Envy and jealousy are impediments to spiritual progress. Showing off breeds boasting, puffs up the feathers of the peacock in proud self-adulation, and leads to the disparagement of others.

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and a baffling new world, the characters in Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations.

The letters of Bartolomeo Fonzio—a leading literary figure in Florence of the time of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Machiavelli—are a window into the world of Renaissance humanism and classical scholarship. This first English translation includes the famous letter about the discovery on the Via Appia of the perfectly preserved body of a Roman girl.