Books

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…

Translating Giorgio Bassani

The work of relatively few Italian novelists from the 20th Century has so far been translated more than once, but only Giorgio Bassani’s —in part or in its entirety— has…

The Year of History, A Novel

When Elsa Morante published La Storia. Romanzo in 1974 it was a watershed event that invested Italian society both in terms of the unprecedented success among readers and the ideologically…

Survival and Holocaust Historiography

Liliana Picciotto’s new book, Salvarsi (Einaudi 2017), stems from a research project she lead for the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan, and represents a radical innovation in Holocaust…