France, 1861. When an epidemic threatens to wipe out the silk trade in France, Herve Joncour, a young silk breeder, has to travel overland to distant Japan, out of bounds to foreigners, to smuggle out healthy silkworms. In the course of his secret negotiations with the local baron, Joncour's attention is arrested by the man's concubine, a girl who does not have oriental eyes. Although they are unable to exchange so much as a word, love blossoms between them, a love that is conveyed in a number of recondite messages. How their secret affair develops is told in this remarkable love story. As haunting as a strain of passionate music, Silk is an enchantment, an exquisite narrative and a stylistic tour de force.

Silk

Literature & Fiction

BARICCO, ALESSANDRO

Contemporary

Vintage

In Ocean Sea, Alessandro Baricco presents a hypnotizing postmodern fable of human malady--psychological, existential, erotic--and the sea as a means of deliverance. At the Almayer Inn, a remote shoreline hotel, an artist dips his brush in a cup of ocean water to paint a portrait of the sea. A scientist pens love letters to a woman he has yet to meet. An adulteress searches for relief from her proclivity to fall in love. And a sixteen-year-old girl seeks a cure from a mysterious condition which science has failed to remedy. When these people meet, their fates begin to interact as if by design. Enter a mighty tempest and a ghostly mariner with a thirst for vengeance, and the Inn becomes a place where destiny and desire battle for the upper hand. Playful, provocative, and ultimately profound, Ocean Sea is a novel of striking originality and wisdom.

Ocean Sea

Penguin

'CITY is an important title for me, because it expresses what this book has always been in my head. A city. No particular city. An impression of a city rather. Its skeleton. I thought of the stories I had in mind as if they were neighbourhoods. And I imagined characters as if they were streets...The characters - the streets - are many. There is a barber who on Thursdays cuts hair for no charge, there is a giant, and a mute. There is a boy called Gould, and a girl called Shatzy Shell. There are professors, people who play football, a black kid who plays basketball and never fails to score, and there's also a general.' Alessandro Baricco

City

Hamish Hamilton

A bold reimagining of our civilization’s greatest tale of war, by the author of the acclaimed best seller Silk. Alessandro Baricco re-creates the siege of Troy through the voices of twenty-one Homeric characters in the narrative idiom of our modern imagination. Sacrificing none of Homer’s panoramic scope, Baricco forgoes Homeric detachment and admits us to realms of subjective experience his predecessor never explored. From the return of Chryseis to the burial of Hector, we see through human eyes and feel with human hearts the unforgettable events first recounted almost three thousand years ago—events arranged not by the whims of the gods in this instance but by the dictates of human nature. With Andromache, Patroclus, Priam, and the rest, we are privy to the ghastly confusion of battle, the clamor of princely councils, the intimacies of the bedchamber—until finally only a blind poet is left to recount, secondhand, the awful fall of Ilium. Imbuing the stuff of legend with a startling new relevancy and humanity, Baricco gives us The Iliad as we have never known it. His transformative achievement is certain to delight and fascinate all readers of Homer’s indispensable classic.

An Iliad

KNOPF

A bold re-imagining of our civilization’s greatest tale of war, from the acclaimed and bestselling author of Silk. In An Iliad, Alessandro Baricco re-creates the siege of Troy through the voices of twenty-one Homeric characters, in the narrative idiom of our modern imagination. From the return of Chryseis to the burial of Hector, we see through human eyes and feel with human hearts the unforgettable events first recounted almost three thousand years ago. Imbuing the stuff of legend with a startling new relevancy and humanity, Baricco gives us The Iliad as we have never known it. His transformative achievement is certain to delight and fascinate all readers of Homer’s indispensable classic.

An Iliad (Vintage International)

The year is 1861. Hervé Joncour is a French merchant of silkworms, who combs the known world for their gemlike eggs. Then circumstances compel him to travel farther, beyond the edge of the known, to a country legendary for the quality of its silk and its hostility to foreigners: Japan.There Joncour meets a woman. They do not touch; they do not even speak. And he cannot read the note she sends him until he has returned to his own country. But in the moment he does, Joncour is possessed.

