian ways by riding its trains from Verona to Milan, Rome to Palermo, and right down to the heel of Italy.

Parks begins as any traveler might: "A train is a train is a train, isn t it?" But soon he turns his novelist s eye to the details, and as he journeys through majestic Milano Centrale station or on the newest high-speed rail line, he delivers a uniquely insightful portrait of Italy. Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive: an obsession with speed but an acceptance of slower, older ways; a blind eye toward brutal architecture amid grand monuments; and an undying love of a good argument and the perfect cappuccino.

Italian Ways also explores how trains helped build Italy and how their development reflects Italians sense of themselves from Garibaldi to Mussolini to Berlusconi and beyond. Most of all, Italian Ways is an entertaining attempt to capture the essence of modern Italy. As Parks writes, "To see the country by train is to consider the crux of the essential Italian dilemma: Is Italy part of the modern world, or not?""

In this brilliant collection, a renowned critic vividly depicts the dynamic relationships between authors, their work, and their readers Acclaimed novelist and critic Tim Parks has long been fascinated by the complicated relationship between an author's life and work. Dissatisfied with the dominant modes of reading he encountered, he began exploring the underlying values and patterns that guide authors in both their writing and their lives. In a series of provocative, incisive, and unflinching essays written over the past decade and collected for the first time here, he reveals how style and content in a novel reflect a whole pattern of communication and positioning in the author's ordinary and daily behavior. We see how life and work are deeply enmeshed in the work of writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, Feodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Anton Chekhov, Philip Roth, Julian Barnes, Peter Stamm, and Geoff Dyer, among others. Parks further shows us how readers' reactions to these writers and their works are inevitably connected to these communicative patterns, establishing a relationship that goes far beyond aesthetic appreciation. This original and daring collection takes us into the psychology of some of our greatest writers and challenges us to see with more clarity how our lives become entangled with theirs through our reading of their novels.

The Medici are famous as the rulers of Florence at the high point of the Renaissance. Their power derived from the family bank, and this book tells the fascinating, frequently bloody story of the family and the dramatic development and collapse of their bank (from Cosimo who took it over in 1419 to his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent who presided over its precipitous decline). The Medici faced two apparently insuperable problems: how did a banker deal with the fact that the Church regarded interest as a sin and had made it illegal? How in a small republic like Florence could he avoid having his wealth taken away by taxation? But the bank became indispensable to the Church. And the family completely subverted Florence's claims to being democratic. They ran the city. Medici Money explores a crucial moment in the passage from the Middle Ages to the Modern world, a moment when our own attitudes to money and morals were being formed.To read this book is to understand how much the Renaissance has to tell us about our own world. Medici Money is one of the launch titles in a new series, Atlas Books, edited by James Atlas. Atlas Books pairs fine writers with stories of the economic forces that have shaped the world, in a new genre - the business book as literature.

Idealistic young officer Giovanni Drogo is full of determination to serve his country well. But when he arrives at a bleak border station in the Tartar desert, where he is to take a short assignment at Fort Bastiani, he finds the castle manned by veteran soldiers who have grown old without seeing a trace of the enemy. As his length of service stretches from months into years, he continues to wait patiently for the enemy to advance across the desert, for one great and glorious battle . . . Written in 1938 as the world waited for war, and internationally acclaimed since its publication, The Tartar Steppe is a provocative and frightening tale of hope, longing and the terrible sorcery of dreams and desires.

Niccolo Machiavelli's brutally uncompromising manual of statecraft, The Prince is translated and edited with an introduction by Tim Parks in Penguin Classics. As a diplomat in turbulent fifteenth-century Florence, Niccolo Machiavelli knew how quickly political fortunes could rise and fall. The Prince, his tough-minded, pragmatic handbook on how power really works, made his name notorious and has remained controversial ever since. How can a leader be strong and decisive, yet still inspire loyalty in his followers? When is it necessary to break the rules? Is it better to be feared than loved? Examining regimes and their rulers the world over and throughout history, from Roman Emperors to renaissance Popes, from Hannibal to Cesare di Borgia, Machievalli answers all these questions in a work of realpolitik that still has shrewd political lessons for today. Tim Parks's acclaimed contemporary translation renders Machiavelli's no-nonsense original as alarming and enlightening as when it was first written. His introduction discusses Machiavelli's life and reputation, and explores the historical background to the work. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) was born in Florence, and served the Florentine republic as a secretary and second chancellor, as ambassador and foreign policy-maker. When the Medici family returned to power in 1512 he was suspected of conspiracy, imprisoned and tortured and forced to retire from public life. His most famous work, The Prince, was written in an attempt to gain favour with the Medicis and return to politics. If you enjoyed The Prince, you might like Plato's Republic, also available in Penguin Classics. 'A gripping work, and a gripping translation' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian 'Tim Parks's swift and supple new translation brings out all its chilling modernity' Boyd Tonkin, Independent

Arising from a dissatisfaction with blandly general or abstrusely theoretical approaches to translation, this book sets out to show, through detailed and lively analysis, what it really means to translate literary style. Combining linguistic and lit crit approaches, it proceeds through a series of interconnected chapters to analyse translations of the works of D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Henry Green and Barbara Pym. Each chapter thus becomes an illuminating critical essay on the author concerned, showing how divergences between original and translation tend to be of a different kind for each author depending on the nature of his or her inspiration. This new and thoroughly revised edition introduces a system of 'back translation' that now makes Tim Parks' highly-praised book reader friendly even for those with little or no Italian. An entirely new final chapter considers the profound effects that globalization and the search for an immediate international readership is having on both literary translation and literature itself.

