Search results for ""author anne milano appel""

In this prophetic allegory about artificial intelligence by a renowned figure of twentieth-century Italian literature, a modest university professor becomes involved in a remote and enigmatic project in the middle of the Cold War.At the beginning of Dino Buzzati’s The Singularity, Ermanno Ismani, an unassuming university professor, is summoned by the minister of defense to accept a two-year, top-secret mission at a mysterious research center, isolated from the world among forests, plunging cliffs, and high mountains. What’s he supposed to do there? Not clear. How long will he be there? No saying.Still, Ismani takes the mystifying job and, accompanied by his no-nonsense wife, Elisa, heads to the so-called Experimental Camp of Military Zone 36, wondering whether, in the midst of the Cold War, it’s some sort of nuclear project he’s been assigned to. But no, the colleagues the couple meets on arrival assure them, it’s nothing like

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Based on a remarkable true story, Don't Tell Me You're Afraid is a moving, inspiring novel of a life lived in hope. Samia Omar grows up in war-torn Somalia, dreaming of being a world-class sprinter. She sleeps with a photo of Mo Farah by her bed and trains hard. After achieving a place on the national team to compete in the Beijing Olympics, she sets her sights on the 2012 games in London. But with the war encroaching on the lives of her family, Samia decides to join her sister and make the treacherous journey to Europe, putting her life and her dreams in the hands of traffickers.

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Lucie was brought up by bourgeois parents as a passionate young fascist. At the age of eighteen, she decides to volunteer in the Nazi labour camps in Germany. Wishing to disprove what she sees as the lies that are being told about Nazi-Fascism, she instead encounters the horrors of life there - and is changed completely. Shedding her identity, she joins a group of deportees being sent to Dachau concentration camp. She escapes the camp in October 1944, and wanders around a Germany devastated by allied bombardments. Then, in February 1945, while helping dig in rubble seeking to rescue survivors, a wall falls on her and she is left paralysed from the waist down. Translated into English for the first time, Deviation is an autobiographical novel about the repression of memory, and one woman's attempt to make sense of the hell she has lived through.

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A writer for whom the journey has always mattered reinvents the very form itself in this inviting collection of in-the-moment impressions of his journeys A writer of enormous erudition and wide-ranging travels, Claudio Magris selects for this volume writings penned during trips and wanderings over the span of several decades. He has traveled through these years with many beloved companions, to whom he dedicates the book, and sought the kind of journey “that occurs when you abandon yourself to [the gentle current of time] and to whatever life brings.” Taken together Magris’s essays share a clearly identified theme. They represent the motif of the journey in all its aspects—literary, metaphysical, spiritual, mythical, philosophical, historical—as well as the author’s comprehensive understanding of the subject or, one might say, of his own way of being in the world. Traveling from Spain to Germany to Poland, Norway, Vietnam, Iran, and Australia, he records particular moments and places through a highly personal lens. A writer’s writer and a reader’s traveler, Magris proves that wandering is equal part wondering.

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'A devastating marvel of a novel' Sunday Telegraph 'A highly enjoyable novel... Giordano is especially good on the textures, smells, heat and colours of the Italian south. These stay long in the mind, as does the way he writes about the obsessiveness of love, the way it dominates and distorts and the self-delusions and fantasies it gives rise to' TLS 'If you're pining for an Italian break, then this might be the remedy: Heaven And Earth is rooted so deep in idyllic Puglia that you can almost feel the red soil under your sandals' Daily Mail 'Raw and evocative: a breathtaking and poignant creation that will leave you itching under the skin' Herald 'A stunning achievement' André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name 'Perfect, moving, honest, brilliant, with characters who feel like old friends' Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less 'The perfect novel. Paolo Giordano is one of the handful of great writers working anywhere today' Edmund White Every summer Teresa follows her father to his childhood home in Puglia, down in the heel of Italy, a land of relentless, shimmering heat, centuries-old olive groves and taciturn, proud people. There Teresa spends long afternoons enveloped in a sun-struck stupor, reading her grandmother's cheap crime paperbacks.Everything changes the summer she meets the three boys who live on the masseria next door: Nicola, Tommaso and Bern - the man Teresa will love for the rest of her life. Raised like brothers on a farm that feels to Teresa almost suspended in time, the three boys share a complex, intimate and seemingly unassailable bond. But no bond is unbreakable and no summer truly endless, as Teresa soon discovers. Because there is resentment underneath the surface of that strange brotherhood, a twisted kind of love that protects a dark secret. And when Bern - the enigmatic, restless gravitational centre of the group - commits a brutal act of revenge, not even a final pilgrimage to the edge of the world will be enough to bring back those perfect, golden hours in the shadow of the olive trees.PRAISE FOR PAOLO GIORDANO 'Mesmerizing... Giordano works with piercing subtlety' New York Times'Elegant and fiercely intelligent' Elle'Elegiac, tender and mournful' Wall Street Journal

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We learn more every year about the damaging effects of solitary confinement. This unquestionably cruel and unusual punishment leaves prisoners with no human contact, sometimes for years at a time, and it nearly always leads to lasting trauma. In Solitary, Maurizio Torchio takes on the daunting task of narrating this most isolating experience, one in which the captive is not only cut off from society in the walls of a prison, but from human contact itself. Within this closed world seemingly out of time, the prisoner still yearns for human contact. Ultimately, this desire is a form of hope, reminding us that ineluctable human qualities survive even in the most inhumane spaces.

