Calabria is the toe of the boot that is Italy -- a rugged peninsula where grapevines and fig and olive trees cling to the mountainsides during scorching summers. Calabria is also a seedbed of Italian-American culture; in North America, more people of Italian heritage trace their roots to Calabria than to almost any other region in Italy. Mark Rotella's Stolen Figs -- named a Best Travel Book of 2003 by Condé Nast Traveler -- is a marvelous evocation of Calabria. A grandson of Calabrese immigrants, Rotella persuades his father to visit the region for the first time in thirty years; once there, he meets Giuseppe, a postcard photographer who becomes his guide. As they travel around the region, Giuseppe initiates Rotella -- and the reader -- into its secrets: how to make a soppressata and 'nduja, and, of course, how to steal a fig without committing a crime. Stolen Figs is a model travelogue -- at once charming and wise, and full of an earthy and unpretentious sense of life that now, as ever, characterizes Calabria and its people.

An effortlessly artful blend of travel book, memoir, and affectionate portrait of a people Calabria is the toe of the boot that is Italy—a rugged peninsula where grapevines and fig and olive trees cling to the mountainsides during the scorching summers while the sea crashes against the cliffs on both coasts. Calabria is also a seedbed of Italian American culture; in North America, more people of Italian heritage trace their roots to Calabria than to almost any other region in Italy. Mark Rotella's Stolen Figs is a marvelous evocation of Calabria and Calabrians, whose way of life is largely untouched by the commerce that has made Tuscany and Umbria into international tourist redoubts. A grandson of Calabrian immigrants, Rotella persuades his father to visit the region for the first time in thirty years; once there, he meets Giuseppe, a postcard photographer who becomes his guide to all things Calabrian. As they travel around the region, Giuseppe initiates Rotella—and the reader—into its secrets: how to make soppressata and 'nduja, where to find hidden chapels and grottoes, and, of course, how to steal a fig without actually committing a crime. Stolen Figs is a model travelogue—at once charming and wise, and full of the earthy and unpretentious sense of life that, now as ever, characterizes Calabria and its people.

Evan S. Connell's restraint, concision, and perfect pitch lend themselves stunningly to the short story form. He intuitively senses when to explain and when to let silence stand in speech's stead. His characters—among them, a wanderer back from Spain, the corpulent Mr. Bemis, Katia and her lion—ring true not because the stories are filled with monumental events, but because they center around seemingly insignificant experiences that remain in the mind, imbued with a meaning ever difficult to define. Often we are left to float in their wake, ending in an ellipsis of sorts. Yet by Connell's mastery, even the voices that speak only once resonate beyond the final page.

Howl’s Moving Castle meets Neil Gaiman in this “dark and flinty” (Booklist) middle grade fantasy, set in a world as mesmerizing as it is menacing, following children on a quest to save their father who get embroiled in the sinister agendas of rival sorcerers. In an unkind alternate past, somewhere between the Stone Age and a Metal Age, Tell and his sister Wren live in a small mountain village that makes its living off black glass mines and runs on brutal laws. When their father is blinded in a mining accident, the law dictates he has thirty days to regain his sight and be capable of working at the same level as before or be put to death. Faced with this dire future, Tell and Wren make the forbidden treacherous journey to the legendary city of Halfway, halfway down the mountain, to trade their father’s haul of the valuable black glass for the medicine to cure him. The city, ruled by five powerful female sorcerers, at first dazzles the siblings. But beneath Halfway’s glittery surface seethes ambition, violence, prejudice, blackmail, and impending chaos. Without knowing it, Tell and Wren have walked straight into a sorcerers’ coup. Over the next twelve days, they must scramble first to save themselves, then their new friends, as allegiances shift and prejudices crack open to show who has true power.

This volume offers insights into the nature of warfare, diplomacy and peacemaking on the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages, and the influences and entanglements resulting from these processes. The essays collected here emphasize both violent conflict and the brokering of allegiances and settlements, either within polities and common endeavours or between rival entities (such as the taifas of Seville and Badajoz in the fractious eleventh century). The volume begins with an account of Muslim warlords who sought service under Christian rulers in the tenth century and their historiographical fates, and embraces the whole of the Iberian Peninsula, from its western coast, in an analysis of the tightrope walked by the Galician monastery of Oia in maintaining its Portuguese domains at times of bitter conflict between Castile and its neighbour, to its eastern coast, as Catalan and Aragonese merchants coped with pirates and state-sponsored confiscation in the fifteenth century.