Longlisted for the Authors' Club First Novel Award 'Divine . . . the smart, sexy read you need' Evening Standard 'Startlingly impressive' Daily Mail 'Exhilarating' Vogue.com 'An electric new novel' Guardian AN EXQUISITE DEBUT NOVEL. A MID-LIFE COMING-OF-AGE STORY CHARTING ONE MAN'S SEXUAL AWAKENING AND HIS SPECTACULAR FALL FROM GRACE IN 1990S LONDON. FOR FANS OF ALAN HOLLINGHURST AND EDWARD ST AUBYN. Exiled from his university position for an inexcusable blunder, art historian Don Lamb flees to London, a city alive with sex and creativity. There, over the course of a long, hot summer, as he is immersed in the anarchic art and gay scenes of the mid-90s, Don sees his carefully curated life irrevocably changed. But his epiphany is also a reckoning, as his unexamined past is revealed to him in a devastating new light. Intense and atmospheric, Tiepolo Blue traces Don's turbulent awakening, and his desperate flight from art into life. 'Wildly enjoyable . . . A novel that combines formal elegance with gripping storytelling' Financial Times 'Dizzying and exciting and unsettling, and beautifully told' Reverend Richard Coles, Daily Mail

The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often covering vast ceilings like those at the Würzburg Residenz in Germany and the Royal Palace in Madrid with frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him - but though his contemporaries appreciated and admired him, they failed to understand him. Few have even attempted to tackle Tiepolo's series of thirty-three bizarre and haunting etchings, the Capricci and the Scherzi, but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge, interpreting these etchings as chapters in a dark narrative that contains the secret of Tiepolo's art. Blooming ephebes, female satyrs, Oriental sages, owls, snakes: we will find them all, including Punchinello and Death, within the pages of this book, along with Venus, Time, Moses, numerous angels, Cleopatra and Beatrice of Burgundy - a motley, gypsyish company always on the go. Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a fluid, seemingly effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.

From the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, a book-length poem on two educations in painting, a century apart "Between me and Venice the thigh of a hound; my awe of the ordinary, because even as I write, paused on a step of this couplet, I have never found its image again, a hound in astounding light." Tiepolo's Hound joins the quests of two Caribbean men: Camille Pissarro--a Sephardic Jew born in 1830 who leaves his native St. Thomas to follow his vocation as a painter in Paris--and the poet himself, who longs to rediscover a detail--"a slash of pink on the inner thigh / of a white hound"--of a Venetian painting encountered on an early visit from St. Lucia to New York. Both journeys take us through a Europe of the mind's eye, in search of a connection between the lost, actual landscape of a childhood and the mythical landscape of empire. Published with twenty-five full-color reproductions of Derek Walcott's own paintings, the poem is at once the spiritual biography of a great artist in self-imposed exile, a history in verse of Impressionist painting, and a memoir of the poet's desire to catch the visual world in more than words.

Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) was the greatest Italian painter of the eighteenth century, best known for his monumental frescoes and epic altarpieces. The scale of these paintings is immense, even overpowering. Yet some of Tiepolo's finest work can be found in the small oil sketches that he often made in preparation for these grand commissions. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Giambattista Tiepolo: Fifteen Oil Sketches brings together a group of the artist's oil sketches from the Courtauld Institute in London that spans his entire career and reveals the amazing confidence and fluidity with which he created these paintings. The unusual intimacy of these preparatory sketches-made directly on the canvas with no preliminary underdrawing-reveals a great artist's vigorous imagination at work. The exhibit will run from May 3, 2005, to September 4, 2005. An introductory essay situates these works within the context of eighteenth-century art and Tiepolo's life and career.

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "[An] immersive saga. . . . A celebration of family and a paean to the power of storytelling.”—People, "Book of the Week" "Trigiani conveys the beauty of Italy, the hardships of war, the taste of family recipes, and the enduring love of family."—Library Journal (starred) “The beauty of any book by Adriana Trigiani is her ability to interweave life and fiction. . . . Don’t miss your chance to take this unforgettable journey with the Cabrelli women!” —Lisa Wingate, Book of the Month From “a master of visual and palpable detail” (The Washington Post), comes a lush, immersive novel about three generations of Tuscan artisans with one remarkable secret. Epic in scope and resplendent with the glorious themes of identity and belonging, The Good Left Undone unfolds in breathtaking turns. Matelda, the Cabrelli family’s matriarch, has always been brusque and opinionated. Now, as she faces the end of her life, she is determined to share a long-held secret with her family about her own mother’s great love story: with her childhood friend, Silvio, and with dashing Scottish sea captain John Lawrie McVicars, the father Matelda never knew. . . . In the halcyon past, Domenica Cabrelli thrives in the coastal town of Viareggio until her beloved home becomes unsafe when Italy teeters on the brink of World War II. Her journey takes her from the rocky shores of Marseille to the mystical beauty of Scotland to the dangers of wartime Liverpool—where Italian Scots are imprisoned without cause—as Domenica experiences love, loss, and grief while she longs for home. A hundred years later, her daughter, Matelda, and her granddaughter, Anina, face the same big questions about life and their family’s legacy, while Matelda contemplates what is worth fighting for. But Matelda is running out of time, and the two timelines intersect and weave together in unexpected and heartbreaking ways that lead the family to shocking revelations and, ultimately, redemption.

