ENGLISH BOOKS

To travel through Italy is as close as one gets to being in paradise. For centuries, writers, artists, architects, and merchants have been drawn here, inspired by the beauty of Venice, Florence, Naples, and Rome.
Here, some of Italy’s most amazing landscapes and diverse regions are honored, like Tuscany, Umbria, the Amalfi Coast, and, no less magical, the Aeolian Islands off the coast of Sicily.
In these mythical surroundings are legendary hotels full of atmosphere, where novels are set, movies are made, weddings are celebrated, and famous love stories consummated: Villa d’Este on Lake Como, the Pellicano Hotel in Porto Ercole, the Il San Pietro on the Amalfi Coast, and the Palazzo Margherita in Basilicata—to name just a few.

Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of Italian painting, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial: violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. Today, he is considered one of the greatest influences in all art history.

This edition offers a neat and comprehensive Caravaggio catalogue raisonne. Each of his paintings is reproduced from recent top-quality photography, allowing for a vivid encounter with the artist's ingenious repertoire of looks and gestures, as well as numerous detail shots of his boundary-breaking naturalism. Five accompanying chapters trace the complete arc of Caravaggio's career from his first public commissions in Rome through to his growing celebrity status and trace his tempestuous personal life, in which drama loomed as prominently as in his canvases.

Angelika Taschen travels from the mountains of Macedonia in the north to the Peloponnese with its mythical places like Corinth, Sparta, and Olympia, and to the larger and smaller groups of islands in the south. She opens the doors to some of the country's most extraordinary hotels, including Imaret in Kavala, located in a former Ottoman complex; Tainaron Blue Retreat in a secluded former defense tower in the Mani; and The Windmill, a converted windmill on the island of Kimolos in the Cyclades. She invites readers to discover legendary luxury hotels, like Eagles Palace in Halkidiki or Poseidonion Grand Hotel on Spetses, and takes them to enchanting B&Bs like Guesthouse Mazaraki in Mystras or Melisses on Andros, run by food blogger Allegra Pomilio.

Along her itinerary, she visits hotels on well-known picturesque islands-such as the Mystique on Santorini and the Soho Roc House on Mykonos-but also accommodations in remote places like the Mediterraneo on the island of Kastelorizo, which lies in the very southeast of Greece off the Turkish coast. In addition she shows interesting architectural and design concepts, such as The Rou Estate hotel village, a historic, carefully restored hamlet on Corfu; the minimalist Olea All Suite Hotel on Zakynthos; and Ammos on Crete, where no two pieces of furniture are alike and new eccentric pieces are added every year.

After Egon Schiele (1890-1918) freed himself from the shadow of his mentor and role model Gustav Klimt, he had just ten years to inscribe his signature style into the annals of modernity before the Spanish flu claimed his life. Being a child prodigy quite aware of his own genius and a passionate provocateur, this didn't prove to be too big a challenge.

His haggard, overstretched figures, extreme depiction of sexuality and self-portraits, in which he staged himself with emaciated facial expressions bordering between brilliance and madness, had none of the decorative quality of Klimt's hymns of love, sexuality and yearning devotion. Instead, Schiele's work spoke of a brutal honesty, one that would upset and irreversibly change Viennese society.

Across small cottages and lavish villas, beach houses and forest refuges, discover the world's finest crop of new homes. This cutting-edge global digest features such talents as Shigeru Ban and Marcio Kogan alongside up-and-coming names like Aires Mateus, Xu Fu-Min, Vo Trong Nghia, Desai Chia, and Shunri Nishizawa. Here, there are homes in Australia and New Zealand, from China and Vietnam, in the United States and Mexico, and on to less expected places like Ecuador and Costa Rica. The result is a sweeping survey of the contemporary house and a revelation that homes across the globe may have more in common than expected.

With the publication of Fantastic Four No. 1 in November 1961, comics giant Marvel inaugurated a transformative era in pop culture. Through the next two decades, the iconic Hulk, Spider-Man, Iron Man, and the X-Men leapt, darted, and towered through its pages. Captain America was resurrected from his 1940s deep-freeze and the Avengers became the World's Greatest Super Heroes. Daredevil, Doctor Strange, and dozens more were added to the pantheon, each with their own rogues' gallery of malevolent counterparts. Nearly 60 years later, these thrilling characters from the 1960s and '70s are more popular than ever, fighting the good fight in comics, toy aisles, and blockbuster movies around the world.