Old King Lear has decided to retire from his royal duties. He calls his three daughters to him, and asks each to tell him how much they love him. The eldest two, Goneril and Regan, flatter him with their words. Cordelia - the youngest and, until now, his favourite - only says that she loves him as a daughter must love her father. Furious, he disinherits her and divides his kingdom between her two sisters. But Goneril and Regan soon turn against Lear, forcing him to wander in the wilderness with only his court jester for company, desperately hoping for a reconciliation with Cordelia... Praise for the Save the Story series:'Enticing, generously sized and dashingly illustrated... brilliantly told by top-flight novelists, they are fresh, idiosyncratic and winning' Guardian 'This handsomely illustrated series... offers younger readers vivid, accessible first encounters with some literary heavyweights' Metro Melania G. Mazzucco was born in Rome in 1966, and studied Italian literature and cinema. She has written award-winning novels and works for the cinema, theatre and radio, and is a contributor to The New York Times, El Pais and la Repubblica, among many others. Her novel Vita (published in English by Picador in 2006) won Mazzucco the 2003 Strega Prize, Italy's leading literary award.

The first complete English translation of D'Annunzio's haunting book-length prose poem Composed during a period of extended bed rest, Gabriele D'Annunzio's Notturno is a moving prose poem in which imagination, experience, and remembrance intertwine. The somber atmosphere of the poem reflects the circumstances of its creation. With his vision threatened and his eyes completely bandaged, D'Annunzio suffered months of near-total blindness and pain-wracked infirmity in 1921, and yet he managed to write on small strips of paper, each wide enough for a single line. When the poet eventually regained his sight, he put together these strips to create the lyrical and innovative Notturno. In Notturno D'Annunzio forges an original prose that merges aspects of formal poetry and autobiographical narrative. He fuses the darkness and penumbra of the present with the immediate past, haunted by war memories, death, and mourning, and also with the more distant past, revolving mainly around his mother and childhood. In this remarkable translation of the work, Stephen Sartarelli preserves the antiquated style of D'Annunzio's poetic prose and the tension of his rich and difficult harmonies, bringing to contemporary readers the full texture and complexity of a creation forged out of darkness.

A totally unique poetic treatise, La Vita Nuova is an elaborately and symbolically patterned selection of Dante's early poems, interspersed with his own incisive prose commentary. The poems themselves tell the story of his undying love for Beatrice, from their first meeting at a May Day party, through Dante's sufferings and his attempts to conceal the true object of his devotion, to his overwhelming grief at her death, and ending with the transformative vision of her in heaven. These are some of the richest love poems in literature and the movement from self-pitying lament to praise for his beloved's beauty and virtue illustrate the elevating power of love. This lucid new translation, based on the latest authoritative Italian edition and featuring the Italian on facing pages, captures the ineffable quality of a work that has inspired the likes of Charles Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges and Louise Gluck.

A masterful collection by a literary giant of the past century, rendered by one of our most esteemed Italian translators Regarded as one of Europe's great modernists, Pirandello was also a master storyteller, a fine observer of the drama of daily life with a remarkable sense of the crushing burdens of class, gender, and social conventions. Set in the author's birthplace of Sicily, where the arid terrain and isolated villages map the fragile interior world of his characters, and in Rome, where modern life threatens centuries-old traditions, these original stories are sun baked with the deep lore of Italian folktales. In "The Jar," a broken earthenware pot pits its owner, a quarrelsome landholder, against a clever inventor of a mysterious glue. "The Dearly Departed" tells the story of a young widow and her new husband on their honeymoon, haunted at every turn by the sly visage of the deceased. The scorned lover, the despondent widow, the intransigent bureaucrat, the wretched peasant-Pirandello's characters expose the human condition in all its fatalism, injustice, and raw beauty. For lovers of Calvino and Pasolini, these picturesque stories preserve a memory of an Italy long gone, but one whose recurring concerns still speak to us today.

In April 1903, Diamante, age twelve, and Vita, age nine, are sent by their poor families in Southern Italy to make a life in America. Theirs is an unforgettable love story, a tale of immigrant survival and hope that takes them from the crime-ridden tenements of Little Italy to the brutal rail yards of the Midwest.