Reluctant Jews
Sandro Gerbi in Conversation with Alessandro Cassin AC: You have vast experience in biographical writing of different types, however writing about oneself is a different enterprise. How did you conceive…
Books
Concentrated Modernity
The Complete Lives of Camp People: Colonialism, Fascism, Concentrated Modernity. This introduction to the book by the same title published in 2020 by Duke University Press is reproduced here by…
Defoe as a Possible Model
The structure of History, a Novel, departs substantially from Morante’s previous novels and poses some interesting interpretative questions. While critics have often pointed to similarities with the narrative structure of…
From the Levant to the Tropics: The Saga of the Levy Family
It was from here, from the chaotic, sunny and tropical city of Rio de Janeiro, that most of the sources of Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s recently published book Family Papers: A…
Controlling Mobilities
H-Net review of: Stephanie Malia Hom, Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention. Cornell University Press, 2019 Empire’s Mobius Strip unravels the historical and political reasons that connect the…
What exactly is a concentration camp?
L’internata numero 6/Internee n. 6 – The earliest known diary of daily life in a fascist concentration camp. You see, it is as if we were crossing a bridge. Does…
The language that lived twice
— Though, we usually don’t review books available only in Italian, in this case, the approach to a familiar subject is so remarkably fresh that I trust will interest our…
Primo Levi at 100
Primo Levi’s 100th anniversary will be celebrated around the world through lectures, book presentations, staged readings, and academic seminars. Drawing on its ongoing effort to offer a platform to new…
Diario Ottuso
“Lyric prose is a way to enter the market: a parcel of prose is a lost continent” Amelia Rosselli The growing interest in Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996), one of Italy’s…
Publishing and Culture: The Alchemy of Ideas
Since the days of Gutenberg and probably long before, publishers have depended on what was most popular, and therefore profitable, for their existence. From breathless, half-imagined travelogues to more salacious…