Leonardo Sciascia

A man is shot dead as he runs to catch the bus in the piazza of a small Sicilian town. Captain Bellodi, the detective on the case, is new to his job and determined to prove himself. Bellodi suspects the Mafia, and his suspicions grow when he finds himself up against an apparently unbreachable wall of silence. A surprise turn puts him on the track of a series of nasty crimes. But all the while Bellodi's investigation is being carefully monitored by a host of observers, near and far. They share a single to keep the truth from coming out.

"Leonardo Sciascia was an outstanding and controversial presence in twentieth-century Italian literary and intellectual life. Writing about his native Sicily and its culture of secrecy and suspicion, Sciascia matched sympathy with skepticism, unflinching intelligence with a streetfighter's intransigent poise.". "Sciasia was particularly admired for his short stories, and The Wine-Dark Sea offers what he himself considered his best work in the genre: thirteen spare and trenchant miniatures that range in subject from village idiots to mafia dons, marital spats to American dreams. Here, Sciascia confronts the contradictions - sometimes comic, sometimes deadly, and sometimes both - of Sicily's turbulent history and day-to-day life."--BOOK JACKET.

The townspeople of Glover, North Dakota, had little doubt that was what was happening at the old schoolhouse! They believed Lavender Holland, with her Gypsy clothing, herbal potions and black cat, must be some kind of witch. Wyatt Archer, however, wasn't convinced the eccentric weaver practiced black magic, but from the moment they met, he felt a compelling need to see Lavender again...and again. Maybe the town was right, for Lavender had certainly cast a spell on him. A sense of belonging, that was all Lavender had ever hoped for, but everyone in town felt she was something best avoided. Everyone except Wyatt Archer. Lavender knew fate had brought Wyatt to her, but just as easily, that same fate could rip them apart...forever.

"All my books taken together form one," Leonardo Sciascia conceded in his 1967 preface to Le parrocchie di Regalpetra; they form "a Sicilian book which probes the wounds of past and present and develops as the history of the continuous defeat of reason and of those who have been personally overcome and destroyed in that defeat.". Sicily as Metaphor, an intellectual autobiography and companion piece to Sciascia's imaginative writings, resulted from the conversations he had toward the end of the 1970s with the French journalist Marcelle Padovani, correspondent for Le Nouvel Observateur in Italy and author of a history of the Italian Communist Party. Sciascia spoke to her of his family, his childhood, his career as a teacher; he replied to her questions on his writings, on his idea of the writer's position in the world and his function there; to other questions that have to do with Sicilian realities - with the Mafia, the Church - and their relation to Italian politics generally; and finally he expressed himself on the social crises in his country and in the world. Some fifteen years have passed since then. In Sicily as Metaphor what remains perfectly unaffected by the evolution of affairs is this portrayal of the man who in his time so fully exemplified the European man of letters - who in Europe has always been a public figure, with implicit public responsibilities. Even when discussing issues that have been obscured or superseded by recent events, there is an uncommon durability in Sciascia's reflections; and this is bound up with style. Some time ago a critic writing in the Times Literary Supplement noted that Sciascia's "style shows how strongly, how single-mindedly and intelligently he has reacted against the candyfloss fluffiness of so much around him. What he has to say is compressed so tightly that his writing is rock hard, sometimes dry; in contrast to the almost crazy carelessness in the use of words so often found in Italy, his words are picked so exactly that they form mosaics of their own, precise patterns of emotional or intellectual meaning beyond the precise sense of what they seem to be saying."

A collection of four novellas. In these stories, illusions about ideology and history are lost in mirth and in suffering, and innocence is abandoned. Each novella has a historical moment: the Allied invasion of Sicily; the Spanish Civil War; the death of Stalin; and the "events" of 1848.

Getting close to Adam Bayne, the director of the local men's rehab center, Atlanta reporter Toni Shields finds their relationship, future, and faith threatened by her family secret and Adam's devastating past.