books @ cc.

by Umberto Eco (2005)

A collection of mostly reworked lectures and conference papers, sometimes introductions, On Literature discusses Eco’s influences (Borges, Joyce), canon names of literature (Cervantes, Wilde, Holmes, Marx, Thomas Aquinas (whom he wrote his doctorate thesis on, published as The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas)), and personal experiences and opinions of his writing career (How I Write, Intertextual Irony and Levels of Reading), while in The Power of Falsehood, readers of Baudalino will find the author’s short comment on Prester John (among other discussion on the engineering force of ‘falsehood’).

by Cesare Pavese (1948)

Three young men, the narrator, Pieretto, Oreste, being young, nocturnal, and bored, met Poli, who has all the money to indulge in his whims, whatever they may be. No purpose of existence, achievements, feeling wasted, women, drugs here and there, hunting, you know, the usual.

Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe
by Piero Camporesi (1989)

Divided into 19 chapters, Bread of Dreams is an account on how (as summarized by the jacket) “many people in early modern Europe lived in a state of almost permanent hallucination, drugged by their hunger or by bread adulterated with hallucinogenic herbs.”

by Primo Levi (1971)

Narrative is contained within another narrative in this novel, as Faussone, an exuberant rigger, tells his stories of working to a chemist-writer narrator (no doubt Levi’s alter ego):his constructions, an adventurous monkey, a machine that caught stardust, a name gone wrong, overcoming the fear of water, from India, Russia to Alaska.

by Primo Levi (1975)

Levi is a superb storyteller, with an ability (and delight, admitting himself as belonging to “that species of persons who do things in order to talk about them”) to turn words into engaging stories. The Periodic Table consists of twenty one short stories named after elements, arranged chronologically based on events in Levi’s life, with two short fictions, Lead and Mercury, inserted at the point they were written.

by Primo Levi (1971)
translated from the Italian by Ruth Feldman

Written unplanned at different times and on different ocassions, Moments of Reprieve is a collection of fifteen short stories, each centred on one character only.

by Alberto Moravia (1951)

During (and a few decades after) the wars Moravia was probably the most widely-known Italian novelist in English-speaking countries. The Conformist and Contempt have been made into films by Bertolucci and Godard. Then there’s also the friendship with Pasolini. Yet these days one (at least in English-speaking world) hardly heard of him, jostled by popular favourites such as Eco and Calvino.