In this exuberant and wildly funny novel, Primo Levi celebrates the joys of work and the art of storytelling. The magic is worked through the mesmerizing tales told by Libertini Faussone, a construction worker, and by the narrator, a writer-chemist, who share stories of their adventures. Faussone is a life-loving, self-educated philosopher who has built bridges and towers in India, Africa, Alaska, and Russia. His passion for work and travel shines through his stories - of a monkey who wanted to be a man, of a magnificent machine that caught stardust, and of a first love, a girl who drove a...

"One of the most important and gifted writers of our time" --Italo Calvino

In the final days of World War II, a courageous band of Jewish partisans makes its way from Russia to Italy, moving toward the ultimate goal of Palestine. Based on a true story, If Not Now, When? chronicles their adventures as they wage a personal war of revenge against the Nazis: blowing up trains, rescuing the last victims of concentration camps, scoring victories in the face of unspeakable devastation. Primo Levi captures the landscape and the people of Eastern Europe in vivid detail, depicting as...

"One of the most important and gifted writers of our time" Italo Calvino

Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing voices to emerge from the twentieth century: a man who survived one of the ugliest times in history, yet who was able to describe his own Auschwitz experience with an unaffected tenderness.
Levi was a master storyteller but he did not write fairytales. These stories are an elegy to the human figures who stood out against the tragic background of Auschwitz, "the ones in whom I had recognized the will and capacity to react, and hence a rudiment of virtue." Each...

The true and harrowing account of Primo Levi's experience at the German concentration camp of Auschwitz and his miraculous survival; hailed by The Times Literary Supplement as a "true work of art, this edition includes an exclusive conversation between the author and Philip Roth.

In 1943, Primo Levi, a twenty-five-year-old chemist and "Italian citizen of Jewish race," was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. Survival in Auschwitz is Levi's classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic...

From 1955 to 1987, the year of his suicide, Primo Levi wrote a series of articles that appeared in newspapers and journals. This volume contains a selection of these writings which shows at once the range of his interests and the skill, thoughtfulness and sensitivity he brought to his subjects, whether writing from the point of view of an eye-witness of the holocaust, of an author of novels and short stories, or of a chemist. The first part of this collection brings together Levirsquo; s articles about the holocaust and the concentration camp. In ldquo; With Anne Frank history spokerdquo; ,...

With the publication of The Periodic Tableon 1984, Primo Levi became one of America s most beloved writers. This new collection of his stories and essays reveals the full imaginative range of this great Italian writer. Most of the stories are science fiction and fantasy, combining Levi s love for science with his keen perception of human nature. The essays, originally written for the Italian newspaper La Stampa, cover a broad range of his interests, from art and literature to politics and current affairs. Levi s quick wit and humanity shine through in these gemlike pieces."

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
The Periodic Table is largely a memoir of the years before and after Primo Levi s transportation from his native Italy to Auschwitz as an anti-Facist partisan and a Jew.
It recounts, in clear, precise, unfailingly beautiful prose, the story of the Piedmontese Jewish community from which Levi came, of his years as a student and young chemist at the inception of the Second World War, and of his investigations into the nature of the material world. As such, it provides crucial links and backgrounds, both personal and intellectual, in the tremendous...

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...

Over the course of more than twenty-five years, Primo Levi gave more than two hundred newspaper, journal, radio and television interviews speaking with such varied authors as Philip Roth and Germaine Greer. Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon have selected and translated thirty-six of the most important of these interviews for The Voice of Memory.

We recognize the voice familiar to us from Levi's masterpieces, from The Periodic Table to The Drowned and the Saved. But we also see a fuller, more varied and more complex picture of the writer famously shrouded in his past. There is Levi...

Primo Levi's account of life as a concentration camp prisoner falls into two parts. If This is a Man describes his deportation to Poland and the 20 months he spent working in Auschwitz. The Truce covers his journey home to Italy at the end of the war.