An NPR Best Book of the Year Written during the height of the 1970s Italian domestic terror, a cult novel, with distinct echoes of Lovecraft and Borges, makes its English-language debut. In the spare wing of a church-run sanatorium, some zealous youths create "the Library," a space where lonely citizens can read one another’s personal diaries and connect with like-minded souls in "dialogues across the ether." But when their scribblings devolve into the ugliest confessions of the macabre, the Library’s users learn too late that a malicious force has consumed their privacy and their sanity. As the city of Turin suffers a twenty-day "phenomenon of collective psychosis" culminating in nightly massacres that hundreds of witnesses cannot explain, the Library is shut down and erased from history. That is, until a lonely salaryman decides to investigate these mysterious events, which the citizenry of Turin fear to mention. Inevitably drawn into the city’s occult netherworld, he unearths the stuff of modern nightmares: what’s shared can never be unshared. An allegory inspired by the grisly neo-fascist campaigns of its day, The Twenty Days of Turin has enjoyed a fervent cult following in Italy for forty years. Now, in a fretful new age of "lone-wolf" terrorism fueled by social media, we can find uncanny resonances in Giorgio De Maria’s vision of mass fear: a mute, palpitating dread that seeps into every moment of daily existence. With its stunning anticipation of the Internet—and the apocalyptic repercussions of oversharing—this bleak, prescient story is more disturbingly pertinent than ever. Brilliantly translated into English for the first time by Ramon Glazov, The Twenty Days of Turin establishes De Maria’s place among the literary ranks of Italo Calvino and beside classic horror masters such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. Hauntingly imaginative, with visceral prose that chills to the marrow, the novel is an eerily clairvoyant magnum opus, long overdue but ever timely.

"A disturbing, unsettling novel . . . if it had been published in English soon after its first appearance in Italian (1968), the name of Giorgio De Maria would be well-known, his novels and stories mentioned in the context of J.G. Ballard, Anna Kavan, Shirley Jackson or Robert Aickman."—Lisa Tuttle, Nebula Award winner and author of Gabriel, Windhaven, and The Curious Affair of the Witch at Wayside Cross. Before an untimely mental breakdown cut short his two-decade career, Giorgio De Maria distinguished himself as one of Italy's most unique and eccentric weird fiction masters. With a background in the post-war literary culture of Turin -- Italy's urbane but eerie "city of black magic" -- De Maria drew inspiration from the Turinese underbelly of occultism, secret societies and radical politics. His writing coincided with the decade of terrorist violence known to Italians as the Years of Lead; the outcome was a weird fiction suffused with panic, rage, trauma, paranoia and meditations on antisocial hubris. In 1978, he told an interviewer: "...I think that the dimension of the fantastic, as much as this may seem paradoxical, is the most fitting one to express a reality as complex as ours today." De Maria's debut novel, The Transgressionists (1968) portrays a cell of malicious telepaths who meet in the cafés and jazz clubs of 1960s Turin to plot world domination. After experiencing the worst of their power, an embittered office clerk resolves to join them and prove himself worthy to share in their villainy. He cultivates twisted mindfulness techniques to awaken his inner sociopath. He fights off predatory phantoms that seem maddeningly drawn to him. He prepares for the dangerous "Great Leap" which will make him into a fully-fledged Transgressionist. But could his megalomania strain relations with his fiancee? Will he sacrifice love in his quest for omnipotence? The other works in this volume are no less surreal and startling. The Secret Death of Joseph Dzhugashvili (1976) gives us a nightmarish fantasy Soviet Union, where a dissident poet finds himself trapped in a psychological experiment conducted by Stalin himself. In "The End of Everydayism," a group of futuristic artists begin using corpses as a medium -- with violent, unforeseen results. The antihero of "General Trebisonda" is a possibly insane commander who prepares for a war crime in an eerily deserted fortress. Available in English for the first time, this collection contains two novellas, two short stories and a dystopian teleplay, The Appeal, which the post-cyberpunk novelist Andrea Vaccaro has lauded as "worthy of the best episodes of Black Mirror." Meanwhile, an introduction by translator Ramon Glazov offers a detailed account of De Maria's background, creative context and thoroughly unusual life.

