books@cc.

by Umberto Eco (2005)

A collection of mostly reworked lectures and conference papers, sometimes introductions discussing Eco’s influences, some canon names of literature, experiences and opinions of his writing career and other discussion on literature.

by Cesare Pavese (1948). Three young men, being young, nocturnal, and bored, met Poli, who has all the money to indulge in his whims. No purpose of existence, achievements, feeling wasted, women, drugs here and there, hunting, the usual.

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

An account on how 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

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.

A collection of insightful and understated autobiographical short stories named after elements by Primo Levi.

by Primo Levi (1971)

A collection of fifteen short stories, each centred on one character only. As overused it is for lame backcover reviews and acclaim, the phrase “superb storyteller” (and he, to some degrees, knows what a good story-telling is) is fully justified in the case of Levi: concise, analytical (but never dry) descriptions of details told in almost a sense of wonder, an appreciation, but never paraded in flamboyance.

Conjugal Loveby Alberto Moravia

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.