William Weaver Books

A soldier wandering through the streets of Rome resolves, rather drunkenly, that he must find himself a woman. It is Ida Mancuso's fate, at precisely that moment, to turn the corner of the street, laden with shopping. The soldier sees easy prey - but Ida confronts her nightmare vision. The year is 1941, the soldier is German and she is half-Jewish. Elsa Morante's brave novel evokes the real terrors, fears and hopes of a mother living through one of the most horrifying events in recent times. In marked contrast to the posturing fascists on the political stage, this is the history of the Second World War as the ordinary people of Italy experienced it.

If I'm not for myself, who will be for me? If not this way, how? If not now, when?' So runs the Song of the Partisan. This enthralling novel pays tribute to the Jews who fought back during the holocaust. Based on a true story, it chronicles the adventures, crises and moral struggles of a group of Russian and Polish refugees as, stranded in occupied territory, they offer what resistance they can to the German army.

Set in Italy in the Middle Ages, this work is not only a narrative of a murder investigation in a monastery in 1327, but also a chronicle of the 14th century religious wars, a history of monastic orders, and a compendium of heretical movements.

This title includes enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. They disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms - and have time for a love life. 'Naturally, we were all there, old 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?'.

"Like the nervous hero of Mr. Palomar (superbly translated by William Weaver), Italo Calvino, always had a telescope's eye for what can only be called the thingness of things. Stars and planets, birds, a loaded food counter, all take on an extra reality, as though observed for the first time in wonder by a man previously blind. Mr Calvino was a magician whose voice commanded us: listen, look, understand. His tone was wryly humorous, his style perfect, his treatment literally fabulous. Through his minute attention to the surface of things he demonstrated the universal." — The Sunday Telegraph

In this brilliant work, Roberto Calasso cracks the code of what Baudelaire named the Modern--the increasingly murderous period from the French Revolution to the end of World War II. From Talleyrand's France and the legendary African city of Kasch, to Lenin's Russia and the killing fields of Cambodia, Calasso leads us along an enticing maze of mythology, literature, art, and science to the pulsing heart of civilization, where he deciphers the deepest secrets of history.

Three book editors, jaded by reading far too many crackpot manuscripts on the mystic and the occult, are inspired by an extraordinary conspiracy story told to them by a strange colonel to have some fun. They start feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer capable of inventing connections between the entries, thinking they are creating nothing more than an amusing game, but then their game starts to take over, the deaths start mounting, and they are forced into a frantic search for the truth

How to Travel with a Salmon is a highly engaging collection of what Umberto Eco calls his diario minimo - minimal diaries - after the magazine column in which he began "pursuing the pathways of parody.". These essays, written in the late eighties and early nineties, are his playful but unfailingly accurate takes on militarism, computer jargon, Westerns, art criticism, librarians, bureaucrats, meals on airplanes, Amtrak trains, bad coffee, maniacal taxi drivers, express mail, 33-function watches, fax machines and cellular phones, pornography, soccer fans, academia, and - last but definitely not least - the author's own self. How to Travel with a Salmon gives us Umberto Eco's acute vision of the absurdities of modern life.

This enormously engaging, strange novel is both an engrossing saga of a family and a hilarious account of addiction and failure as its helpless hero, notionally undergoing psychiatric help, manages spectacularly to fail to give up smoking, run his business or make sense of his private life.A hymn to self-delusion and procrastination ZENO'S CONSCIENCE has provoked enormous affection in its readers both in Italian and English since its first publication in the 1920s.

As always with Eco, this novel includes dazzling digressions, outrageous tricks, pages of extraordinary feeling and poetry, and vicarious reflections on our postmodern age. Baudolino is a marvellous tale by the author of 'The Name of the Rose'.