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“Italian Short Stories” ed. by Jhumpa Lahiri

Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories ed. Jhumpa Lahiri Translated from the Italian by Various 528 pgs. | hc | 9780241299838 | $30.00 Penguin Random House Review by Jeanne Bonner   Novels and memoirs often become labors of love for the authors who birth them. But what about an anthology? How often do we imagine ...

“Quo Vadis, Baby?” by Grazia Verasani

  Quo Vadis, Baby? by Grazia Verasani Translated from the Italian by Taylor Corse and Juliann Vitullo 180 pgs. | pb | 9781599103662 | $15.00 Italica Press Review by Jeanne Bonner   The last time I wrote about Grazia Verasani’s Quo Vadis, Baby? (Mondadori, 2007) I was researching an article for Literary Hub ...

Class

The thing about Class is that I don’t know what the hell to think about it, yet I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ll begin by dispensing with the usual info that one may want to know when considering adding the book to their “to read” list. Written by Francesco Pacifico. Translated by Francesco Pacifico. Published ...

Latest Review: "Three-Light Years" by Andrea Canobbio

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Tiffany Nichols on Andrea Cannobio’s Three Light-Years, translated by Anne Milano Appel and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Friday the 13th! Go catch some black cats before the weekend! Here’s the beginning of Tiffany’s review: I would like to ...

Three-Light Years

I would like to pose the argument that it is rare for one to ever come across a truly passive protagonist in a novel. The protagonist (perhaps) of Three Light-Years, Claudio Viberti, is just that—a shy internist who lives in an apartment above his mother and below his ex-wife, and religiously eats boiled vegetables every ...

The Four Corners of Palermo

The Sicilian Mafia has always been a rich subject for sensational crime fiction. The Godfather, Goodfellas, and The Sopranos worked the mob’s bloody corpses and family feuds to both entertainment and artistic value. Giuseppe di Piazza’s debut novel attempts this, though with less success. The Four Corners of Palermo is ...

Latest Review: "My Brilliant Friend" by Elena Ferrante

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Acacia O’Connor on Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, translated by Ann Goldstein and published by Europa Editions. This book was published in English in 2012, but considering the attention Ferrante has been getting for her work since then, this is a ...