The novels that the great Italian writer Alberto Moravia wrote in the years following the World War II represent an extraordinary survey of the range of human behavior in a fragmented modern society.Boredom, the story of a failed artist and pampered son o
In this exuberant novel, one of Italy's greatest living writers celebrates the art of storytelling and the spirit of work through weaving the mesmerizing tales of an itinerant construction worker, Libertino Faussone, and a writer-chemist, the true and fic
Mattia Pascal endures a life of drudgery in a provincial town. Then, providentially, he discovers that he has been declared dead. Realizing he has a chance to start over, to do it right this time, he moves to a new city, adopts a new name, and a new cours
The great Pirandello's (1867-1936) 1926 novel, previously published here in 1933 in another translation, synthesizes the themes and personalities that illuminate such dramas as Six Characters in Search of an Author.Vitangelo Moscarda ``loses his reality''
Bassani describes a land beyond the city and surrounding countryside. It is a land that lives also in the water, so the active population is made up of people who work there or go there on purpose. This special land belongs to men who fish with boats and
“The thought . . . called up the flavors of an elaborate and bold cuisine, bent on making the flavors’ highest notes vibrate, juxtaposing them in modulations, in chords, and especially in dissonances that would assert themselves as an incomparable exp
Taking as his focus the periods immediately before and after the French Revolution but making occasional sallies backward and forward in time - from Vedic India to the porticoes of the Palais-Royal and to the killing fields of Pol Pot - Calasso recounts,
Long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce and Kafka, and now available in a supple new English translation, Italo Svevo’s charming and splendidly idiosyncratic novel conducts readers deep into one hilariously hyperactive and e
In a large apartment house in central Rome, two crimes are committed within a matter of days: a burglary, in which a good deal of money and precious jewels are taken, and a murder, as a young woman whose husband is out of town is found with her throat cut
