Mario Brelich, a Hungarian author writing in Italian, was a superb ironist. In his three novels, of which this is the first, he explored central episodes of the Old and New Testaments with unsparing wit and intelligence. In Navigator of the Flood, Brelich's Noah is a man laboring under a burden of responsibility by a Lord who appears from time to time to "correct"--at man's expense--His own foreknowledge and omniscience. If Noah finds God's commands at times cruel or incomprehensible, if he still sees beauty in a life now under threat of extinction, and wonders why he and his family...
Mario Brelich, a Hungarian author writing in Italian, was a superb ironist. In his three novels, of which this is the first, he explored central episo...
Ruin is an acclaimed 1954 novel by Italian Beppe Fenoglio. It's the story of Augustine Braida, a boy who serves the Rabino family, whose first-person account of life in Langhe paints a vivid portrait of early twentieth-century Italian peasant life. Told with terrible humility and great force, it is a compassionate and harrowing narrative of peasant endurance in the face of overwhelming hardship. Born into a working-class family in the town of Alba lying in that part of the Piedmont called LeLanghe, Beppe Fenoglio (1922-1963) belonged to the generation of young Italian writers...
Ruin is an acclaimed 1954 novel by Italian Beppe Fenoglio. It's the story of Augustine Braida, a boy who serves the Rabino family, whose first-...
This imaginative reworking of the story of Abraham and Sarah combines myth, rabbinic lore, storytelling, and psychological insight to create new and revealing interpretations of ancient texts. In The Holy Embrace, Abraham repudiates the idols worshipped by his ancestors and accepts God when the Lord selects him as the ambivalent patriarch of His chosen people. But the greatest impediment to God's designs is Abraham's infatuation with his wife, "the most beautiful woman in the world," who is also narcissistic and frigid. How the miracle of their holy embrace is finally accomplished,...
This imaginative reworking of the story of Abraham and Sarah combines myth, rabbinic lore, storytelling, and psychological insight to create new and r...
Mario Rigoni Stern was born in 1921 in Asiago, in the mountains of northeastern Italy. Throughout his literary career, he has remained deeply attached to the region of his birth, its peasant customs, its dialect, its seasonal cycles and shifting historical fortunes.Tonle Bintarn's story takes place in the mountains of the Veneto region, which once bordered the Austro-Hungarian Empire and where smuggling was a means of subsistence for the peasant population. Having run afoul of a patrol of revenue agents, Tonle must seek refuge beyond the frontier in Central Europe, where year after year he...
Mario Rigoni Stern was born in 1921 in Asiago, in the mountains of northeastern Italy. Throughout his literary career, he has remained deeply attached...
