A pop-up version of the orchestral fairy tale in which a boy ignores his grandfather's warnings and proceeds to capture a wolf

The novel is a chronicle of fifty years of the Risorgimento, the Italian Unification's effect on Sicily, dating from Garibaldi's landing on the island in 1860 to the final decline of a once-opulent Sicilian family. The book represents a variation on the historical novel, in that it permits the present to intrude into the past--the omniscient narrator hints at what will happen after the story is finished. The protagonist is Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince...

""The melancholy folklore of exile," as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime. These protagonists tend to take detours and to narrate unresolved efforts. They are characters living in the margins, often coming to pieces, and sometimes,...

On small silent feet the old Tomten tiptoes through the snow, keeping watch over the farm on this chilly winter night.

Middle-aged bachelor Senhor Jose, a low-grade clerk in the Central Registry where certificates of birth, marriage, divorce, and death are kept, discovers the incomplete record of an unknown woman and becomes obsessed with the idea of finding her and making her known.