THE MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND HARMONY is a book without any modern parallel. Forming an active link in a chain that reaches back through Ovid's METAMORPHOSES directly to Homer, Roberto Calasso's re-exploration of the fantastic fables and mysteries we may only think we know explodes the entire world of Greek mythology, pieces it back together, and presents it to us in a new, and astonishing, and utterly contempory way.

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Literature & Fiction

ROBERTO CALASSO

Literary

Vintage

What are Kafka's stories about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Things that happen every day? But where and when? In this remarkable book, Roberto Calasso sets out not to dispel the mystery but to let it be illuminated by its own light. With his unique vision, imagination, and intellectual acumen, Calasso attempts to enter the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of the stories to discover what they are meant to signify and to delve into the most basic question: Who is K.? The culmination of the author's lifelong fascination with Kafka, K. is a book of significant literary importance, the fourth part in a work in progress of which the previous volumes are The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, and Ka.

Vintage Books

The Ruin Of Kasch

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

<p>It is the essence of Roberto Calasso's particular genius to have evolved a unique way of reconstructing the imaginative heart of some of the world's greatest cultures. In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony it was the 'Greekness' of classical culture; in Ka he gives us the 'Indianness' of the mind of India, but in an Indian way. He does not describe or explain this mental world: he regenerates it through its stories and customs. Who is Ka? And who is the immense eagle who asks this question, filling the sky, an elephant and a giant turtle in his claws? How can he be the child of woman? Who are these tiny folk he eats? The first impact of Ka is one of tremendous strangeness, bewilderment, disorientation. Slowly, however, the strange becomes familiar and - as Ka folds and enfolds the world of the Deva and the Seven Seers, of Siva, Brahma and Visnu, the wars of the Mahabharata, and finally the advent of the Buddha - we are amazed at our own recognition. These stories lie so close to the grain of our own experience that they confirm, or for the first time articulate, our own deepest perceptions about our condition.</p>

Mythology & Folk Tales

Random House]

Art Of The Publisher

Reference

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Penguin books.India

The Book of All Books

Penguin Books, Ltd.

The Tablet of Destinies

World Literature

JONATHAN CAPE.

Tiepolo Pink

The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often covering vast ceilings like those at the Wurzburg Residenz in Germany and the Royal Palace in Madrid with frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him - but though his contemporaries appreciated and admired him, they failed to understand him. Few have even attempted to tackle Tiepolo's series of thirty-three bizarre and haunting etchings, the "Capricci" and the "Scherzi", but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge, interpreting these etchings as chapters in a dark narrative that contains the secret of Tiepolo's art. Blooming ephebes, female satyrs, Oriental sages, owls, snakes: we will find them all, including "Punchinello" and "Death", within the pages of this book, along with "Venus", "Time", "Moses", numerous angels, "Cleopatra" and "Beatrice of Burgundy" - a motley, gypsyish company always on the go. Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a fluid, seemingly effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.

Bodley Head

Ardor

In this revelatory volume, roberto calasso, whom the paris review has called 'a literary institution', explores the ancient texts known as the vedas. Little is known about the vedic people who lived more than three thousand years ago in northern india, they left behind almost no objects, images, ruins. They created no empires. Even the hallucinogenic plant, the soma, which appears at the center of some of their rituals, has not been identified with any certainty. Only a 'parthenon of words' remains, verses and formulations suggesting a daring understanding of life. 'if the vedic people had been asked why they did not build cities,' writes calasso, 'they could have replied, we did not seek power, but rapture.' this is the ardor of the vedic world, a burning intensity that is always present, both in the mind and in the cosmos. With his signature erudition and profound sense of the past, calasso explores the enigmatic web of ritual and myth that define the vedas. Often at odds with modern thought, he shows how these texts illuminate the nature of consciousness more than neuroscientists have been able to offer us up to now. Following the 'hundred paths' of the satapatha brahmana, an impressive exegesis of vedic ritual, ardor indicates that it may be possible to reach what is closest by passing through that which is most remote, as 'the whole of vedic india was an attempt to think further'.

Penguin

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

Books by ROBERTO CALASSO