Book picks similar to
The Road to the City by Natalia Ginzburg
fiction
italian
short-stories
italiani
Without Ever Reaching the Summit: A Journey
Paolo Cognetti - 2018
Drawing on memories of his childhood in theAlps, Cognetti explored the roots of life in the mountains, truly getting to know the communities and the nature that forged this resilient, almost mythical region. Accompanying him was Remigio, a childhood friend who had never left the mountains of Italy, and Nicola, a painter he had recently met. Joined by a stalwart team of local sherpas, the trio started out in the remote Dolpo region of Nepal. From there, a journey of self-discovery shaped by illness, human connection, and empathy was born.Without Ever Reaching the Summit features line illustrations drawn by the author.
Belfagor: A Tale (1840)
Niccolò Machiavelli
Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
Ficciones
Jorge Luis Borges - 1944
Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything else in between. Part One: The Garden of Forking Paths Prologue Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940) The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim (1936, not included in the 1941 edition) Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939) The Circular Ruins (1940) The Lottery in Babylon (1941) An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain (1941) The Library of Babel (1941) The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) Part Two: Artifices Prologue Funes the Memorious (1942) The Form of the Sword (1942) Theme of the Traitor and the Hero (1944) Death and the Compass (1942) The Secret Miracle (1943) Three Versions of Judas (1944) The End (1953, 2nd edition only) The Sect of the Phoenix (1952, 2nd edition only) The South (1953, 2nd edition only)
The Daydreamer
Ian McEwan - 1994
He's a quiet ten year old who can't help himself from dropping out of reality and into the amazing world of his vivid imagination. His daydreams are fantastic and fascinating - only in the bizarre and disturbing world of dreams can he swap bodies with the family cat and his baby cousin, Kenneth, or wipe out his entire family with vanishing cream.
The Duel
Giacomo Casanova - 1789
Translated for the first time into English, this autobiographical novel describes Casanova’s extraordinary battle with a Polish count, while on the run from the Venetian authorities. Having escaped from Venice’s infamous Piombi Prison, Casanova was forced into exile. Far from destitute, however, his reputation gained him entry into European society’s highest echelons. Yet there, he soon found himself obliged to engage in a duel over a ballerina—a lady in whom neither he nor his Polish rival had the slightest interest. Recounting the deadly encounter and the surprising events it precipitated with sardonic wit, Casanova creates a work of thrilling adventure and inimitable literary style. Giacomo Casanova was an adventurer, a spy, a poet, and a novelist. His literary reputation rests on his remarkable History of My Life, which vividly records not only his exploits and adventures but the manners and morals of the day.
If You Kept a Record of Sins
Andrea Bajani - 2007
Lorenzo, just a young boy when his mother leaves, recalls the incisive fragments of their life - when they would playfully wrestle each other, watch the sunrise, or test out his mother’s newest scientific creation. Now a young man, Lorenzo travels to Romania for his mother’s funeral and reflects on the strangeness of today’s Europe, which masks itself as a beacon of Western civilization while iniquity and exploitation run rampant. With elliptical, piercing prose, Bajani tells a story of abandonment and initiation, of sentimental education and shattered illusions, of unconditional love.
Seven Gothic Tales
Isak Dinesen - 1934
Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight characteristic of the modern short story with the haunting mystery of the nineteenth-century Gothic tale, in the tradition of writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, and Poe.
Persecution
Alessandro Piperno - 2010
Leo Pontecorvo, an internationally revered pediatric oncologist, is forty-eight. His wife, Rachel, is a physician and the loving mother to Filippo and Samuel, two amiable pre-teens. The evening news is on in the living room but nobody pays it any attention until Dr. Pontecorvo's name surfaces from the background noise and a news item airs that will change the lives of the Pontecorvos forever. Leo Pontecorvo has been publicly accused of a vile crime. A spotlight is turned on him that reveals the mistakes, regrets, and contradictions of a lifetime. Every detail of his private and professional life is about to come under scrutiny, to be debated by both friends and foes, by ravenous reporters and punctilious prosecutors. But Leo could bear all this if it weren't for the suspicious gazes of his wife and children. Surely they, of all people, believe in his innocence! Alessandro Piperno is widely acknowledged as one of today's most talented European novelists. His voice is singular and shocking at times, yet always possessed of tenderness and enormous generosity of heart. His vision is broad and encompassing, his psychological insights penetrating and undeniable. In this deeply felt family drama, Alessandro Piperno paints a broad canvas and fills it with psychologically complex characters whom readers will instantly recognize and never forget.
