Michel de Montaigne embodies the Humanist ideal. Curious, measured, contemplative yet not unworldly, witty, free of prejudice, and urbane. But what does Montaigne have to tell us about how to think and live today? In forty short, erudite and lively chapters written over a single summer, Antoine Compagnon seeks answers to that question. 
In A Summer with Montaigne, Compagnon invites his readers to join him as he strolls through Montaigne’s key contributions to our understanding of what is good and worthwhile in life. This engaging book, then, serves as both an introduction to Montaigne for readers unfamiliar with his work and a refresher for those who are already acquainted with his unique brilliance, vitality, and timeliness. Montaigne’s Essays deal with themes that remain relevant today, from the problems posed by religion, war, power and friendship to the absurdity of our fixations and peccadillos. As accompanies readers through the Essays, Compagnon never pontificates and is never austere, rather he approaches Montaigne with a sense of humor, admiration, and joy.

A Summer with Montaigne: On the Art of Living Well

History

COMPAGNON, Antoine

Europe

Europa Compass

In the fifteenth century, even before the city states of the Apennine Peninsula began to coalesce into what would become, several centuries later, a nation, “Italy” exerted enormous influence over all of Europe and throughout the Mediterranean. Its cultural, economic, and political dominance is utterly astonishing and unique in world history. Viewing the Italy―the many Italies―of that time through the lens of today allows us to gather a fragmented, multi-faceted and seemingly contradictory history into a single unifying narrative that speaks to our current reality as much as it does to a specific historical period. This is what the acclaimed French historian, Fernand Braudel, achieves here. He brings to life the two extraordinary centuries that span the Renaissance, Mannerism, and the Baroque and analyzes the complex interaction between art, science, politics and commerce during Italy’s extraordinary cultural flowering.

Out of Italy: Two Centuries of World Domination and Demise

Arts & Photography

BRAUDEL, Fernand

History & Criticism

Boitani’s presentation of the classics is as entertaining and unexpected as it is informative. He invites the reader to discover the timeless beauty and wisdom of ancient literature, highlighting its profound and surprising connections to the present. 
With their emphasis on the mutability and fluidity of identity and matter, their examination of the power and position of women in society, and their enduring treatments of force and subjugation, fate and free will, the ethical life, hospitality, love, compassion, and mysticism, the classics play active roles in our lives and can help us refine our opinions and our values. 
Ranging from Homer to Tacitus, with Thucydides, Aristotle Sophocles, Cicero, and many others in between, Boitani’s A New Sublime is a fresh, inspiring reminder of the enduring importance and beauty of the classics of the Western canon.

A New Sublime: Ten Timeless Lessons on the Classics

Literature & Fiction

Boitani, Piero

“A brilliant meditation on language and life.”―Bookriot 
For word nerds, language loons, and grammar geeks, an impassioned and informative literary leap into the wonders of the Greek language. Here are nine ways Greek can transform your relationship to time and to those around you, nine reflections on the language of Sappho, Plato, and Thucydides, and its relevance to our lives today, nine chapters that will leave readers with a new passion for a very old language, nine epic reasons to love Greek. 
The Ingenious Language is a love song dedicated to the language of history’s greatest poets, philosophers, adventurers, lovers, adulterers, and generals. Greek, as Marcolongo explains in her buoyant and entertaining prose, is unsurpassed in its beauty and expressivity, but it can also offer us new ways of seeing the world and our place in it. She takes readers on an astonishing journey, at the end of which, while it may still be Greek to you, you’ll have nine reasons to be glad it is. 
No batteries or prior knowledge of Greek required!

The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek

Self-Help

Marcolongo, Andrea

Personal Transformation

Lire Magazine Best Travel Book 
Take four friends, put them on two Ural motorcycles (complete with sidecars), send them off on a 2,500-mile odyssey retracing history’s most famous retreat, add what some might consider an excessive amount of Vodka, and you’ve got Sylvain Tesson’s Berezina, a riotous and erudite book that combines travel, history, comradery, and adventure. 
The retreat of Napoleon’s Grande Armée from Russia culminated, after a humiliating loss, with the crossing of the River Berezina, a word that henceforth became synonymous with unmitigated disaster for the French and national pride for the Russians. Two hundred years after this battle, Sylvain Tesson and his friends retrace Napoleon’s retreat, along the way reflecting on the lessons of history, the meaning of defeat, and the realities of contemporary Europe. A great read for history buffs and for anyone who has ever dreamed of an adventure that is out of the ordinary.

