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Primo Levi, Mountain Rebel

Levi's experience as a partisan—and the execution of two teenage boys—showed him humans' capacity for extreme violence.  Gavin Jacobson, December 15, 2015 In September 1943, Primo Levi took to the mountains in northwest Italy to escape the Nazis. A keen mountaineer…

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A Primo Levi Atlas

A Primo Levi Atlas: Primo Levi di fronte e di profilo, by Marco Belpoliti Interview by Alessandro Cassin Marco Belpoliti has crowned his decades long critical engagement with Levi with an ambitious new book, Primo Levi di fronte e di profilo  (Primo…

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Primo Levi at the United Nations

Roger Cohen Primo Levi survived Auschwitz through a double act of profound humanity: his ability even in the darkest days to see in fellow prisoners “men and not things” and so, as he put it, avoid “that total humiliation and…

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Quaestio De Centauris

In the fall of 2015, crowning a twelve year effort by W.W. Norton’s editor Bob Weil, Primo Levi’s complete works became available in English for the first time. Norton’s Liveright imprint released a boxed three-volume collection arranged in the chronological order…

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Primo Levi, Anthropologist of Normality

Ernesto Ferrero, 2009 I first met Primo Levi in February 1963, a month before the release of his book The Truce. I had just walked into the press office at Giulio Einaudi publishing house. I had not yet read If This Is…

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The Grey Zone

The Grey Zone, Anna Bravo, Working paper for the Lezione Primo Levi: Raccontare per la storia, Einaudi, 2014 Levi writes about Rumkowski “we are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and…

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Calvino, Manzoni and the Gray Zone

Carlo Ginzburg First of all, there is a memory, an image. Primo Levi and Calvino are walking side by side at dusk in the summertime, talking animatedly (Calvino is taller), along the road that goes towards the village of Rhêmes…

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