Book picks similar to
The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello
classics
classici
fiction
italian
The Whisperer
Donato Carrisi - 2009
Five of them appear to belong to missing girls between the ages of eight and eighteen. The sixth is yet to be identified. Worse still, the girls' bodies, alive or dead, are nowhere to be found.Lead investigators Mila Vasquez, a celebrated profiler, and Goran Gavila, an eerily prescient criminologist, dive into the case. They're confident they've got the right suspect in their sights until they discover no link between him and any of the kidnappings except the first. The evidence in the case of the second missing child points in a vastly different direction, creating more questions than it answers.Vasquez and Gavila begin to wonder if they've been brought in to take the fall in a near-hopeless case. Is it all coincidence? Or is a copycat criminal at work? Obsessed with a case that becomes more tangled and intense as they unravel the layers of evil, Gavila and Vasquez find that their lives are increasingly in each other's hands.THE WHISPERER, as sensational a bestseller in Europe as the Stieg Larsson novels, is that rare creation: a thought-provoking, intelligent thriller that is also utterly unputdownable.
Jezebel
Irène Némirovsky - 1936
Gladys Eysenach is no longer young, but she is still beautiful, elegant, cold. She is accused of shooting dead her much-younger lover. As the witnesses take the stand and the case unfolds, Gladys relives fragments of her past: her childhood, her absent father, her marriage, her turbulent relationship with her daughter, her decline, and then the final irrevocable act. With the depth of insight and pitiless compassion we have come to expect from the author of Suite Française, Irène Némirovsky shows us the soul of a desperate woman obsessed with her lost youth.
Foundation / Foundation and Empire / Second Foundation / The Stars, Like Dust / The Naked Sun / I, Robot
Isaac Asimov - 1981
. .The Stars, Like DustA masterpiece of suspense and drama: Biron Farrill sets out on a dangerous quest through the galaxies to find "Rebellion World" and its key to man's future peace.The Naked SunEarth's very existence is at stake when a murder takes place on power-hungry Solaria. One of the greatest detective stories in the science fiction canon.I, RobotThe classic vision of a future where robots are so sophisticated that mankind is threatened with redundancy. Stories include: Robbie, Runaround, Reason, Catch That Rabbit, Liar!, Little Lost Robot, Escape!, Evidence, and The Evitable Conflict.
The House of Sleep
Jonathan Coe - 1997
Sarah is a narcoleptic who has dreams so vivid she mistakes them for real events. Robert has his life changed forever by the misunderstandings that arise from her condition. Terry spends his wakeful nights fueling his obsession with movies. And an increasingly unstable doctor, Gregory, sees sleep as a life-shortening disease which he must eradicate.But after ten years of fretful slumber and dreams gone bad, the four reunite in their college town to confront their disorders. In a Gothic cliffside manor being used as a clinic for sleep disorders, they discover that neither love, nor lunacy, nor obsession ever rests.
The Golem
Gustav Meyrink - 1915
The red-headed prostitute Rosina; the junk-dealer Aaron Wassertrum; puppeteers; street musicians; and a deaf-mute silhouette artist.Lurking in its inhabitants’ subconscious is the Golem, a creature of rabbinical myth. Supposedly a manifestation of all the suffering of the ghetto, it comes to life every 33 years in a room without a door. When the jeweller Athanasius Pernath, suffering from broken dreams and amnesia, sees the Golem, he realises to his terror that the ghostly man of clay shares his own face...The Golem, though rarely seen, is central to the novel as a representative of the ghetto's own spirit and consciousness, brought to life by the suffering and misery that its inhabitants have endured over the centuries. Perhaps the most memorable figure in the story is the city of Prague itself, recognisable through its landmarks such as the Street of the Alchemists and the Castle.
Hunger
Knut Hamsun - 1890
The book brilliantly probes the psychodynamics of alienation, obsession, and self-destruction, painting an unforgettable portrait of a man driven by forces beyond his control to the edge of the abyss. Hamsun influenced many of the major 20th-century writers who followed him, including Kafka, Joyce and Henry Miller. Required reading in world literature courses, the highly influential, landmark novel will also find a wide audience among lovers of books that probe the "unexplored crannies in the human soul" (George Egerton).
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.
Vita dei campi
Giovanni Verga - 1880
Foreword by Paul Bailey. A licentious woman coerces her son–in–law into agreeing to an illicit affair; a young boy, forced to work down in a mine to make a living, is robbed of his childhood and ultimately his life; a returning soldier toys with the affections of local girls and unleashes a sea of passion and vengeance from the village folk—read together, these stories form a remarkable chronicle of Sicilian country life in all its harsh reality. Giovanni Verga (1840–1922) is Italy’s foremost Naturalist writer; he is best remembered for The House by the Medlar Tree, his saga of a family of Sicilian fishermen.
The Flame
Gabriele D'Annunzio - 1900
that perverse Book -- Eleanora DusaFirst published in Italian in 1900, The Flame is one of the most sensational works of the fin-de-siecle and is justifiably notorious due to its being a thinly-veiled account of the author's tempestuous affair with the legendary actress, Eleanora Dusa. A contemporary critic called it the most swinish novel ever written. Sarah Bernhardt returned her presentation copy to the author unopened.Writing in a florid style reminiscent of Henry James and Walter Pater, D'Annunzio uses turn of the century Venice as a backdrop in this study of the passionate struggle of two gifted artists for supremacy in love and art, and of the difference between male and female fantasy. After almost a century of neglect, D'Annunzio's insight into the nature of passion and the power of language remains disturbingly intact.
Against Nature (À Rebours)
Joris-Karl Huysmans - 1884
Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes, and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. The original handbook of decadence, Against Nature exploded like a grenade (in the words of Huysmans) and has enjoyed a cult readership from its publication to the present day.
Spoon River Anthology
Edgar Lee Masters - 1915
Unconventional in both style and content, it shattered the myths of small town American life. A collection of epitaphs of residents of a small town, a full understanding of Spoon River requires the reader to piece together narratives from fragments contained in individual poems."
The Shadow-Line
Joseph Conrad - 1916
A young sea captain's first command brings with it a succession of crises: his sea is becalmed, the crew laid low by fever, and his deranged first mate is convinced that the ship is haunted by the malignant spirit of a previous captain. This is indeed a work full of "sudden passions," in which Conrad is able to show how the full intensity of existence can be experienced by the man who, in the words of the older Captain Giles, is prepared to "stand up to his bad luck, to his mistakes, to his conscience." A subtle and penetrating analysis of the nature of manhood, The Shadow-Line investigates varieties of masculinity and desire in a subtext that counters the tale's seemingly conventional surface.