Cesare Pavese

A shifting, primordial work by Cesare Pavese, plumbing the netherworlds of philosophy, myth, human feeling, and mortality"Above all [Pavese''s novels] are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings . . . Each one of Pavese''s novels revolves around a hidden theme, something unsaid which is the real thing he wants to say." ? Italo Calvino Cesare Pavese''s The Leucothea Dialogues is peopled with gods, centaurs, clouds, poets, hunters, snakes, and nymphs. These are the beings who spoke to him through the ancient plays and poems he read in primary school. Here they speak again in the twenty-seven dialogues that form the novel. Pavese calls mythology a "hothouse of symbols." His hothouse is liveliest at night, in the peculiar clarity of darkness. Pavese''s characters are more than "characters," they play like the dreams of earliest childhood, they pose questions that seem to travel through the minds of the dead to the minds of the living and back again. Through reeds, shadows, glens, fields of blazing straw, homes and villages on the edges of valleys, and over cliffs, we follow their harried stories. In Minna Zallman Proctor''s radiant translation, The Leucothea Dialogues is an expression of an exhilarating intelligence.

A landmark translation of passionate, fiercely intelligent poetry about coming of age by one of the most influential Italian writers of the twentieth century.Cesare Pavese?s 1936 collection of poems, Lavorare stanca, is increasingly regarded as one of the most astonishing and powerful books of twentieth-century poetry. William Arrowsmith?s translations capture the spirit and complex vitality of Pavese?s voice.This bilingual edition also contains a thorough introduction to Pavese?s work, notes to individual poems, and two critical essays that he wrote about Lavorare stanca, the book by which he hoped to be remembered. ?Lavorare stanca,? he once declared, ?is a book that might have saved a generation.?

'Life was a perpetual holiday in those days...' Italy, 1930s. It's the height of summer and sixteen-year-old Ginia is desperate for adventure. So begins a fateful friendship with Amelia, a stylish and sophisticated artist's model who envelops her in a dazzling new world of bohemian artists and intoxicating freedom. Under the spell of her new friends, Ginia soon falls in love with Guido, an enigmatic young painter. It's the start of a desperate love affair, charged with false hope and overwhelming passion - destined to last no longer than the course of a summer. The Beautiful Summer is a gorgeous coming-of-age tale of lost innocence and first love, by one of Italy's greatest writers.