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THE PHENOMENAL INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER ‘An anti-fascist history lesson disguised as a novel’ New York Times ‘Extraordinary’ TLS ‘The novel Italy has been waiting for. A masterpiece’ Roberto Saviano A startling look into the fascist mindset, a portrait of unrelenting determination, and an impeccable work of historical fiction. M tells the story of the rise of fascism from within the mind of its founder. A gripping and masterful exposé, it explores Benito Mussolini’s rise to power and a movement that, amidst a failing democracy, came to shape the world. ‘Panoptic and polyphonic, Scurati’s book gives us the experiences of the fearful and the feared, the rhetoric of both the revolutionaries and the reactionaries … an immense mosaic’ Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman ‘An indisputable literary achievement … Italo Calvino would have loved it’ El Paìs

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From the international bestselling author of Gomorrah, this is a deeply personal and candid portrait of Italy today: a place of trafficking and toxic waste, where votes can be bought and sold, where organized crime ravages both north and south - yet also where many courageous individuals defy the system, and millions work tirelessly for a better future. 'Saviano is a blazingly vivid and courageous writer' Independent 'A national hero' Umberto Eco'Saviano has an astonishing ability to write luminously yet subtly about terrible things' Le Parisien 'Brave and passionate' Guardian 'One of the world's finest investigative journalists' GQ

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Goliarda Sapienza's The Art of Joy was written over a nine year span, from 1967 to 1976. At the time of her death in 1996, Sapienza had published nothing in a decade, having been unable to find a publisher for what was to become her most celebrated work, due to its perceived immorality. One publisher's rejection letter exclaimed: 'It's a pile of iniquity.' The manuscript lay for decades in a chest finally being proclaimed a "forgotten masterpiece" when it was eventually published in 2005. This epic Sicilian novel, which begins in the year 1900 and follows its main character, Modesta, through nearly the entire span of the 20th century, is at once a coming-of-age novel, a tale of sexual adventure and discovery, a fictional autobiography, and a sketch of Italy's moral, political and social past. Born in a small Sicilian village and orphaned at age nine, Modesta spends her childhood in a convent raised by nuns.Through sheer cunning, she manages to escape, and eventually becomes a princess. Sensual, proud, and determined, Modesta wants to discover the infinite richness of life and sets about destroying all social barriers that impede her quest for the fulfilment of her desires. She seduces both men and women, and even murder becomes acceptable as a means of removing an obstacle to happiness and self-discovery.Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996) was born in Catania, Sicily in 1924, in an anarchist socialist family. At sixteen, she entered the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome and worked under the direction of Luchino Visconti, Alessandro Blasetti and Francesco Maselli. She is the author of several novels published during her lifetime: Lettera Aperta (1967), Il Filo Di Mezzogiorno (1969), Università di Rebibbia (1983), Le Certezze Del Dubbio (1987). L'Arte Della Gioia is considered her masterpiece.Anne Milano Appel, Ph.D., a former library director and language teacher, has been translating professionally for nearly twenty years, and is a member of ALTA, ATA, NCTA and PEN. Her translation of Giovanni Arpino's Scent of a Woman (Penguin, 2011) was named the winner of The John Florio Prize for Italian Translation (2013).

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From one of Europe’s most revered authors, a tale of one man’s obsessive project to collect the instruments of death, evil, and humanity’s darkest atrocities in order to oppose them “It’s an attractive trait in Magris that he so obviously can’t resist a good story. . . . Blameless, wonderfully translated by Anne Milano Appel, succeeds as a prayer for mercy and reason in a world of torturers and whitewashers.”—Neal Ascherson, New York Review of Books Claudio Magris’s searing new novel ruthlessly confronts the human obsession with war and its savagery in every age and every country. His tale centers on a man whose maniacal devotion to the creation of a Museum of War involves both a horrible secret and the hope of redemption. Luisa Brooks, his museum’s curator, a descendant of victims of Jewish exile and of black slavery, has a complex dilemma: will the collections she exhibits save humanity from repeating its tragic and violent past? Or might the display of articles of war actually valorize and memorialize evil atrocities? In Blameless Magris affirms his mastery of the novel form, interweaving multiple themes and traveling deftly through history. With a multitude of stories, the author investigates individual sorrow, the societal burden of justice aborted, and the ways in which memory and historical evidence are sabotaged or sometimes salvaged.

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He’s finally letting go of the memory of his murdered girlfriend. Then he sees her texts. Alice was a hopeful young graduate student when, on a beautiful August night, her body was found in the woods. She’ll always remember the night she was murdered. And she still suffers the grief and rage that destroyed her family. But what Alice regrets most is the last fight she had with her boyfriend, Enrico—and the fact that she never had the chance to tell him something that would have changed everything. A decade later, Enrico has returned to the provincial town where Alice lived and died, to sell his family home. All he wants is to forget. But then, among the things he left behind, he finds an old cell phone…and unread texts sent from Alice’s phone. Now, her terrible secrets are about to swallow up everyone she knew, loved, and trusted. For Enrico, discovering them is his only chance to put his lost love—and the demons of his past—to rest.

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