"Manet comes alive in Brombert's] pages. . . . At times her biography reads like a substantial and detailed 19th-century novel. . . . Brombert's "Edouard Manet" gives us not only a portrait of a complex artist but, in its authority and its range, a portrait of an age as well." James R. Mellow, "New York Times Book Review"
"One of the pleasures of reading her is to follow the way she weaves life, art and history into a smooth tapestry. The art emerges from the life, and in the broadest possible context: in terms of its creator's life and concerns and in terns of its historical and...

Italo Svevo's early novel Senilita (1898) remained unknown for many years until James Joyce encountered the novelist in Trieste and came to admire Senilita as a preeminent modern Italian novel. Joyce helped to launch Svevo's career, and years later Svevo achieved great fame with his masterpiece, Confessions of Zeno. In Senilita, Svevo tells the story of the amorous entanglement of Emilio, a failed writer already old at thirty-five, and Angiolina, a seductively beautiful but promiscuous young woman. A study in jealousy and self-torment, the novel traces the intoxicating effect of a...

Description: JOURNEY TO THE WORLD OF THE BLACK ROOSTER tells the story of a twenty-year-old graduate student in French literature who longed to go to Paris, but her fiance's Fulbright fellowship sent them to Rome -- where she had no wish to be -- for their first year of marriage. That was the beginning of a half-century love affair with Italy, and more specifically, with Tuscany, where the Bromberts lived for long periods and to which they return every summer. JOURNEY TO THE WORLD OF THE BLACK ROOSTER is a love story in which the author weaves the story of her marriage, the story of her...

Known for his entertaining investigations into culinary practice, Massimo Montanari turns his hungry eye to the phenomenon of food culture, food lore, cooking methods, and eating habits throughout history. An irresistible buffet of one hundred concise and engaging essays, this collection provides stimulating food for thought for those curious about one of life's most fundamental pleasures.

Focusing on the selection, preparation, and mythology of food, Montanari traverses such subjects as the status of the pantry over the centuries, the various strategies of cooking over time, the...

In his new history of food, acclaimed historian Massimo Montanari traces the development of medieval tastes--both culinary and cultural--from raw materials to market and captures their reflections in today's food trends. Tying the ingredients of our diet evolution to the growth of human civilization, he immerses readers in the passionate debates and bold inventions that transformed food from a simple staple to a potent factor in health and a symbol of social and ideological standing.

Montanari returns to the prestigious Salerno school of medicine, the "mother of all medical schools," to...