FIRST PUBLISHED in English in 1958, Two Women is a compassionate yet forthright narrative of simple people struggling to survive in war. The two women are Cesira, a widowed Roman shopkeeper, and her daughter Rosetta, a naive teenager of haunting beauty an
Moravia's political fable about an Italian anti-Fascist and the frightened, suicide-seeking German girl he encounters on a boat to Capri--the setting of Moravia's Il disprezzo from 1954--was welcomed as one of his finest novels. Stephen Spender for The Ne
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,
