Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948) is unarguably one of the most important films in the history of cinema. It is also one of the most beguiling, moving, and seemingly simple works of narrative ever made. The film tells the story of one man and his son as they search fruitlessly through the streets of Rome for his stolen bicycle; the bicycle which had offered the possibility of escape from the poverty and humiliation of long-term unemployment.

The second-hand story is a narrative structure that hinges on a narrator who listens to and reports other people’s words. Updating the older literary convention of the reported tale and responding to the recent marked increase in both the production of and interest in autobiography, autofiction, reportage, and testimony, the second-hand story has become a key and distinctive structure in contemporary western literature. How has this form emerged, and why has it become so prominent? What is...

Among the first written accounts of the concentration camps—a major literary and historical discovery.While in a Russian-administered holding camp in Katowice, Poland, in 1945, Primo Levi was asked to provide a report on living conditions in Auschwitz. Published the following year, it was subsequently forgotten and remained unknown to a wider public.Dating from the weeks and months immediately after the war, Auschwitz Report details the authors’ ha...

Primo Levi (1919–87) was the author of a rich body of work, including memoirs and reflections on Auschwitz, poetry, science fiction, historical fiction and essays. In particular, his lucid and direct accounts of his time at Auschwitz, begun immediately after liberation in 1945 and sustained until weeks before his suicide in 1987, has made him one of the most admired of all Holocaust writer-survivors and one of the best guides we have for the interrogation of that horrific event. But there ...

In 1945, soon after the liberation of Auschwitz, Soviet authorities in control of the Kattowitz (Katowice) camp in Poland asked Primo Levi and his fellow captive Leonardo De Benedetti to compile a detailed report on the sanitary conditions they witnessed in Auschwitz. The result was an extraordinary testimony and one of the first accounts of the extermination camps ever written. Their report, published in a medical journal in 1946, marked the beginnings of Levi’s life-long work as writer, ...

«As Italy tends to be studied increasingly in transnational and transcultural perspective, there is an ever-greater need for studies that explore the country's relationship with other geographical areas and cultural configurations. Linetto Basilone's work is an important contribution to research of this kind. The work provides a panoramic view of how journalists and travel writers from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s have sought to represent China, its relationship with Italy, and...

This compelling Holocaust Memoir is about Sala Lewis and her love of family.Sala Lewis, who at age ten was left alone to wander the streets of Poland after her family was taken away by the Nazis. She had been out with her friends and came home to find her family gone and the apartment where she lived closed off and she was not allowed in. Everything she possessed was no longer hers. She had no family, no clothes, no food, and at that moment in time, no future. It was because she wa...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST •The instant classic debut novel from the author of Inland and The Morningside, hailed as “a thrilling beginning to what will certainly be a great literary career” (Elle)“Spectacular . . . [Téa Obreht] spins a tale of such marvel and magic in a literary voice so enchanting that the mesmerized reader wants her never to stop.”—Entertainment Weekly

'"All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them,' Isak Dinesen once said. Sorrows are all pain otherwise, pain without sense or meaning. But joys, too, it seems to me, need their context. And sometimes their coexistence needs to be borne. The coexistence or possibility of the opposite can be what gives an experience its meaning. At its simplest, that is a story." —Camilla Gibb, This Is HappyIn this profoundly moving memoi...

Lives of Girls and Women is the intensely readable, touching, and very funny story of Del Jordan, a young woman who journeys from the carelessness of childhood through an uneasy adolescence in search of love and sexual experience.As Del dreams of becoming famous, suffers embarrassment about her mother, endures the humiliation of her body's insistent desires, and tries desperately to fall in love, she grapples with the crises that mark the passage to womanhood.

Elizabeth Strout “animates the ordinary with an astonishing force,” wrote The New Yorker on the publication of her Pulitzer Prize–winning Olive Kitteridge. The San Francisco Chronicle praised Strout’s “magnificent gift for humanizing characters.” Now the acclaimed author returns with a stunning novel as powerful and moving as any work in contemporary literature.Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children, Jim and Bob Bur...

When Garnet Raven was three years old, he was taken from his home on an Ojibway Indian reserve and placed in a series of foster homes. Having reached his mid-teens, he escapes at the first available opportunity, only to find himself cast adrift on the streets of the big city.Having skirted the urban underbelly once too often by age 20, he finds himself thrown in jail. While there, he gets a surprise letter from his long-forgotten native family.The sudden communication from ...