From the author of the international bestseller Silk ("Vividly erotic" -- Los Angeles Times; "A heartbreaking love story . . . a literary gem of bewitching power" -- The Sunday Times [London]), comes a haunting, suspenseful tale of love and vengeance. A handful of disparate lives converge at a remote seaside inn: a lovelorn professor, a renowned painter, an inscrutable seductress. And a beautiful young girl, fatally ill, brought to the sea by a desperate father's last hope. An intricate web of destinies and associations begins to reveal itself, but it is not until the arrival of a mysterious sailor called Adams that the truth in all its dreamlike beauty and cruelty becomes clear. Adams may furnish the key to the girl's salvation, but only the fulfillment of his obsessive secret purpose -- to answer murder with murder -- can conclude the journey that has brought him from the ends of the earth. At once playful and profoundly serious, Alessandro Baricco's new novel surges with the hypnotic power of the ocean sea.

From the author of the international bestseller Silk (“A riveting, lyrical love story” —Alan Cheuse, NPR) and the acclaimed Ocean Sea (“Astonishing . . . vividly erotic”—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times) comes an entirely new species of fiction: a panoramic Cartesian comic book of a novel—with superheroes, boxers, cowboys, and one bed-wetting prodigy expected to win the Nobel Prize. Baricco’s wildly inventive story, set in the United States, describes the improbable relationship between two untethered souls: Gould, a thirteen-year-old genius, and Shatzy Shell, his thirtysomething governess. Except for each other, they abide beyond human connection, each in a private world of serial imagination: in Shatzy’s case, the violent Wild West show she has been improvising into a tape recorder since the age of six; in Gould’s, the mock-heroic tale of an underdog boxer, which the boy tells to his imaginary friends, a giant and a mute. With the narrative logic of a comic strip, City’s quicksilver prose flows unpredictably between the whimsy of childhood conjuring and the serpentine realm of metaphysics, cunningly reminding us how the imaginings of children can harbor the stuff of tragedy, while the grandest ideas of adults are often strictly for kids. By turns hilarious and deeply sad, City is an American original, penned by a brilliant Italian.

This startling, sensual, hypnotically compelling novel tells a story of adventure, sexual enthrallment, and a love so powerful that it unhinges a man's life. In 1861 French silkworm merchant Hervé Joncour is compelled to travel to Japan, where, in the court of an enigmatic nobleman, he meets a woman. They do not touch; they do not even speak. And he cannot read the note she sends him until he has returned to his country. But in the moment he does, Joncour is possessed. The same spell will envelop anyone who reads Silk, a work that has the compression of a fable, the evocative detail of the greatest historical fiction, and the devastating erotic force of a dream.

The author of the international bestseller Silk now delivers a ravishing and wildly inventive novel about friendship, genius and its discontents, and the redemptive power of narrative. Somewhere in America lives a brilliant boy named Gould, an intellectual guided missile aimed at the Nobel Prize. His only companions are an imaginary giant and an imaginary mute. Improbably—and yet with impeccable logic--he falls into the care of Shatzy Shell, a young woman whose life up till that point has been equally devoid of human connection . Theirs is a relationship of stories and of stories within stories: of Gould’s evolving saga of an underdog boxer and the violent Western that Shatzy has been dictating into a tape recorder since the age of six. Out of these stories, Alessandro Baricco creates a masterpiece of metaphysical pulp fiction that recalls both Scheherazade and Italo Calvino. By turns exhilarating and deeply moving, City is irresistible.

Literary

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Books by BARICCO, ALESSANDRO

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BARICCO, ALESSANDRO. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Silk

Ocean Sea

City

An Iliad

An Iliad (Vintage International)

Silk

Ocean Sea

City

Silk

City