The immigrant tenants of a building in Rome offer skewed accounts of a murder in this prize-winning satire by the Algerian-born Italian author. Piazza Vittorio is home to a polyglot community of immigrants who have come to Rome from all over the world. But when a tenant is murdered in the building's elevator, the delicate balance is thrown into disarray. As each of the victim's neighbors is questioned by the police, readers are offered an all-access...

"Un'Italia segreta, inquietante in un romanzo che ha il ritmo delle saghe noir americane. Un libro dove i protagonisti sono una banda di giovani delinquenti che decide di conquistare Roma, e diventa un esercito quasi invincibile. Politica, servizi segreti, giudici onesti, poliziotti e il più grande bordello della Capitale in un romanzo basato su una minuziosa documentazione. "-- publisher's or seller's website. "A disturbing novel that is similar...

"Set in Rome, Cape Cod, and Wisconsin over the course of the summer of 2009, and Rome during the spring of 1970, The Wanting Life tells the intertwined story of three members of the Novak family: Father Paul, a closeted gay Catholic priest who's dying of cancer and has secrets he desperately wants to share; Britta, his self-destructive sister and caretaker, who's struggling to find meaning in a world without her beloved husband; and Maura, Britta's...

Orvieto--its very name brings to mind priceless art, colorful ceramics, and straw-colored wine. And the most famous cathedral facade in Italy, a structure of gothic spires, arches, statues, and mosaics. But as Rick Montoya discovers, this jewel of Umbria can have an ugly side as well. When Rick Montoya moved to his mother's Italy from his father's Santa Fe, New Mexico, to work as a freelance translator using his dual heritage, he didn't expect to...

Over the course of a career that spanned six decades, the southern novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Spencer established herself as one of the finest literary artists of a generation that included Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty. This definitive volume brings together three remarkable novels: The Voice at the Back Door, her powerful masterpiece about racial politics in the world of Jim Crow Mississippi; the beloved classic...

Variety lights: A beautiful and ambitious young woman joins a traveling troupe of third-rate vaudevillians and inadvertently causes jealousy and emotional crises. The white sheik: During a day in their honeymoon, a couple is separated by the city's lust and the desires it produces. I vitelloni: Details a year in the life of five young men lingering in post-adolescent limbo, dreaming of adventure and escape from their small town and struggling to...