Primo LeviA Tranquil StarUnpublished Stories of Primo LeviTranslated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli The first English publication of seventeen classic Primo Levi stories marks the twentieth anniversary of his death. "In Levi's writing, nothing is superfluous and everything is essential."—Saul Bellow A Tranquil Star, the first new American collection of Primo Levi previously untranslated fiction to appear since 1990, affirms his position as one of the twentieth century's most enduring writers. These seventeen stories, first published in Italian between 1949 and 1986, demonstrate Levi's extraordinary range, taking the reader from the primal resistance of a captured partisan fighter to a middle-aged chemist experimenting with a new paint that wards off evil, to the lustful thoughts of an older man obsessed with a mysterious woman in a seaside villa. In the title story, Levi demonstrates his unerringly tragic understanding of the fragility of the universe through the tale of a pensive astronomer, terrified by the possibility that a long-dormant star might explode and reduce the entire planet to vapor. This remarkable new collection affirms Italo Calvino's conviction that Levi was "one of the most important and gifted writers of our time." Primo Levi (1919-1987), a chemist by training, gained international recognition for his 1959 memoir Survival in Auschwitz. Ann Goldstein, an editor at The New Yorker, won the PEN Prize for Italian translation in 1993. Alessandra Bastagli, a native of Milan, is an editor at Palgrave/Macmillan. |
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April 2007 / hardcover / ISBN 978-0-393-06468-1 6" x 8" / 176 pages / Fiction | |||||
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