La dolce vita! Sun-drenched vineyards! Seaside paradises! Sex! Drugs! Rock 'n' Roll! Volcanoes! if you can never go home again, you may as well go to Italy. Mark Anthony Jarman's latest collection is a rollicking cycle of connected tales that swirls around a dubious hero, a feckless man who finds himself gazing into the existential abyss. His kids have grown up, his wife is long-gone, and his girlfriend has left for greener pastures. And so he escapes to Italy, where he runs headlong away from the past and into newfound freedom. What he finds is not the escape he sought, but something richer and infinitely stranger.

Knife Party at the Hotel Europa careens recklessly through Alpine snow, Roman markets, and the ash of Pompeii. The corpses of refugees wash up on the Mediterranean beaches while tourists bask in the sun. Beautiful Italians party in a Napoli apartment while a man bleeds to death in the hallway. The history of ancient civilizations wells up beneath the surface of modern life.

By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, this extraordinary collection of stories brings us face to face with the inescapable hereness of here and nowness of now, a perfectly executed exploration of what it means not merely to live, but to be alive.