It's less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability and complexity.

[…] just as he leaned over to get the stick, I seized him with both hands by the collar, and, with a vigorous and sudden snatch, I brought my assailant harmlessly, his full length, on the not over clean ground—for we were now in the cow yard.

The coppa di testa sounds daintier than what it really is: a pig's head seasoned and rolled, then sous-vided for 18 hours and sliced like ham.

The Godfather Returns (Random House; 430 pages), by the non-Sicilian Mark Winegardner, is not precisely a sequel; it’s interleaved into the gaps between the three movies.