In Edmund White's most moving novel yet, an American living in Paris finds his life transformed by an unexpected love affair. Austin Smith is pushing fifty, loveless and drifting, until one day he meets Julien, a much younger, married Frenchman. In the beginning, the lovers' only impediments are the comic clashes of culture, age, and temperament. Before long, however, the past begins to catch up with them. In a desperate quest to save health and happiness, they move from Venice to Key West, from Montreal in the snow to Providence in the rain. But it is amid the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara that their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis.

Avant-garde Paris comes to life in this "meticulous and loving reconstruction of the period" (The New York Times Book Review) On almost every Saturday of the first half of the twentieth century, Gertrude Stein would open her door to the likes of Picasso and Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Cocteau and Apollinaire, welcoming them into a salon alive with vivid avant-garde paintings and sparkling intellectual conversation. In Charmed Circle, James R. Mellow has re-created this fascinating world and the complex woman who dominated it. His engaging narrative illuminates Stein's writing—now celebrated along with the work of such literary giants as Joyce and Woolf—including her difficult early periods, which adapted cubism and abstraction to the written word. Rich with detail and insight, it conveys both the serene rhythms of daily life with her devoted partner, Alice B. Toklas, and the radical pulse and dramatic upheavals of her exciting era. Spanning the years from 1903, when Stein first arrived in Paris, to her final days at the end of the Second World War, Charmed Circle is a penetrating and lively account of a writer at the heart of modernity.

In the 1980s a Romanian family, accompanied by their dog defects to Greece where they are accommodated in a refugee camp. Exhilarating, absurd or saddening surprises meet them at every turn when, during their wait for Canadian immigrant visas, they mingle with refugees from the communist bloc, Afghanistan and Turkey. Not everyone has the same reason for being there, but camp-mates of the same mind gather around drinks and there is talk of hope and love, hatred and betrayal, heroism and sacrifi ces. These cathartic tales unfold against the background of one of the cruelest periods of history.

Long before the official establishment of the Commonwealth, intrepid pioneers ventured west of the Allegheny Mountains into an expansive, alluring wilderness that they began to call Kentucky. After blazing trails, clearing plots, and surviving innumerable challenges, a few adventurers found time to pen celebratory tributes to their new homeland. In the two centuries that followed, many of the world’s finest writers, both native Kentuckians and visitors, have paid homage to the Bluegrass State with the written word. In The Kentucky Anthology, acclaimed author and literary historian Wade Hall has assembled an unprecedented and comprehensive compilation of writings pertaining to Kentucky and its land, people, and culture. Hall’s introductions to each author frame both popular and lesser-known selections in a historical context. He examines the major cultural and political developments in the history of the Commonwealth, finding both parallels and marked distinctions between Kentucky and the rest of the United States. While honoring the heritage of Kentucky in all its glory, Hall does not blithely turn away from the state’s most troubling episodes and institutions such as racism, slavery, and war. Hall also builds the argument, bolstered by the strength and significance of the collected writings, that Kentucky’s best writers compare favorably with the finest in the world. Many of the authors presented here remain universally renowned and beloved, while others have faded into the tides of time, waiting for rediscovery. Together, they guide the reader on a literary tour of Kentucky, from the mines to the rivers and from the deepest hollows to the highest peaks. The Kentucky Anthology traces the interests and aspirations, the achievements and failures and the comedies and tragedies that have filled the lives of generations of Kentuckians. These diaries, letters, speeches, essays, poems, and stories bring history brilliantly to life. Jesse Stuart once wrote, “If these United States can be called a body, Kentucky can be called its heart.” The Kentucky Anthology captures the rhythm and spirit of that heart in the words of its most remarkable chroniclers.