The Legacy of Primo Levi

The Legacy of Primo Levi

Author: S. Pugliese

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2004-12-16

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1403981590

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection represents some of the latest research on Primo Levi, the famous Auschwitz survivor Italian author, in the field of Italian Studies, Holocaust Studies, Jewish Studies, literary theory, philosophy, and ethics. The author has collected an impressive group of scholars, including Ian Thomson, who has published a well-received biography of Levi in the UK (a US edition is due this year); Alexander Stille, who is a staff writer got the New Yorker as well as for the New York Times (he is also the author of Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism ); and David Mendel, who knew Levi and had an extensive correspondence with the Italian writer. There are four essays on Levi's complex and fertile theory of the 'Gray Zone' and further essays on the myriad aspects of this thought. This is an excellent collection with new perspectives and interpretations of the life and work of Primo Levi.


Happiness, as Such

Happiness, as Such

Author: Natalia Ginzburg

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 0811228002

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The hauntingly beautiful epistolary novel from “a glowing light of modern Italian literature” (New York Times Book Review) Longlisted for the PEN Translation Award At the heart of Happiness, as Such is an absence—an abyss that pulls everyone to its brink—created by a family’s only son, Michele, who has fled from Italy to England to escape the dangers and threats of his radical political ties. This novel is part epistolary: his mother writes letters to him, nagging him; his sister Angelica writes, missing him; so does Mara, his former lover, telling him about the birth of her son who may be his own. Left to clean up Michele’s mess, his family and friends complain, commiserate, tease, and grieve, struggling valiantly with the small and large calamities of their interconnected lives. Natalia Ginzburg's most beloved book in Italy and one of her finest achievements, Happiness, as Such is an original, wise, raw, comic novel that cuts to the bone.


Family and Borghesia

Family and Borghesia

Author: Natalia Ginzburg

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 1681375095

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Two novellas about domestic life, isolation, and the passing of time by one of the finest Italian writers of the twentieth century. Carmine, an architect, and Ivana, a translator, lived together long ago and even had a child, but the child died, and their relationship fell apart, and Carmine married Ninetta, and their child is Dodò, who Carmine feels is a little dull, and these days Carmine is still spending every evening with Ivana, but Ninetta has nothing to say about that. Family, the first of these two novellas from the 1970s, is an examination, at first comic, then progressively dark, about how time passes and life goes on and people circle around the opportunities they had missed, missing more as they do, until finally time is up. Borghesia, about a widow who keeps acquiring and losing the Siamese cats she hopes will keep her company in her loneliness, explores similar ground, along with the confusions of feeling and domestic life that came with the loosening social strictures of the 1970s. “She remembered saying that there were three things in life you should always refuse,” thinks one of Natalia Ginzburg’s characters, beginning to age out of youth: “Hypocrisy, resignation, and unhappiness. But it was impossible to shield yourself from those three things. Life was full of them and there was no holding them back.”


Elena Ferrante as World Literature

Elena Ferrante as World Literature

Author: Stiliana Milkova Rousseva

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-01-14

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1501357549

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"A model of academic praxis." - Public Books Elena Ferrante as World Literature is the first English-language monograph on Italian writer Elena Ferrante, whose four Neapolitan Novels (2011-2014) became a global phenomenon. The book proposes that Ferrante constructs a theory of feminine experience which serves as the scaffolding for her own literary practice. Drawing on the writer's entire textual corpus to date, Stiliana Milkova examines the linguistic, psychical, and corporeal-spatial realities that constitute the female subjects Ferrante has theorized. At stake in Ferrante's theory/practice is the articulation of a feminine subjectivity that emerges from the structures of patriarchal oppression and that resists, bypasses, or subverts these very structures. Milkova's inquiry proceeds from Ferrante's theory of frantumaglia and smarginatura to explore mechanisms for controlling and containing the female body and mind, forms of female authorship and creativity, and corporeal negotiations of urban topography and patriarchal space. Elena Ferrante as World Literature sets forth an interdisciplinary framework for understanding Ferrante's texts and offers an account of her literary and cultural significance today.


Natalia Ginzburg

Natalia Ginzburg

Author: Angela M. Jeannet

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2000-12-15

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1487586795

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A prominent and prolific Italian writer, Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) is known for her novels, plays, short stories, and essays. This collection brings together, for an English-speaking audience, a variety of critical perspectives on Ginzburg's work. The essays, all by North American scholars, examine the author's entire production. The topics examined include Ginzburg's struggle to define herself as a woman, a writer, and an intellectual; her interpretation of the relationship between historical events and private lives; her reflections on the women's movement and the changing nature of the family; and her mastery of a distinctly personal writing style. What emerges here is a nuanced and complex portrait of Ginzburg and her work. The reader is given a sense of the importance of her contribution, not only as a writer but as a witness to the events of the twentieth century. The volume also includes a chronology, a bibliography, and translations of some of Ginzburg's lesser-known writings, including three articles, a poem, and a one-act play.


Open City

Open City

Author: Ignazio Silone

Publisher: Steerforth Italia

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A sampler of post-World War II Italian fiction, including excerpts from Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine and Elsa Morante's House of Liars. Nothing on the title, however, a film by Roberto Rossellini.


Sketches of the Criminal World

Sketches of the Criminal World

Author: Varlam Shalamov

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2020-01-14

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1681373688

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The astonishing follow-up to 2018's Kolyma Stories. In 1936, Varlam Shalamov, a journalist and writer, was arrested for counterrevolutionary activities and sent to the Soviet Gulag. He survived fifteen years in the prison camps and returned from the Far North to write one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature, an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the years he spent in the Gulag. Sketches of the Criminal World is the second of two volumes (the first, Kolyma Stories, was published by NYRB Classics in 2018) that together constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov’s stories and the only one to be based on the authorized Russian text. In this second volume, Shalamov sets out to answer the fundamental moral questions that plagued him in the camps where he encountered firsthand the criminal world as a real place, far more evil than Dostoyevsky’s underground: “How does someone stop being human?” and “How are criminals made?” By 1972, when he was writing his last stories, the camps were being demolished, the guard towers and barracks razed. “Did we exist?” Shalamov asks, then answers without hesitation, “I reply, ‘We did.’”


Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film

Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film

Author: Giuliana Minghelli

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-11

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1135104808

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This study argues that neorealism’s visual genius is inseparable from its almost invisible relation to the Fascist past: a connection inscribed in cinematic landscapes. While largely a silent narrative, neorealism’s complex visual processing of two decades of Fascism remains the greatest cultural production in the service of memorialization and comprehension for a nation that had neither a Nuremberg nor a formal process of reconciliation. Through her readings of canonical neorealist films, Minghelli unearths the memorial strata of the neorealist image and investigates the complex historical charge that invests this cinema. This book is both a formal analysis of the new conception of the cinematic image born from a crisis of memory, and a reflection on the relation between cinema and memory. Films discussed include Ossessione (1943) Paisà (1946), Ladri di biciclette (1948), and Cronaca di un amore (1950).