BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Mary Balogh's The Secret Mistress. Step into a world of scandal, intrigue, and enthralling passion as New York Times bestselling author Mary Balogh sweeps us into the lives of an extraordinary family: the Huxtables. Margaret, the eldest, embarks on the most risqué adventure of her life and agrees to marry the most notorious man in London.… Only desperation could bring Duncan Pennethorne, the infamous Earl of Sheringford, back home after the spectacular scandal that had shocked even the jaded ton. Forced to wed in fifteen days or be cut off without a penny, Duncan chooses the one woman in London in frantic need of a husband. A lie to an old flame forces Margaret Huxtable to accept the irresistible stranger’s offer. But once she discovers who he really is, it’s too late—she’s already betrothed to the wickedly sensual rakehell. Quickly she issues an ultimatum: If Duncan wants her, he must woo her. And as passion slowly ignites, two people marrying for all the wrong reasons are discovering the joys of seduction—and awaiting the exquisite pleasure of what comes after….

“Calvino . . . managed effortlessly what no author in English could quite claim: his novels and stories and fables were both classically modernist and giddily postmodern, embracing both experiment and tradition, at once conceptual and humane, intimate and mythic.” — Jonathan Lethem, New York Times Book Review Blending reality and illusion with elegance and precision, the stories in this collection take place in a World War II–era and postwar Italy tinged with the visionary and fablelike qualities. A trio of gluttonous burglars invades a pastry shop; two children trespass upon a forbidden garden; a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him. In the title story, a compact masterpiece of shifting perspectives, a panicked soldier tries to keep his wits—and his life—when he faces off against a young partisan with a loaded rifle and miraculous aim. Select stories from Last Comes the Raven have been published in translation, but the collection as a whole has never appeared in English. This volume, including several stories newly translated by Ann Goldstein, is an important addition to Calvino's legacy.

In this stunningly wrought collection, Dave Smith presents a galaxy of souls searching for "something" through the dusty lens of a lost faith. If religion is the arena in which we engage ultimate meaning, then these are religious poems indeed, prayers and meditations of the cosmically disenfranchised looking for a sign among the detritus of a broken world: "Lord, admit/us, we lived here, almost happy, almost yours". But where, really, are we? And how - and why - did we get here? Pulsing, carefully orchestrated, these thirteen-line poems are tightly wound miracles of compression, alive with texture and color, sharp with the raw flavors of sex, blood, and seawrack, ready to explode off the page. Ranging from youth, all moonlight and speed and violent ecstasy, through the fierce disillusionment of middle age to the final decline, snagged on "memory's hook"; from the sun-shot desolation of the contemporary American South to the faded marmoreal glory of Europe - Smith forges a craggy metaphysics that stops just this side of despair, finding Delphic moments of affirmation of our kinship with the physical world.