Comparing Vittorini's work to Picasso's, Italo Calvino described Conversations as "the book-Guernica."The novel begins at a time in the narrator's life when nothing seems to matter; whether he is reading newspaper posters blaring of wartime massacres, lying in bed with his wife or girlfriend, or flipping through the pages of a dictionary it is all the same to him—until he embarks on a journey back to Sicily, the home he has not seen in some fifteen years. In traveling through the Sicilian countryside and in variously hilarious and tragic conversations with its people—his indomitable mother in particular—he reconnects with his roots and rediscovers some basic human values.In the introduction Hemingway wrote for the American debut of Conversations (published as In Sicily by New Directions in 1949) he remarked: "I care very much about Vittorini's ability to bring rain with him when he comes, if the earth is dry and that is what you need." More recently, American critic Donald Heiney wrote that in this one book, Vittorini "like Rabelais and Cervantes...adds a new artistic dimension to the history of literature."

    He interweaves the careers of his characters and the events of their time with a narrative verve and breathtaking technical skill that make U.S.A. among the most compulsively readable of modern classics.A startling range of experimental devices captures the textures and background noises of 20th-century life: "Newsreels" with blaring headlines; autobiographical "Camera Eye" sections with poetic stream-of-consciousness; "biographies" evoking emblematic historical figures like J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, John Reed, Frank Lloyd Wright, Thorstein Veblen, and the Unknown Soldier. Holding everything together is sheer storytelling power, tracing dozens of characters from the Spanish-American War to the onset of the Depression.The U.S.A. trilogy is filled with American speech: labor radicals and advertising executives, sailors and stenographers, interior decorators and movie stars. Their crisscrossing destinies take in wars and revolutions, desperate love affairs and harrowing family crises, corrupt public triumphs and private catastrophes, in settings that include the trenches of World War I, insurgent Mexico, Hollywood studios in the silent era, Wall Street boardrooms, and the tumultuous streets of Boston just before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

    Now available in paperback, this highly-acclaimed book is a playful and ingenious gathering of interwoven stories. "At once terribly moving and wildly funny".--A.S. Byatt.

    When plague breaks out, the villagers flee, blocking the boys inside the deserted town. Their brief attempt to build autonomous lives of self-respect, love, and tribal valor is doomed in the face of death and the adult nightmare of war.

    A peasant boy, Balbino, tries to flee the repressive Galician society of the 30s and 40s by questioning, answering, and criticizing every aspect of social and religious restrictions.

    In a secluded woodland castle an old General prepares to receive a rare visitor, a man who was once his closest friend but who he has not seen in forty-one years. Over the ensuing hours host and guest will fight a duel of words and silences, accusations and evasions. They will exhume the memory of their friendship and that of the General’s beautiful, long-dead wife. And they will return to the time the three of them last sat together following a hunt in the nearby forest--a hunt in which no game was taken but during which something was lost forever. Embers is a classic of modern European literature, a work whose poignant evocation of the past also seems like a prophetic glimpse into the moral abyss of the present

    Official circles perceived "Sobor" sharply negatively, because the novel, rejecting the dogmatism of class ideas, affirmed universal, humanistic values.The Council is a philosophical novel that examines important social and national issues in terms of the eternal humanistic truths that human civilization must be guided by in order to avoid destruction and annihilation.

    After a highly controversial trial, the couple go to the electric chair for treason despite worldwide protests. Decades later their son, Daniel, grown to young manhood, tries to make sense of their lives and deaths - and their legacy to him. Like millions of other Americans, he is attempting to reconcile an America based on the highest human ideals with the tragedy of his parents. This is the framework for E.L. Doctorow's dazzling masterpiece, as he fictionalizes an actual social and political drama to create an intensely moving, searching, and illuminating tale of two decades, two generations, and a troubled legacy of passion and purpose, martyrdom and meaning.

    He saw the beauty of the Peruvian landscape, as well as the grimness of social conditions in the Andes, through the eyes of the Indians who are a part of it. Ernesto, the narrator of Deep Rivers, is a child with origins in two worlds. The son of a wandering country lawyer, he is brought up by Indian servants until he enters a Catholic boarding school at age 14. In this urban Spanish environment he is a misfit and a loner. The conflict of the Indian and the Spanish cultures is acted out within him as it was in the life of Arguedas. For the boy Ernesto, salvation is his world of dreams and memories. While Arguedas' poetry was published in Quechua, he invented a language for his novels in which he used native syntax with Spanish vocabulary. This makes translation into other languages extremely difficult, and Frances Horning Barraclough has done a masterful job, winning the 1978 Translation Center Award from Columbia University for her efforts.

    In a new novel by one of the premier writers of the ''new'' South Africa, an exile returns from America--where he fled during the apartheid regime--to find his newly democratic country in a shambles.

    They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed, touched only occasionally by the advances of the twentieth century.In depicting the lives of Benjamin and Lewis and their interactions with their small local community Chatwin comments movingly on the larger questions of human experience.

    As a study of conspiracy and conspirators, of men caught in the desperate clash of ideologies, betrayal, expediency, and of free will, Andre Malraux's novel remains unequaled.Translated from the French by Haakon M. Chevalier

    The aftermath of Armageddon, of course, is the world's glorious opportunity to embrace Russia's New Theology, guaranteed to cure or kill. - The American Mercury, December 1936. (http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmMercury-1936...)

    After he marries a woman he had seen eight years earlier, the story becomes, on one level, an analogy between his temporary sexual impotence and the position of intellectuals. A year later he is ready to abandon his wife and escape from the camp. Cameo appearances by philosophic and literary figures (Marx and Meng-tz, Othello and Song Ji) and discussing China and sex allow the incorporation of non-novelistic elements while indulging in gallows humor.

    The resulting novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, became an acclaimed bestseller and a masterwork of German literature, in the tradition of Christopher Isherwood's 'Berlin Stories' and Bertolt Brecht's 'Three Penny Opera'. Like Isherwood and Brecht, Keun revealed the dark underside of Berlin's "golden twenties" with empathy and honesty. Unfortunately, a Nazi censorship board banned Keun's work in 1933, and destroyed all existing copies of The Artificial Silk Girl. Only one English translation was ever published, in Great Britain, before the book disappeared in the chaos of the ensuing war. Today, more than seven decades later, the story of this quintessential "material girl" remains as relevant as ever, as an accessible new translation brings this lost classic to light once more. Other Press is pleased to announce the republication of The Artificial Silk Girl, elegantly translated by noted Germanist Kathie von Ankum, and featuring a new introduction by Harvard professor Maria Tatar.