First published by Calvino--this long-suppressed novel of a city under deluge shows a darker Naples, on the verge of collapse

A travelogue revealing the hidden stories of Naples. In recent years Naples has become, for better or worse, the new destination in Italy. While many of its more unusual features are on display for all to see, the stories behind them remain largely hidden. In Marius Kociejowski’s portrait of this baffling city, the serpent can be many things: Vesuvius, the mafia-like Camorra, the outlying Phlegrean Fields (which, geologically speaking, constitute the second most dangerous area on the planet). It is all these things that have, at one time or another, put paid to the higher aspirations of Neapolitans themselves. Naples is simultaneously the city of light, sometimes blindingly so, and the city of darkness, although often the stuff of cliché. The boundary that separates death from life is porous in the extreme: the dead inhabit the world of the living and vice versa. The Serpent Coiled in Naples is a travelogue, a meditation on mortality, and much else besides.

New Orleans criminal psychologist Kit Franklyn has a case where victims share similarities, including humming nursery rhymes, committing murder, and then suicide! She and Andy Broussard set out to solve the case scientifically. Not once is Black Magic considered until an ancient Cajun sorcerer’s curse is heard: ‘Beware songs you loved in youth’.

Follows on with continuous main pagination from Second Series 89. Translated by the editor from the Portuguese MS in the Bibliothèque de la Chambre des Deput Paris. Book VI of the Suma Oriental, together with a translation of Rodrigues' 'Book', the entire Portuguese texts, and a letter from Pires to King Manuel, 1516. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1944.

When Helga Schneider was four, her mother, Traudi, abandoned her to pursue her career. In 1998, Helga received a letter asking her to visit Traudi, now 90-years old, before she dies. Mother and daughter have met only once after Traudi left, on a disastrous visit where Helga first learnt the terrible secret of her mother's past. Traudi was as an extermination guard in Auschwitz and Ravensbruck and was involved in Nazi 'medical' experiments on prisoners. She has never expressed even the slightest remorse for her actions, yet Helga still hopes that at this final meeting she will find some way to forgive her mother.