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The Atlantic. Why Primo Levi Survives

His will to bear witness, and record the hellish particularity of the Holocaust, helped save his life in Auschwitz. It also inspired the writing he will be remembered for. William Dereziewicz. Three volumes, 3,000 pages: The Complete Works of Primo Levi, in…

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Harper’s Magazine. Free but Not Redeemed

James Marcus. Primo Levi’s literary conquest of America has been slow, sketchy, almost diffident. The English translation of his first book, If This Is a Man, appeared in this country in 1959, twelve years after the publication of the original in Italy,…

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New Republic. Primo Levi, Mountain Rebel

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

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Wall Street Journal. The Tragedy of Survival

James Wood. Primo Levi did not consider it heroic to have survived eleven months in Auschwitz. Like other witnesses of the concentration camps, he lamented that the best had perished and the worst had survived. But we who have survived…

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New York Anni 30 L’italiano che anticipò Amazon

Parla Alessandro Cassin, che riapre la storica libreria fondata nel 1884 da un immigrato siciliano. Il successivo proprietario ebbe l’intuizione di vendere per corrispondenza i volumi fatti arrivare dal nostro Paese Giuseppe Culicchia. C’era una volta una piccola libreria italiana…

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The New Yorker. Italian Hours

Alek Wilkinson. “Countless times I walked past these windows with the curtains drawn,” Alessandro Cassin said. “It seemed so unlikely that there would be anything behind them anymore.” Cassin is the director of publishing for Centro Primo Levi, which promotes…

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La Stampa. Interview with Alessandro Cassin

Alain Elkann Centro Primo Levi recently launched CPL Editions, a new publishing enterprise at the historical New York Italian bookstore and publisher S.F. Vanni. The interview with Alessandro Cassin, Director of Publishing, took place at the recently reopened S.F. Vanni…

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S F VANNI: Germinating From Old Roots

ALESSANDRO CASSIN.     The bookstore, in business from 1884 to 2004,  reopens as a pop-up bookstore, cultural space and headquarters for our own CPL Editions.  In a city in constant transformation, we believe in the symbolic value of the…

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Ansa. Miracle on 12th Street

Alessandra Baldini For independent bookstores, New York is a cemetery scattered with crosses: Gotham and Coliseum were gone in the first decade of this century, casualties of the big bookstore chains, which eventually succumbed themselves to the rise of Amazon.…

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Italoamericano. Italian Bookstore Reopens in New York

Becky Zeferino S.F. Vanni, the oldest running Italian bookstore in the United States, has released news of its end-of-January reopening in New York City.  The bookstore was first founded in 1884 by the Sicilian (Caltagirone) Sante Fortunato Vanni in Greenwich…

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