Selections from Leopardi's prose masterwork, Zibaldone, one of the great intellectual diaries in European literature, expertly translated by Tim Parks Revenge-Revenge is so sweet one often wishes to be insulted so as to be able to take revenge, and I don't mean just by an old enemy, but anyone, or even (especially when in a really bad mood) by a friend.-from Passions The extraordinary quality of Giacomo Leopardi's writing and the innovative nature of his thought were never fully recognized in his lifetime. Zibaldone, his 4,500-page intellectual diary-a vast collection of thoughts on philosophy, civilization, literary criticism, linguistics, humankind and its vanities, and other varied topics-remained unpublished until more than a half-century after his death. But shortly before he died, Leopardi began to organize a small, thematic collection of his writings in an attempt to give structure and system to his philosophical musings. Now freshly translated into English by master translator, novelist, and critic Tim Parks, Leopardi's Passions presents 164 entries reflecting the full breadth of human passion. The volume offers a fascinating introduction to Leopardi's arguments and insights, as well as a glimpse of the concerns of thinkers to come, among them Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Wittgenstein, Gadda, and Beckett.

A novel about obsessive love and madness set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy's eerily beautiful novel begins innocently enough: "At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell." But there is nothing innocent here. With the off-handed remorselessness of a young Eve, the narrator describes her potentially lethal designs to win the affections of Frederique, the apparently perfect new girl. In Tim Parks' consummate translation (with its "spare, haunting quality of a prose poem," TLS), Sweet Days of Discipline is a peerless, terrifying, and gorgeous work.

Arising from a dissatisfaction with blandly general or abstrusely theoretical approaches to translation, this book sets out to show, through detailed and lively analysis, what it really means to translate literary style. Combining linguistic and lit crit approaches, it proceeds through a series of interconnected chapters to analyse translations of the works of D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Henry Green and Barbara Pym. Each chapter thus becomes an illuminating critical essay on the author concerned, showing how divergences between original and translation tend to be of a different kind for each author depending on the nature of his or her inspiration. This new and thoroughly revised edition introduces a system of 'back translation' that now makes Tim Parks' highly-praised book reader friendly even for those with little or no Italian. An entirely new final chapter considers the profound effects that globalization and the search for an immediate international readership is having on both literary translation and literature itself.

"Reading time is approximately four hours. Remembering time, as for its author, the rest of one's life," said Joseph Brodsky of Fleur Jaeggy's novel, Sweet Days of Displine. Now Jaeggy has come up with seven stories, each at some deep level in dark complicity with the others, all as terse and spare as if etched with a steel tip. A brooding atmosphere of horror, a disturbing and subversive propensity for delirium haunts the violent gestures and chilly irony of these tales. Full of menace, the air they breathe is stirred only by the FUEhn, the warm west wind of the Alps that inclines otherwise respectable citizens to vent the spleen and angst of life's last vanities.

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 through the eyes of 'cosmic know-it-all' Qfwfq, an exuberant, chameleon-like figure, who takes the shape of a dinosaur, a mollusc, a steamer captain and a moon milk gatherer, among others. This is the first complete edition in English of Italo Calvino's funny, whimsical and delightful stories, which blend scientific fact, flights of fancy, parody and wordplay to show the strangeness and the wonders of the world. Italo Calvino (1923-1985), one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. Calvino was born in Cuba and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. Among his other works published in Penguin Modern Classics are Italian Folktales, Hermit in Paris, Into the War, The Path to the Spiders' Nests, Numbers in the Dark, Six Memos for the Next Millennium and Why Read the Classics? If you liked The Complete Cosmicomics, you might enjoy Jorge Luis Borges' Fictions, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'The complete and definitive collection ... a masterpiece' Gilbert Adair, Evening Standard 'Dazzling ... a book of revelation' Tim Adams, Observer 'If you have never read Cosmicomics, you have before you the most joyful reading experience of your life' Salman Rushdie 'A landmark in fiction, the work of a master' Ursula K Le Guin, Guardian

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.

One hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarrelled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods on me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad. Letty Fox is hunting for a husband. Her picaresque adventures are brilliantly described in this imaginative portrayal of a woman who might have been independent, but chose otherwise.

A new translation of the infamous Renaissance classic, in a striking deluxe edition
The original blueprint for realpolitik, "The Prince" shocked sixteenth-century Europe with its advocacy of ruthless tactics for gaining absolute power and its abandonment of conventional morality. For this treatise on statecraft, Machiavelli drew upon his own experience of office under the turbulent Florentine republic, rejecting traditional values of political theory and recognizing the complicated, transient nature of political life. Concerned not with lofty ideals, but with a regime that would last, this seminal work of modern political thought retains its power to alarm and to instruct.