The affair is a military wedding. The groom's parents are the Bradwins, one of the oldest and most distinguished families in Virginia. The family head, General "Boss" Bradwin, is a famous army officer. Of all his prized sons, his youngest, "Clipper" Bradwin, is the most promising. First in his class at Blue Ridge Military Academy, graduate with all honors, he is now entering into holy matrimony and then into wartime service of his country. What will begin, however, with the solemnity of his marriage vows will end in the echoing screams of the damned-an ungodly spectacle of spilled blood and sobbing, throat-aching terror. For this distinguished family is like no other on earth. There is a curse on their blood. Their family history is rooted not in magnolia and honeysuckle, but in darkness and demonism, in frightening forces beyond their knowledge and control. Their august history begins not in antebellum mansions, but with supernatural sorcery in the ancient rites and rituals of dark African jungles. There is a curse that grips the Bradwins from generation to generation, from horror to bloody horror, and that climaxes in a spine-chilling nightmare of black occultism and blood vengeance.

'This could well be the best book ever written about football' Time Out The memoir behind the documentary One Night in Turin, the inside story of a World Cup that changed our footballing nation forever. It was the World Cup semi-finals. On 4th July, 1990, in a stadium in Turin, Gazza cried, England lost and football changed forever. This is the inside story of Italia '90 - we meet the players, the hooligans, the agents, the journalists, the fans. Writer Pete Davies was given nine months full access to the England squad and their manager Bobby Robson. One Night in Turin is his thrilling insider account of the summer when football became the greatest show on earth.

Christianity was born nearly two thousand years ago in ancient Palestine. It has shaped the course of human history. Yet historians still cannot say how it really began. How did a first-century Jew called Jesus manage to spark a new religion? It is one of the biggest and most profound of all historical mysteries. This extraordinary book finally provides a convincing answer. Traditionally, the birth of Christianity has been explained via the miracle of the Resurrection. After Jesus died he was raised from the dead by God and appeared to his disciples, telling them to spread the gospel. Once they saw the Risen Jesus, nothing could shake their belief. Within a few generations Christianity had spread throughout the Middle East and Europe; within a few centuries it had taken over much of the world. But historians have been unable to account for Christianity’s remarkable success without the Resurrection to spark it. If no one really saw the Risen Jesus, how were his followers convinced that he was their immortal Messiah? Art historian Thomas de Wesselow has spent the last seven years deducing the answer to this puzzle, and in doing so he has pieced together an entirely new picture of the birth of Christianity. Reassessing a familiar but misunderstood historical source and reinterpreting many biblical passages, de Wesselow shows that the solution has been staring us in the face for more than a century. The Shroud of Turin, widely thought to be a fake, is in fact authentic. And it holds the key to the greatest mystery in human history.

Finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Fiction Award, Dan Chaon's Best of 2017 pick in Publishers Weekly, one of Vol. 1 Brooklyn's Best Books of 2017, a BOMB Magazine "Looking Back on 2017: Literature" Pick, and one of Vulture's 10 Best Thriller Books of 2017. Jac Jemc's The Grip of It is a chilling literary horror novel about a young couple haunted by their newly purchased home Touring their prospective suburban home, Julie and James are stopped by a noise. Deep and vibrating, like throat singing. Ancient, husky, and rasping, but underwater. “That’s just the house settling,” the real estate agent assures them with a smile. He is wrong. The move—prompted by James’s penchant for gambling and his general inability to keep his impulses in check—is quick and seamless; both Julie and James are happy to start afresh. But this house, which sits between a lake and a forest, has its own plans for the unsuspecting couple. As Julie and James try to establish a sense of normalcy, the home and its surrounding terrain become the locus of increasingly strange happenings. The framework— claustrophobic, riddled with hidden rooms within rooms—becomes unrecognizable, decaying before their eyes. Stains are animated on the wall—contracting, expanding—and map themselves onto Julie’s body in the form of painful, grisly bruises. Like the house that torments the troubled married couple living within its walls, The Grip of It oozes with palpable terror and skin-prickling dread. Its architect, Jac Jemc, meticulously traces Julie and James’s unsettling journey through the depths of their new home as they fight to free themselves from its crushing grip.