Short Stories
Anton Chekhov - 1919
They present a wide spectrum of comic and serious themes and a variety of techniques. (His short novels, available in another Norton volume, Seven Short Novels by Chekhov, have been omitted.) Two of the stories have been translated for this edition by Professor Matlaw; the other translations, by Constance Garnett, Ivy Litvinov, and Marian Fell, have been revised in accordance with contemporary usage. Footnotes have been supplied wherever necessary to explain peculiarities of Russian life and the historical era in which Chekhov lived and wrote."Backgrounds" includes a rich selection of Chekhov's letters, in new translations by Professor Matlaw, and Gorky's celebrated essay on Chekhov, translated by Ivy Litvinov. The critical essays offer general views of Chekhov's art and achievement and detailed analyses of particular stories. The critics are D. S. Mirsky, A. B. Derman (whose essay has been translated from the Russian especially for this edition), Renato Poggioli, Gleb Struve, Donald Rayfield, Karl Kramer, Virginia Llewellyn Smith, and Nils Ake Nilsson.A Selected Bibliography directs readers to resources for further study.Chameleon (1884) --Oysters (1884) --A living chronology (1885) --The huntsman (1885) --Misery (1886) --The requiem (1886) --Anyuta (1886) --Agatha (1886) --Grisha (1886) --A gentleman friend (1886) --The chorus girl (1886)--Dreams (1886) --Vanka (1886)--At home (1887) --The siren's song (1887) --Sleepy (1888) --The grasshopper (1892) --In exile --Rothschild's fiddle (1894) --The student (1894) --The teacher of literature (1889-94) --Whitebrow (1895) --Anna on the neck (1895) --The house with the mansard (1896) --The pecheneg (1898)--A journey by cart (1897) --The man in a case (1898) --Gooseberries (1898) --About love (1898) --A doctor's visit (1902) --The darling (1899) --The lady with the dog (1899) --The bishop (1902) --The betrothed (1903).
A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East
Tiziano Terzani - 1995
. . . It turned out to be one of the most extraordinary years I have ever spent: I was marked for death, and instead I was reborn."Traveling by foot, boat, bus, car, and train, he visited Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Mongolia, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. Geography expanded under his feet. He consulted soothsayers, sorcerers, and shamans and received much advice--some wise, some otherwise--about his future. With time to think, he learned to understand, respect, and fear for older ways of life and beliefs now threatened by the crasser forms of Western modernity. He rediscovered a place he had been reporting on for decades. And reinvigorated himself in the process.
Bestiario
Julio Cortázar - 1951
These stories that speak about objects and daily happenings, pass over to another dimension, one of nightmare or revelation. In each text, surprise and uneasiness are ingredients added to the indescribable pleasure of its reading. These stories may upset readers due to a very rare characteristic in literature: They stare at us as if waiting for something in return. After reading these true classics, our opinion of the world cannot remain the same.1. "Casa Tomada" ("House Taken Over")2. " Carta a una señorita en París" (Letter to a Young Lady in Paris")3. "Lejana" ("The Distances")4. "Ómnibus" ("Omnibus")5. "Cefalea" ("Headache")6. "Circe" ("Circe")7. "Las puertas del cielo" ("The Gates of Heaven")8. "Bestiario" ("Bestiary")
The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa - 1982
He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology, and horoscope. When he died in 1935, Pessoa left behind a trunk filled with unfinished and unpublished writings, among which were the remarkable pages that make up his posthumous masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, an astonishing work that, in George Steiner's words, "gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce's Dublin or Kafka's Prague." Published for the first time some fifty years after his death, this unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs comprises the "autobiography" of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa's alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, part descriptive narrative, captivatingly translated by Richard Zenith, The Book of Disquiet is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century.
Antwerp
Roberto Bolaño - 2002
Reading this novel, the reader is present at the birth of Bolaño’s enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard—which Bolaño chose to publish in 2002, twenty years after he’d written it (“and even that I can’t be certain of”)—as if testing out a high dive, he would plunge into the unexplored depths of the modern novel.Antwerp’s fractured narration in 54 sections—voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers by, from an omniscient narrator, from “Roberto Bolaño” all speak—moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.
Blackout
Gianluca Morozzi - 2004
He has an uncanny ability to convey mood swings, excitement and plot twists with ever increasing velocity.”—Gazzetta di Parma“A chilling and claustrophobic thriller with an unpredictable ending. Morozzi joins the best in the genre.”—LINUSBologna in August: unbearable heat, an empty city. Claudia is a young student in a hurry to return home from her work as a waitress and get out of the skimpy uniform she hates. Tomas is a young man on his way to elope to Amsterdam with his girlfriend, Francesca. Aldo is a husband and father with an uncanny resemblance to Elvis Presley, anxious to get to an apartment filled with guilty secrets. All three have an urgent need to be somewhere else. Instead, they are trapped in an elevator in a deserted building on a holiday weekend. They are like three wasps in an upturned glass . . . and one of the trio is a serial killer.This dark, twist-packed psychological thriller in the style of Phonebooth has been adapted as a US film to be released in the fall of 2008, starring Amber Tamblyn and directed by cult Mexican auteur Rigoberto Castañeda.Gianluca Morozzi was born in Bologna in 1971, where he lives today. He is well-known as a cutting-edge satirist and music critic, often compared to Nick Hornby and Ben Elton. Blackout is his first thriller.