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…
Books
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…
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…
New Book Explores America’s Flirt With Italian Fascism
Mauro Canali’s La scoperta dell’Italia examines the activity, impact, and perspectives of American correspondents in Italy from 1900 to 1945 and the beginnings of the modern tradition of international political…
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…