The Legacy of Primo Levi


Book Description

This collection represents some of the latest research on Primo Levi, the famous Auschwitz survivor Italian author, in the field of Italian Studies, Holocaust Studies, Jewish Studies, literary theory, philosophy, and ethics. The author has collected an impressive group of scholars, including Ian Thomson, who has published a well-received biography of Levi in the UK (a US edition is due this year); Alexander Stille, who is a staff writer got the New Yorker as well as for the New York Times (he is also the author of Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism ); and David Mendel, who knew Levi and had an extensive correspondence with the Italian writer. There are four essays on Levi's complex and fertile theory of the 'Gray Zone' and further essays on the myriad aspects of this thought. This is an excellent collection with new perspectives and interpretations of the life and work of Primo Levi.




Survival In Auschwitz


Book Description

A work by the Italian-Jewish writer, Primo Levi. It describes his arrest as a member of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, and his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp from February 1944 until the camp was liberated on 27 January 1945.




Primo Levi


Book Description

Presents a detailed biography of an Italian chemist caught up in the Holocaust whose later books bore testimony to what he'd seen. The book makes use of research, interviews with Levi's friends and relatives, and unpublished texts and testimonies. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




Interpreting Primo Levi


Book Description

The legacy of antifascist partisan, Auschwitz survivor, and author Primo Levi continues to drive exciting interdisciplinary scholarship. The contributions to this intellectually rich, tightly organized volume - from many of the world's foremost Levi scholars - show a remarkable breadth across fields as varied as ethics, memory, and media studies.




Primo Levi


Book Description

Presents the life of the Italian Jewish author, examining his dual intellectual role as a scientist and writer and the legacy of his works in which he details his life as a survivor of Auschwitz.




Answering Auschwitz


Book Description

This work contains essays that deal directly with Levi and his work, tangentially using Levi's writings or ideas to explore larger issues in Holocaust studies, philosophy, theology, and the problem of representation.




Motherhood, Fatherland, and Primo Levi


Book Description

Motherhood, Fatherland and Primo Levi: The Hidden Groundwork of Agency in his Auschwitz Writings offers major new insights into the political dimensions of Levi’s thought by using those texts conventionally thought to be marginal to his oeuvre (i.e., his short works of science fiction and fantasy and his World War Two partisan novel) to deepen our understanding of the lessons he offered in his more well-known and celebrated texts, Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved. Typically cast as one of the most profound theorists of what human beings at their worst can do to one another, Levi appears in this book as (in addition) a theorist who affirms a politics of active and broad participation in republican institutions as an important means of achieving a fulfilled human life. This book reinterprets Levi’s political significance by bringing to bear two literatures that have been previously missing from scholarly considerations of Levi’s legacy: psychologically-informed analyses of how infantile and toddler experience of, and relationship to, a primary caretaker shape later perceptions of self and relationship and studies of Machiavelli’s variant of republican thought in which major emphasis is placed on founding institutions of civic participation that develop responsible political leaders and foster good citizenship. In the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring, which has given rise to people acting on their worst impulses (ethnic cleansing, genocide) as well as on their best (revolution, democratic constitutionalism), Levi’s legacy, considered more comprehensively, can be a valuable touchstone for understanding the democratic possibilities of a world undergoing rapid political change. Avoiding academic jargon and entanglement in hyper-specialized academic debates, Motherhood, Fatherland and Primo Levi offers that comprehensive understanding to scholars across many fields (Italian studies, political theory, cultural studies, women’s studies, Holocaust studies, history) as well as to general interest readers of a humanistic bent and citizens concerned to make sense of this revolutionary age.




Auschwitz Report


Book Description

Among the first written accounts of the concentration camps—a major literary and historical discovery. While in a Russian-administered holding camp in Katowice, Poland, in 1945, Primo Levi was asked to provide a report on living conditions in Auschwitz. Published the following year, it was subsequently forgotten and remained unknown to a wider public. Dating from the weeks and months immediately after the war, Auschwitz Report details the authors’ harrowing deportation to Auschwitz, and how those who disembarked from the train were selected for work or extermination. As well as being a searing narrative of everyday life in the camp, and the organization and working of the gas chambers, it constitutes Levi’s first lucid attempts to come to terms with the raw horror of events that would drive him to create some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature and testimony. Auschwitz Report is a major literary and historical discovery.




If Not Now, When?


Book Description

“In Levi’s writing, nothing is superfluous and everything is essential.” —Saul Bellow A Penguin Classic 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 well the terrible bleakness of war-ridden Europe. But finally, what he gives us is a tribute to the strength and ingenuity of the human spirit. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.




The Complete Works of Primo Levi


Book Description

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and Library Journal A Holiday Gift Guide Selection in the San Francisco Chronicle and Newsday A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection The Complete Works of Primo Levi, which includes seminal works like If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table, finally gathers all fourteen of Levi’s books—memoirs, essays, poetry, commentary, and fiction—into three slipcased volumes. Primo Levi, the Italian-born chemist once described by Philip Roth as that “quicksilver little woodland creature enlivened by the forest’s most astute intelligence,” has largely been considered a heroic figure in the annals of twentieth-century literature for If This Is a Man, his haunting account of Auschwitz. Yet Levi’s body of work extends considerably beyond his experience as a survivor. Now, the transformation of Levi from Holocaust memoirist to one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers culminates in this publication of The Complete Works of Primo Levi. This magisterial collection finally gathers all of Levi’s fourteen books—memoirs, essays, poetry, and fiction—into three slip-cased volumes. Thirteen of the books feature new translations, and the other is newly revised by the original translator. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison introduces Levi’s writing as a “triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction.” The appearance of this historic publication will occasion a major reappraisal of “one of the most valuable writers of our time” (Alfred Kazin). The Complete Works of Primo Levi features all new translations of: The Periodic Table, The Drowned and the Saved, The Truce, Natural Histories, Flaw of Form, The Wrench, Lilith, Other People’s Trades, and If Not Now, When?—as well as all of Levi’s poems, essays, and other nonfiction work, some of which have never appeared before in English.