Depicts the author's experiences growing up in an assimilated Jewish family in Italy during the 1930s and 1940s

Product Description: When he committed suicide at age forty-one, Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) was one of Italy's best-known writers. A poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator, he had been profoundly influenced in his early years by American literature...read more

Product Description: English summary: A complex study of Dino Campana through his works by one of the most important scholars of nineteenth-century Italian letters. Monika Antes follows Campana through his folly and intense loves, summarizing current research on his life's work, and concluding with an in-depth analysis of how the individual pieces of his writing reflect on the intense emotions of his life...read more

Product Description: English summary: Present in this volume are two voyagers: Odoardo Beccari, who embraced the world with his restless need to know firsthand its continents and its peoples, and Emilio Salgari, whose writing creates characters filled with the spirit of adventure...read more

One of the major figures of twentieth-century European literature, Ignazio Silone (1900-78) is the subject of this award-winning new biography by the noted Italian historian Stanislao G. Pugliese. A founding member of the Italian Communist Party, Silone took up writing only after being expelled from the PCI and garnered immediate success with his first book, Fontamara, the most influential and widely translated work of antifascism in the 1930s. In World War II, the U.S. Army printed unauthorized versions of it, along with Silone's Bread and Wine, and distributed them throughout Italy during the country's Nazi occupation. During the cold war, he was an outspoken opponent of Soviet oppression and was twice considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature.Twenty years after his death, Silone was the object of controversy when reports arose indicating that he had been an informant for the Fascist police. Pugliese's biography, the most comprehensive work on Silone by far and the first full-length biography to be published in English, evaluates all the evidence and paints a portrait of a complex figure whose life and work bear themes with contemporary relevance and resonance. Bitter Spring, the winner of the 2008 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, is a memorable biography of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers against totalitarianism in all its forms, set amid one of the most troubled moments in modern history.

In an enchanting memoir of his formative years, the Nobel Prize-winning playwright describes his youth in northern Italy in a picturesque village on the shores of Lago Maggiore, the struggles between Fascists and partisans in the region, the World War II years, and the anecdotes, characters, and sketches that became the inspiration for his own work. 10,000 first printing.

Product Description: Cultural Writing. Memoir. Edited and translated from the Italian by Stanislao G. Pugliese. Ignazio Silone, anti-fascist and founding member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) offers a politically conscious and soul searching memoir which details his own PSI activities and the various factors engendering the "necessity for action on behalf of liberty and democracy among the working classes...read more

Product Description: Profondo conoscitore di Pirandello, Elio Providenti questa volta si e assunto il compito di strappare lo scrittore siciliano all'oltretomba per raccoglierne le confessioni. Come nella miglior tradizione lo Spirito ha risposto, ma non certo per convalidare le proposizioni sempre piu stancamente ripetute su di lui...read more

Product Description: Italian writer and political activist Ignazio Silone spent fifteen years from 1929 to 1944 as a political exile in Switzerland. Focusing on this period, this book throws new light on Silone's complex biography and shows how his literary production influenced and was influenced by fellow antifascist German émigrés and the Swiss socialist intelligentsia...read more

In a series of autobiographical essays and writings, the late Italian author recalls his tumultuous years as a teenager, during Mussolini's rule, the liberation, and the Cold War; his life in Paris and New York; his travels through the U.S. in 1959 and 1960; his myriad impressions of American life and culture; and more. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

A profile of the author of Survival in Auschwitz and The Periodic Table examines his daily experiences as a paint factory manager who tended an invalid mother and lived in the same house his entire life, discussing the impact of such factors as Mussolini's regime, his difficult reintegration into postwar Italy, and his struggles with depression and insomnia. 17,500 first printing. (view table of contents)

Product Description: In his elegant, lucid and moving biography David Gilmour used his access to Lampedusa's unpublished notes and papers to trace the process by which Lampedusa came to an understanding of his own history and transformed that understanding into one of the most admired novels of his century...read more

Provides biographical information along with plot summaries, lists of characters, and critical views of the author's most famous short stories. (view table of contents)

A portrait of the author of Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening, and The Periodic Table discusses his achievements as a holocaust survivor and writer, the respect he won as a man believed to be at peace with his painful experiences, and the international devastation at his apparent suicide. 15,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

Product Description: At the age of twenty-five, Primo Levi was sent to Hell. Levi, an Italian chemist from Turin, was one of many swept up in the Holocaust of World War II and sent to die in the German concentration camp in Auschwitz. Of the 650 people transported to the camp in his group, only 15 men and 9 women survived...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Writer Italo Svevo had many things in common with other writers: a long struggle for recognition; a friendship with a noteworthy author (in Svevo's case, James Joyce); and a long list of neuroses. His choice of a wife, however, was anything but common...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Novelist, playwright, and poet Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) shocked and dazzled early twentieth-century Europe with his sexual exploits, military feats, and political escapades. More than any other figure since the unification of Italy, he casts a shadow forward to the present day. His relationships with the worlds of Italian culture, theatre, and politics were unique, fiery, and always controversial. His literary achievements have influenced generations of Italian writers. This is the most authoritative biography of the man in any language. (view table of contents)

Recounts the Holocaust experiences of Edith Bruck, the youngest daughter of a poor Jewish family, who was separated from all but her sister when she was transported from Hungary to Auschwitz when she was twelve.

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Product Description: Myriam Anissimov's major biography of Primo Levi delves deeply into the life and mind of this controversial writer, philosopher, and Holocaust witness, exploring the complex nature of a man who was both a strong-spirited survivor and a sufferer of severe bouts of depression, a man who felt misunderstood...read more