A collection of stories about the evolution of the universe.

How can a leader be strong and decisive, yet still inspire loyalty in his followers? How do you keep your enemies in check? Is it better to be feared than loved? When is it necessary to break the rules? This book answers these questions by examining regimes and their rulers around the world and throughout history.

Includes five autobiographical meditations that delves into the author's past, remembering awkward childhood walks with his father, a lifelong obsession with the cinema and fighting in the Italian Resistance against the Fascists.

A couple on a journey across Mexico are excited by the idea of a particular ingredient, suggested by ancient rituals of human sacrifice. Precariously balanced on his throne, a king is able only to listen to the sounds around him - sure that any deviation from their normal progression would mean the uprising of the conspirators that surround him.

A collection of short stories covering the length of the author's writing career, from when he was a teenager to shortly before his death. It includes fables; a town where everything has been forbidden apart from the game of tip-cat; and a pitiable tribe watching the flight paths of guided missiles from outside their mud huts.

'For some time now, I have been plagued, perhaps blessed, by dreams of rivers and seas, dreams of water'. Just days after Albert James writes these lines to his son John, in London, he is dead. Abandoning a pretty girlfriend and the lab where he is completing his PhD, John flies to Delhi to join his mother in mourning.

Pin is a bawdy, adolescent cobbler's assistant, both arrogant and insecure who - while the Second World War rages - sings songs and tells jokes to endear himself to the grown-ups of his town - particularly jokes about his sister, who they all know as the town's 'mattress'.

Italo Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1985-86, but they were left unfinished at his death. The surviving drafts explore of the concepts of lightness, quickness, multiplicity, exactitude and visibility in serious yet playful essays that reveal Calvino's debt to the comic strip and the folktale.

Beginning with an essay on the attributes that define a classic, this collection provides the author's criticism.

In these impressions of the Italian countryside: Twilight in Italy , Sea and Sardina , and Etruscan Places , the author transforms ordinary incidents into passages of intense beauty.

Is Italy a united country, or a loose affiliation of warring states? Is Italian football a sport, or an ill-disguised protraction of ancient enmities? After twenty years in the Bel Pasese, the author goes on the road to follow the fortunes of Hellas Verona football club, and to get a fresh take on the conundrum that is the national character.

Having spent some time in Rome, Antonio returns to his native town with the reputation of being a playboy and with a long list of amorous adventures behind him. To please his father, Antonio agrees to marry the beautiful Barbara. A year after their marriage however - scandal erupts. Barbara is still a virgin.

Overweight and overwrought, Howard Cleaver, London's successful journalist, abruptly abandons home, partner, mistresses and above all television, the instrument that brought him identity and power. Humiliated by his inability to understand the Tyrolese peasants, he discovers that there is nowhere so noisy and so dangerous as the solitary mind.

Addresses DH Lawrence's belligerence and how the relationships in his life were characterized by intimacy and conflict. This collection includes essays on tension and conflict in the work of Beckett and Hardy, and Bernhard and Dostoevsky. It discusses questions of history, politics and literature, and also takes on the issue of World Cup football.

Camping, eating and paddling together, six adults and nine adolescents seem set to enjoy what their leader insists on calling a 'community experience.' But, the dangerous river brings out qualities and failings in the most urgent fashion, provokes sudden conflicts, inexpected shifts of alliance. And, a banal disagreement turns violent.

Forming a link in a chain that reaches back through Ovid's Metamorphoses directly to Homer, Roberto Calasso's award-winning re-examination of fantastic fables and mysteries, which we may only think we know, sets out to explore the entire world of Greek mythology and piece it back together.

'For some time now, I have been plagued, perhaps blessed, by dreams of rivers and seas, dreams of water'. Just days after Albert James writes these lines to his son, John, in London, he is dead. Abandoning a pretty girlfriend and the lab where he is completing his PhD, John flies to Delhi to join his mother in mourning.

In the dramatic landscape of the Italian Alps a group of English canoeists arrive for an introduction to white water rafting. Rather than allowing them to forget their ordinary personalities, the dangerous river brings out qualities and failings in the group.

A brilliant and unsettling work by one of the revolutionary masters of modern European literature.

Collected here for the first time the best from Tim Parks's short fiction, spanning across his entire literary career and enriched by new stories written specifically for this publication.