Complete Works Of Primo Levi - Hardcover

Primo Levi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 071399956X ISBN 13: 9780713999563

Publisher: Penguin UK, 2015

Synopsis

Primo Levi's entire body of work, newly translated, in three beautifully slip-cased hardback editions, with an introduction by Toni Morrison Primo Levi has long been admired for his harrowing account of suffering in Auschwitz, If This Is a Man. Among the thousands of survivors who have written about their experiences, Levi's work stands out for its understanding of the human condition and philosophical exploration of the polarities of good and evil. The Complete Works of Primo Levi presents all-new translations of the life's work of 'one of the most important and gifted writers of our time' (Italo Calvino). These fourteen books in three volumes will bear testament not only to a brave holocaust survivor but to a universally relevant twentieth-century author. Highlights of the collection besides If This Is a Man include: The Periodic Table, one of the most acclaimed memoirs of the last half century where in each of the 21 stories Levi connects some aspect of his life in pre- and post-war Italy to an element from the periodic table; The Drowned and The Saved, his most philosophical work; and Levi's essays and other non-fiction work never before published in English. Primo Levi was an Italian Chemist who was arrested during the Second World War as a member of the anti-Fascist resistance and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. He died prematurely in Turin in April 1987. Ann Goldstein is an editor at The New Yorker and a recipient of a PEN Renato Poggioli translation award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Toni Morrison is a Nobel Laureate and the acclaimed author of Beloved .

About this title

About the Author:

Primo Levi (1919–1987) was an Italian chemist and writer, best known for his memoirs If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table.

Ann Goldstein, the translator of all of Elena Ferrante’s novels, is an editor at The New Yorker and a recipient of a PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Toni Morrison is a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Review:

“Levi’s best writing was about his life, about questions of freedom and survival.... [A] remarkable achievement.”
- Tim Parks, New York Review of Books

“Expertly edited by Ann Goldstein.... These three handsome volumes bring into focus the breadth and coherence of his genius, and make unexpectedly clear how deeply his work as a chemist shaped his unsettling work as a moralist and his unique vision of psychology and history.... The 3,000 pages of his Complete Works seem tragically few.”
- Edward Mendelson, New York Times Book Review

“Represents a monumental and noble endeavor on the part of its publisher, its general editor, Ann Goldstein, and the many translators who have produced new versions of Levi’s work. Although his best-known work has already benefited from fine English translation, it’s a gift to have nearly all his writing gathered together, along with work that has not before been published in English.”
- James Woods, The New Yorker

“Old school publishing on a grand scale. Once more, Robert Weil of W.W. Norton, now director of its Liveright imprint, has produced a magnificent edition of an important, if slightly neglected, author.... For such a gift as The Complete Works of Primo Levi, one should probably do little more than express thanks.... Whether as witness or imaginative artist, Levi stands high among the truly essential European writers of the past century.”
- Michael Dirda, Washington Post

“Levi, a scientist and deep humanist, vividly comes alive in this boxed set. A laudable, monumental effort to gather the work of a crucial writer of the 20th century in one voluminous package.”
- Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“It is, by any measure, a monumental effort.... [Ann Goldstein] has succeeded. What he hear throughout is Primo Levi’s voice: wry, honest, exact, compassionate in its recognition of human frailty, and imbued with (as he once wrote of Charles Darwin) ‘the sober joy of a man who extracts order from chaos’.... Goldstein and her collaborators have performed an amazing service by allowing us to see him, as it were, complete.”
- James Marcus, Harper's Magazine

“Wonderful.... You cannot forget [Levi]. He writes clearly, cogently, concretely, compactly. His is a scientist's eye, and he often said (with his trademark dry humor) that the main model for his writing was the lab report. Yet in the best contemporary sense, he's also stylish, laboratory-scrupulous in sentence, description, and word choice, always with a sense of the lively mind behind the words.... Levi is among the prime writers to emerge after World War II. This treasure trove will cement his reputation.”
- John Timpane, Philadelphia Inquirer

“A major and most welcome cultural event. It will astonish most of Levi’s English-speaking readers by revealing the richness and extent of his oeuvre.... Levi discharged this duty triumphantly in works of unequaled intellectual rigor, compassion, and modesty.”
- Louis Begley, American Scholar

“A binge reader of The Complete Works of Primo Levi will encounter science fiction, natural histories, and accounts of young love. Levi not only plunders chemical terminology for metaphors describing human affairs (his memoir The Periodic Table is a brilliant example) but also holds up precise, restrained scientific analysis as a model for prose.... As heir to the Italian Renaissance [Levi asks]: What is it to be human? ...Amid the bluster and bilge of the violent moment, we need that kind of voice more than ever.”
- Steven G. Kellman, Chronicle of Higher Education

“A remarkable three-volume set of memoirs, novels, short stories, essays, commentary, book reviews, and poetry, the Complete Works now enables us to appreciate the tangle of forms and identities that defined Levi as a writer: memorialist and fantasist, scientist and sensationalist, puritan and jester, poet and political commentator...It gives us a far more eclectic and interesting writer, one who ranged across a vast intellectual terrain that included astronomy, history, linguistics, classical literature, art, current affairs, memory, and religion.”
- Gavin Jacobson, The New Republic

“There are many reasons to be grateful for the publication of The Complete Works of Primo Levi in a freshly translated, scrupulously edited and beautifully presented edition, starting with the fact that it brings English readers the correct titles of his books.... The complete works of this unfinished and unfinishable man will, for many generations, help to make us human.”
- Sam Magavern, Buffalo News

“With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose.”
- Philip Roth

“The Complete Works of Primo Levi is an act that transfigures publishing into conscience at its most sublime.”
- Cynthia Ozick

“The triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction glows virtually everywhere in Levi’s writing...Time and time again we are moved by his narratives of how men refuse erasure.”
- Toni Morrison, from the introduction

“His life was a testament to the virtues of getting the past into proportion.”
- Clive James

“Primo Levi's poise was one of the greatest achievements in the history of the human spirit. His writing restored the honor of humanism after Auschwitz. This was a man.”
- Leon Wieseltier

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin UK
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 071399956X
• ISBN 13: 9780713999563
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 3008