Berezina: From Moscow to Paris Following Napoleon’s Epic Fail

TESSON, Sylvain

Military

About the Author\nJean-Claude Izzo was born in Marseilles, France in 1945. Best known for the Marseilles trilogy (Total Chaos, Chourmo, Solea), Izzo is also the author of The Lost Sailors, A Sun for the Dying, and one collection of short stories, Living Tires. Izzo is widely credited with being the founder of the modern Mediterranean noir novel. He died in 2000 at the age of fifty-five.\nFor Europa Editions, Howard Curtis has translated five novels by Jean-Claude Izzo, including all three books in his Marseilles trilogy, as well as works by Francisco Coloane, Luis Sepúlveda, Caryl Férey, Daniel Arsand, Santiago Gamboa, and Carole Martinez.\n“Evocative . . . A paean to the life, cities and food of the Mediterranean . . . His essays . . . reveal a man of deep feeling and humanity” (The Guardian).\nA short sublime book on the three things dearest to Jean-Claude Izzo’s heart: his native Marseilles, the sea in all its splendor, and Mediterranean noir―the literary genre his books helped to found. This collection of writings shows Izzo, author of the acclaimed Marseilles trilogy, at his most contemplative and insightful. His native city, with its food, its flavors, its passionate inhabitants, and its long, long history of commerce and conviviality, constitute the lifeblood that runs through all of Izzo’s work. 
Reminiscent of Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi and the lyrical essays of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Albert Camus, as uplifting and touching as Daniel Klein’s Travels with Epicurus, this slender volume will appeal equally to gourmets who delight in the strong flavors of Mediterranean cuisine, to those travelling on the Riviera (or arm-chair travelers who wish they could), and, naturally, to aficionados of noir fiction. 
Praise for Jean-Claude Izzo\n“Mr. Izzo was a marvelous food writer . . . His books are filled with winning descriptions of Provencal meals run through with the flavors of north Africa, Italy, Greece.”―The New York Times\n“Just as Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy made Los Angeles their very own, so Mr. Izzo has made Marseilles so much more than just another geographical setting.”―The Economist\n“In Izzo’s books . . . Marseilles is a ‘ville selon nos coeur,’ a city in tune with our heart . . . A cosmopolitan, maritime city, greedy, sensual and warm.”―Slow Food

Garlic, Mint, & Sweet Basil

Biographies & Memoirs

IZZO, JEAN-CLAUDE

Professionals & Academics

Highly regarded philosopher and psychoanalyst, Massimo Recalcati has penned a gripping, erudite meditation on suffering, doubt, betrayal, and the potential for renewal that dwells in our most painful moments. For Recalcati, Jesus's reckoning in the Garden of Gethsemane is at once an instance of human weakness and an encounter with the Divine. It is the story where the Divine and the Human meet most forcefully, first in company, then in solitude, and where agony and doubt mingle with potential rebirth and revitalization. &nbsp; As the Gospels recount, after the Last Supper, Jesus retreated to a small field just outside the city of Jerusalem: Gethsemane, the olive grove. His prayers are interrupted when Judas arrives with a group of armed men, and kisses him, betraying and abandoning him with a kiss. Jesus is forsaken by his friends and, it seems to him in this moment, by his father, his God. His sin, in Recalcati's view, is like Prometheus to have drawn Divine closer to man. &nbsp; The Night in Gethsemane is a revelatory, moving, and inspiring meditation by one of Italy's most important thinkers.

The Night in Gethsemane: On Solitude and Betrayal

Politics & Social Sciences

Recalcati, Massimo

Philosophy

Renowned architect Renzo Piano (the New Whitney Museum, the Pompidou Center, Potsdamer Platz, Cite Internationale, New York Times Building, The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, etc.) and his son Carlo, a well-regarded journalist, set sail from Genoa one late Summer day to search for Atlantis, the perfect city, built to harbor a perfect society. Embarking not only on a life-changing journey but also on series of conversations that are humorous, irreverent, erudite, and always entertaining, Renzo and Carlo travel from Genoa in search of the perfect city, along the way reflecting on their own relationship, on fathers and sons, on the idea of travel itself, and perhaps most notably on architecture, space, and the secret life of forms. Piano, subject ofThe Art of Making Buildings and a man who can not only measure land at a glance but also the sea's infinite geometry, returns to the places where he has created his iconic works, mosaic pieces in the infinite, necessary quest for perfection. With his son he sails across the Pacific, along the banks of the Thames and the Seine, reaching as far as Athens, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, and Osaka Bay. In search of beauty, Piano finds only imperfection. And so, all that remains is to sail on, in the company of his son.

Atlantis: A Journey in Search of Beauty

Piano. Renzo

Piano, Carlo

Arts & Literature

A clear-eyed, timely investigation of the threat posed by Artificial Intelligence to individual freedom, social cohesion, and the democratic process--and a radical proposal on how to fight back. In this sharp, urgent book, philosopher, psychoanalyst, and former resistance fighter Miguel Benasayag warns of the great danger posed by the growing role of big data and algorithms in deciding the contours of individual lives and the direction of the world. From mass surveillance to predictive law enforcement to data-driven social interactions, AI has already colonized most aspects of our lives and determines the decisions of companies, financial markets, and governments. Structured as a conversation with anthropologist Régis Meyran,The Tyranny of Algorithmsrejects the sterile dichotomy that sees the promise of a "transhuman" future placed in opposition to the desire for a return to a pre-digital past, and examines how societies might meet the unprecedented challenge posed by AI to personal freedom and democratic institutions. The solution, argues Benasayag, doesn't lie in the systemic rejection of advanced technologies and digital architectures but in the search for new forms of integration with machines that put human needs, bodies, and emotions at the center.

The Tyranny of Algorithms: Freedom, Democracy, and the Challenge of AI

Benasayag, Miguel

Computers & Technology

Does the idea of progress still apply to our times? If so, what does progress really mean? Today, many believe that progress is a word to be avoided, a relic from a past, the dangerous product of an era of intellectual naivety that would be best forgotten. Yet, the idea of progress is rooted in a human impulse that is both profound and essential, a way of interpreting history without which our ability to plan the future, our very identity would be at stake. Written just before the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic--which is now putting its argument to the hardest of tests--this lucid essay explores how science and technology have been, and can still be, a powerful engine for human and humane advancement.&nbsp;

What Is Progress

Schiavone, Aldo

World

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