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Art and poetry, mystery and desire collide in this sensual and “elegantly moving” literary romance set in the cobbled streets and painted halls of Florence, Italy (New Yorker). Margot Harrington, an American volunteer in Florence, is an expert at book conservancy. While struggling to save a waterlogged convent library, she comes across a fabulous volume of 16 erotic drawings by Giulio Romano, accompanying 16 steamy sonnets by Pietro Aretino. When first published over 4 centuries ago, the Vatican ordered all copies destroyed. This one—now unique—volume has survived. The abbess prevails upon Margot to save the order’s finances by selling the magnificently illustrated erotica discreetly—meaning without the bishop’s knowledge. Margot’s other clandestine project is a middle-aged Italian who is boldly attempting radical measures to save endangered frescoes. She is 29 and available; he, older and married. He shares her sense of mission and soon her bed in this daring story of spiritual longing and earthly desire.
In his rich and dazzling new novel, the author of the bestselling "The Sixteen Pleasures" chronicles the journey of a man awakening from profound sorrow and rediscovering love in a most unexpected time and place.
Jackson Jones is trying to decide whether to remain an anthropology professor in his small Midwestern town, or to return to doing fieldwork among the Mbuti people, in their African Garden of Eden. His ruminations are interrupted by the arrival of a late friend's niece, who has just been sprung from jail. Sunny admits that she shot her husband, an evangelical pastor from the Little Egypt region of Illinois, but he had it coming after forcing her to take on a rattle snake. As an anthropologist, Jackson is curious about Sunny's experiences with The Church of the Burning Bush; as a man, he is not immune to her backwoods sassiness. Although Sunny is pleased to be with a kind partner at last, she is also serious about her belated education--funded by her late uncle--at Jackson's university. French and herpetology compete for her attention, and Jackson's plan to take her to Paris to propose marriage are waylaid when she decides to travel to an academic conference with her biology professor instead. Jackson is crushed and heads for Little Egypt in Sunny's absence, to get to know her ex-husband and to study the snake-handling ceremonies at his evangelical church. Complications ensue, including Jackson's near-death experience and Sunny's murder of her ex, but fate is a positive force for all in the end. Packed with both information and emotion, Snakewoman of Little Egypt delivers Robert Hellenga at the top of his form.
"The book is generously illustrated and includes full translations of the infamous sonnets that Pietro Aretino wrote to accompany I modi. Exploring such issues as censorship, religious teachings about sex, and the influence of antique culture, Taking Positions is a major contribution to our understanding of the erotic in Renaissance culture."--BOOK JACKET.
Growing up on his family's orchards in Appleton, Michigan, in the 1950s, Martin Dijksterhuis finds everything he needs in his extended family and in the land itself -- in the reassuring routines of growing and harvesting, spraying and pruning. Although his mother wants him to get out of Appleton, which she finds impossibly provincial, and attend a great university -- the University of Chicago, her alma mater -- he has no desire to leave. In the autumn of his junior year of high school, however, in the camp of the migrant workers who come north every year to pick the Dijksterhuis peaches and apples, Martin discovers his vocation, the country blues -- unsettling melodies that cry out from a place in the soul he never knew existed. He also falls in love with Corinna Williams, the strong-willed daughter of the black foreman who runs the Dijksterhuis orchards. His blues vocation and his love for Corinna are the two stories of his life. His struggle to combine them into a single story takes him a long way from home and from the life he had always envisioned for himself, and then it brings him back again in a way he could never have imagined. In this beautifully rendered novel, Robert Hellenga, author of The Sixteen Pleasures and The Fall of a Sparrow, explores the fragility of happiness, the difficulties of following one's calling in life, and the sorrows and satisfactions of being a parent.
Meet Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, in the first novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling series that “blends the genres of romance, horror and adventure with stunning panache”(Diana Gabaldon). Laurell K. Hamilton’s bestselling series has captured readers’ wildest imaginations and addicted them to a seductive world where supernatural hungers collide with the desires of the human heart, starring a heroine like no other... Anita Blake is small, dark, and dangerous. Her turf is the city of St. Louis. Her job: re-animating the dead and killing the undead who take things too far. But when the city’s most powerful vampire asks her to solve a series of vicious slayings, Anita must confront her greatest fear—her undeniable attraction to master vampire Jean-Claude, one of the creatures she is sworn to destroy... “What The Da Vinci Code did for the religious thriller, the Anita Blake series has done for the vampire novel.”—USA Today
Chas. Johnson & Sons has been a family operation for three generations--grandfather, father and son. But when it comes time for Gabe Johnson to take the reins of the business, the world of books has changed, and the combination of the internet and inner city rents forces the store to close. But instead of folding his hand, Gabe decides to risk everything he has and reopen the shop--and, in a sense restart his life--in a small town on the shores of Lake Michigan. Haunted his entire life by an obsession with a former lover, he finds her again only to be faced with yet another even more difficult challenge that threatens the well-being of the revival of the bookstore as well as the fate of his rekindled relationship.
The tumultuous twentieth century, told through the life of a single extraordinary woman Rejected by a series of publishers, abandoned in a chest for twenty years, Goliarda Sapienza's masterpiece, The Art of Joy, survived a turbulent path to publication. It wasn't until 2005, when it was released in France, that this novel received the recognition it deserves. At last, Sapienza's remarkable book is available in English, in a brilliant translation by Anne Milano Appel and with an illuminating introduction by Angelo Pellegrino. The Art of Joy centers on Modesta, a Sicilian woman born on January 1, 1900, whose strength and character are an affront to conventional morality. Impoverished as a child, Modesta believes she is destined for a better life. She is able, through grace and intelligence, to secure marriage to an aristocrat—without compromising her own deeply felt values. Friend, mother, lover—Modesta revels in upsetting the rules of her fascist, patriarchal society. This is the history of the twentieth century, transfigured by the perspective of one extraordinary woman. Sapienza, an intriguing figure in her own right—her father homeschooled her so she wouldn't be exposed to fascist influences—was a respected actress and writer who drew on her own struggles to craft this powerful epic. A fictionalized memoir, a book of romance and adventure, a feminist text, a bildungsroman—this novel is ultimately undefinable but deeply necessary; its genius will leave readers breathless.
Told in their separate voices, sixteen-year-old Prince Oliver, who wants to break free of his fairy-tale existence, and fifteen-year-old Delilah, a loner obsessed with Prince Oliver and the book in which he exists, work together to seek his freedom.