Andrea Camilleri

Stephen Sartarelli

Inspector Montalbano investigates the fatal shooting of a man and finds himself dealing with two beautiful women as prime suspects, mysterious computer codes, threatening letters, and dirty cocaine.

The Paper Moon

Xavier de Maistre

Howard, Richard, 2nd

Joseph De Maistre

Voyage Around My Room

Laurent Gaudé

Sophie Hawkes

The story of the Scortas opens in 1870 with Rocco Scorta Mascalzone, the bastard product of a rape and a notorious scoundrel, whose legacy the family is forced to confront, but while the Scortas' lineage seems doomed to struggle, they are blessed with an imposing pride and a relentless faith in their own power.

The House of Scorta

Massimo Cacciari

Massimo Cacciari, one of the most influential social philosophers in Italy today, is the founder of the trend of criticism known as 'negative thought' that focuses on the failure of traditional logic to explicate the problems of modernity. This book, which introduces his writings to an English-speaking audience, provides a striking social and philosophical account of the twentieth-century metropolis. Patrizia Lombardo's extensive introduction situates Cacciari's thought within the milieu of Italian political activism and philosophy between the 1960s and the 1980s, from his collaboration on the leftist journal Contropiano to his long association with Manfredo Tafuri. Cacciari studies the relation between philosophy and modern architecture and applies the thinking of avant-garde architects, artists, and writers to the social and political problems raised by technological society. He begins by defining the modern metropolis, using the terms and ideas of Georg Simmel and Max Weber, but revealing where their frameworks are limited. He then examines the work of Adolf Loos and other architects and designers in early twentieth-century Vienna, showing how their architecture and criticism expose the alienation and utopianism in notions of the organic city. Cacciari demonstrates how architecture intersects with the city and the state but also with the interior of the private dwelling and with its resistance to the external world. Bringing together philosophy, sociology, urbanism, labor history, economics, and aesthetics, he helps us comprehend via these disciplines a crucial period in the history of modernity.

On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture

Architecture and Nihilism

Pierre Klossowski

In this erotic, metaphysical, and theological novel, the spirits of medieval Templar monks gather on the anniversary of their Grand Master's torment and execution. Together they commit the sexual perfidies and blasphemous acts of which they had been forced to accuse one another before a tribunal.

Stephen Sartarelli

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