Tim Parks

A New York Times Notable Book: A deliciously entertaining account of expatriate life in a small village just outside Verona, Italy. Tim Parks is anything but a gentleman in Verona. So after ten years of living with his Italian wife, Rita, in an Italian condominium bubbling with Italian life around him, the novelist found that he had inadvertently collected a gallery full of splendid characters. In this wittily observed account, Parks introduces readers...

From the author of Italian Neighbors, this is another sparkling account of Italian society and culture-this time focusing on all the little things that turn an ordinary newborn infant into a true Italiano. When British-born Tim Parks heard a mother at the beach in Pescara shout to her son, "Alberto, don't sweat! No you can't go in the sea till eleven, it's still too cold, go and see your cousin in row 3 number 52," he was inspired to write about parenting...

Morris Duckworth teaches English to the pampered rich of Verona and is not pleased. Living a meager existence in a squalid apartment, he regards his privileged students with envy and disdain, first wreaking revenge by petty theft and then, like all good criminals, graduating to grander larceny. When one of those students, a beautiful but vapid heiress, falls in love with him, Morris can almost smell upward mobility. However, after the girl's mother-much...

"Why do we need fiction? Why do books need to be printed on paper, copyrighted, read to the finish? Why should a group of aging Swedish men determine what "world" literature is best? Do books change anything? Did they use to? Do we read to challenge our vision of the world or to confirm it? Has novel writing turned into a job like any other? In Where I'm Reading From, the internationally acclaimed novelist and critic Tim Parks ranges over a lifetime...

LITERARY ESSAYS. An acclaimed author of novels and short stories, Tim Parks - who was described in a recent review as "one of the best living writers of English" - has delighted audiences around the world with his finely observed writings on all aspects of Italian life and customs. This volume contains a selection of his best essays on the literature of his adopted country. From Boccaccio and Machiavelli through to Moravia and Tabucchi, from the Stil...

"In Italo Calvino's cosmicomics, primordial beings cavort on the nearby surface of the moon, play marbles with atoms, and bear ecstatic witness to Earth's first dawn. Exploring natural phenomena and the origins of the universe, these beloved tales relate complex scientific concepts to our common sensory, emotional, human world."--Publisher's description.