Acclaimed author Brian Malloy brings insight, humor, and the authenticity of his own experiences as a member of the AIDS generation to this universal story of love and loss set in New York City and Minneapolis at the peak of the AIDS crisis. Both a tribute to the generation gutted by the pandemic and a powerful exploration of heartbreak, recovery, and how love can defy grief, AFTER FRANCESCO is a balm for anyone who’s ever struggled through a period of darkness and come out the other side thanks to good friends, a bit of dark humor, and a reason to fight. "Like Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers, author-activist Malloy's newest novel is a heartrending portrayal of the realities of healing.” —Oprah Daily, Best LGBTQ Books of the Year The year is 1988 and 28-year-old Kevin Doyle is bone-tired of attending funerals. It’s been two years since his partner Francesco died from AIDS, an epidemic ravaging New York City and going largely ignored by the government, leaving those effected to suffer in silence, feeling unjustifiable shame and guilt on top of their loss. Some people might insist that Francesco and the other friends he’s lost to the disease are in a better place, but Kevin definitely isn’t. Half-alive, he spends his days at a mind-numbing job and nights with the ghost of Francesco, drunk and drowning in memories of a man who was too young to die. When Kevin hits an all-time low, he realizes it’s time to move back home to Minnesota and figure out how to start living again—without Francesco. With the help of a surviving partners support group and friends both old and new, Kevin slowly starts to do just that. But an unthinkable family betrayal, and the news that his best friend is fighting for his life in New York, will force a reckoning and a defining choice. “This novel is fresh, well-observed, often funny, sometimes angry, and always real. I can’t think of another novel about the AIDS years that captures that difficult, messy, intense age more accurately or movingly.”—Christopher Bram, author of Gods & Monsters

In the first book systematically to give evidence of conjugal co-rule at an Italian Renaissance court, and the first full length scholarly study of Isabella d'Este and Francesco Gonzaga, Sarah Cockram shows their relationship in an entirely new light. The book draws on (and presents) a large amount of unpublished archival material, including almost unprecedented surviving correspondence between and around these Renaissance princely rulers. Using these sources, Cockram shows Isabella and Francesco's strategic teamwork in action, illuminating tactics of collaboration and dissimulation. She also reveals behind-the-scenes diplomatic activity; court procedures; sexual politics and seduction; gift-giving and network-building; rivalries, intrigues and assassinations. Several epistolary themes emerge: insights into the couple's communication practices and double-dealing, their use of intermediaries, and attention to security matters. This book's analysis of Isabella's co-rule with her husband, supported by other members of the Gonzaga dynasty, sees her sometimes in the role of subordinate partner, sometimes guiding the couple's actions. It shows how, despite appearances at times, the couple shared common diplomatic policy as well as human, material, and cultural resources; joint administration; and the exercise of authority and justice. Thus emerges a three-dimensional picture of the mechanisms of power and power sharing in the age of Machiavelli.

Dieser Band stellt die erste umfassende Untersuchung italienischer Architekturzeichnungen aus der Sammlung Cronstedt im Nationalmuseum Stockholm vor. Besprochen werden rund 180 Zeichnungen aus der Zeit zwischen 1570 und 1620. Darunter befinden sich Werke von Francesco da Capriani daVolterra, Carlo Maderno und anderen in Rom ansässigen Architekten, die für Kirchen, Kapellen, Paläste, Gärten und Brunnen angefertigt wurden – viele von ihnen stellen die wichtigsten und doch kaum bekannten Quellen für die Architektur des Spätmanierismus und Frühbarock dar. Ebenfalls enthalten sind Pläne und Detailzeichnungen französischer Künstler, die viele antike Monumente ebenso akribisch dokumentierten wie die Bauten der Renaissancebaumeister Bramante, Antonio da Sangallo, Michelangelo und Vignola. Italian Architectural Drawings kommt aufgrund aktueller Forschungsergebnisse zu ganz neuen Zuschreibungen, die auf einer genauen Analyse der Zeichnungen (Papier, Medium, Technik, Montage) beruhen. Ergänzende Vergleichsabbildungen und eine fotografische Bestandsaufnahme der Wasserzeichen runden diesen Band ab.

Why winning doesn’t always lead to happiness Most of us are taught from a young age to be winners and avoid being losers. But what does it mean to win or lose? And why do we care so much? Does winning make us happy? Winning undertakes an unprecedented investigation of winning and losing in American society, what we are really after as we struggle to win, our collective beliefs about winners and losers, and much more. Francesco Duina argues that victory and loss are not endpoints or final destinations but gateways to something of immense importance to us: the affirmation of our place in the world. But Duina also shows that competition is unlikely to provide us with the answers we need. Winning and losing are artificial and logically flawed concepts that put us at odds with the world around us and, ultimately, ourselves. Duina explores the social and psychological effects of the language of competition in American culture. Primarily concerned with our shared obsessions about winning and losing, Winning proposes a new mind-set for how we can pursue our dreams, and, in a more satisfying way, find our proper place in the world.

Die Sphortias des Humanisten Francesco Filelfo (15. Jd.) war das erste veritable neulateinische Epos, das einen zeitgenössischen Helden in Szene setzte. Das Gedicht, das Filelfos Gönner Francesco Sforza, Herzog von Mailand, gewidmet ist, stieß fast sofort auf die heftige Kritik des Galeotto Marzio, eines Zeitgenossen Filelfos. Marzio prangerte in zwei polemischen Briefen die angeblichen literarischen und metrischen Schwächen der Sphortias an. Obwohl Filelfo Abschriften an mögliche Gönner in ganz Italien sandte, litt die Rezeption der Sphortias unter dem Fehlen einer Druckausgabe, was auch die moderne Forschung behindert hat. Der vorliegende Band bietet die editio princeps der Sphortias, ergänzt durch kritische Editionen der anderen bedeutenden, aber gleichfalls kaum erforschten Werke Filelfos, in denen Sforza im Mittelpunkt steht: das unveröffentlichte Gedicht De Genuensium deditione, das 1464 anlässlich der Unterwerfung Genuas unter die Herrschaft des Herzogs von Mailand verfasst wurde; die Oratio parentalis de divi Francisci Sphortiae Mediolanensium ducis felicitate, ein anspruchsvolles biographisches Lobgedicht, das 1467 aus Anlass des ersten Jahrestages von Sforzas Tod geschrieben wurde; und der vollständige polemische Briefwechsel mit Galeotto Marzio. The Sphortias by the Quattrocento humanist Francesco Filelfo was the first full-blown Neo-Latin epic staging a contemporary hero. Devoted to Filelfo’s patron, Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, the poem almost immediately met a fierce critic in Filelfo’s contemporary Galeotto Marzio, who wrote two polemical letters denouncing the Sphortias’ alleged literary and metrical flaws. Although Filelfo sent out copies to possible patrons all over Italy, the Sphortias’ reception suffered from the work’s failure to appear in print, which has not served modern scholarship either. This volume contains the editio princeps of the Sphortias, accompanied by critical editions of Filelfo’s other major Sforza-centred writings, all of them equally understudied: the unpublished poem De Genuensium deditione, written in 1464 on the occasion of Genoa’s submission to the Duke of Milan’s rule; the Oratio parentalis de divi Francisci Sphortiae Mediolanensium ducis felicitate, an ambitious biographical eulogy written in 1467 on the occasion of the first anniversary of Sforza’s demise; and the complete polemical epistolary exchange with Galeotto Marzio.