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. The Novel: A Survival Skill is the fruit of a lifetime's search for a different, more immediate, but again systematic and serious way of talking about literature. Developed over many years, it offers a completely new account of the relationship between a writer, his or her work, and the reader. As such it radically undermines traditional literary criticism and the various criteria used for evaluating a work of fiction. Drawing on ideas from systemic psychology, Tim Parks suggest that both the content and style of a novelist's work, the kind of stories told and the way in which they are told, form part of a more general strategy or simply habit of communication that the novelist has learned within his or her family of origin. The reader reacts to these in very much the same way he or she would react to the same communicative strategy in a real life encounter, different readers reacting differently depending on their own backgrounds and habits of communication. Looking at the different value structures that can dominate in any family-good/evil, independence/dependence, success/failure, belonging/exclusion-this book looks at how a number of major writers position themselves within these value structures, how this positioning is manifest in their writing, and how readers have responded to this depending on their own positioning in the same semantics. Thomas Hardy, for example, a man eager to believe himself courageous but terrified of the consequences of any socially 'unacceptable' behaviour, constructs stories which are courageous in their willingness to debate difficult issues, but which constantly suggest that any attempt to behave courageously is condemned to disaster. Hardy as it were imprisons himself in a world where it is folly to take risks. He is thus exceedingly conservative in his life, while at the same time able to think of himself as courageous in his writing. The Novel: A Survival Skill looks at the way different readers in different periods respond to this depending on their own position with regard to fear, courage, social convention and so on.

'Pavese's novels are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings' Italo Calvino June, 1943. Allied aircraft are bombing Turin; fascist Italy is on its knees. Every evening, after a day's teaching in the city, Corrado returns to the safety of the hills and the care of his two doting landladies. He has no attachments, no obligations. Yet against his better judgement he is drawn to the easy warmth of a circle of anti-fascists who congregate at a nearby tavern, and confronted with a painful choice: emotional and political commitment, with all its dangers - or devastating retreat. Pavese's extraordinary semi-autobiographical novel is a lucid portrayal of missed opportunities and human weakness, set against the seductive intensity of the Italian countryside. Translated with an introduction by Tim Parks Shortlisted for The Society of Authors Translation Award 2022

'A lot of people lose their way in India . . . it's a country specially made for that.' Amid the backstreets, brothels and faded hotels of Bombay, Madras and the old Portuguese port of Goa, a man searches for his lost friend. Xavier has been missing for a year, and the only clues to his disappearance lie with an overworked doctor, a young prostitute and the leader of a strange religious order. Dreamlike, elusive and profoundly disquieting, Indian Nocturne calls into question the very nature of identity.

Is Italy a united country, or a loose affiliation of warring states? Is Italian football a sport, or an ill-disguised protraction of ancient enmities? After twenty years in the bel paese, Tim Parks goes on the road to follow the fortunes of Hellas Verona football club, to pay a different kind of visit to some of the world's most beautiful cities, and to get a fresh take on the conundrum that is national character. From Udine to Catania, from the San Siro to the Olimpico, this is a highly personal account of one man's relationship with a country, its people and its national sport.

A book that combines the tension of cliff-hanging narrative with the pleasures of travel writing, and the stimulation of a profound analysis of one country's mad, mad way of keeping itself entertained.

From the bestselling author of Italian Ways and Italian Neighbours comes a darkly comic new novel of murder in Veronese high society Morris Duckworth has a dark past. Having married and murdered his way into a wealthy Italian family he has now become a respected member of Veronese business life. But it's not enough. He comes up with a plan to put on the most exciting art exhibition of the decade, based on a subject close to his heart: killing. But as Morris meets stiff resistance from the director the museum, everything starts to unravel around him. His children are rebelling, his mistress is asking for more than he wants to give, his wife is increasingly attached to her ageing confessor, and worst of all it's getting harder and harder to ignore the ghosts that swirl around him, and the skeletons rattling in every cupboard...

How do we find calm in our frantic modern world? Tim Parks - lifelong sceptic of all things spiritual - finds himself on a Buddhist meditation retreat trying to answer this very question. With brutal honesty and dry wit, he recounts his journey from disbelief to something approaching inner peace and tackles one of the great mysteries of our time - how to survive in this modern age. Selected from the book Teach us to Sit Still by Tim Parks VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us human Also in the Vintage Minis series: Swimming by Roger Deakin Motherhood by Helen Simpson Work by Joseph Heller Liberty by Virginia Woolf

In these impressions of the Italian countryside, Lawrence transforms ordinary incidents into passages of intense beauty. Twilight in Italy is a vibrant account of Lawrence's stay among the people of Lake Garda, whose decaying lemon gardens bear witness to the twilight of a way of life centuries old. In Sea and Sardina, Lawrence brings to life the vigorous spontaneity of a society as yet untouched by the deadening effect of industrialization. And Etruscan Places is a beautiful and delicate work of literary art, the record of "a dying man drinking from the founts of a civilization dedicated to life."