The Complete Works of Primo Levi - Hardcover

Levi, Primo; Goldstein, Ann; Morrison, Toni

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0871404567 ISBN 13: 9780871404565

Publisher: Liveright, 2015

Synopsis

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and Library Journal
A Holiday Gift Guide Selection in the San Francisco Chronicle and Newsday
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Selection

The Complete Works of Primo Levi, which includes seminal works like If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table, finally gathers all fourteen of Levi's books--memoirs, essays, poetry, commentary, and fiction--into three slipcased volumes.

About this title

Review:

With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose.--Philip Roth

His life was a testament to the virtues of getting the past into proportion.--Clive James

Levi, a scientist and deep humanist, vividly comes alive in this boxed set. A laudable, monumental effort to gather the work of a crucial writer of the 20th century in one voluminous package.

Levi's best writing was about his life, about questions of freedom and survival.... [A] remarkable achievement.--Tim Parks

It is, by any measure, a monumental effort.... [Ann Goldstein] has succeeded. What he hear throughout is Primo Levi's voice: wry, honest, exact, compassionate in its recognition of human frailty, and imbued with (as he once wrote of Charles Darwin) 'the sober joy of a man who extracts order from chaos'.... Goldstein and her collaborators have performed an amazing service by allowing us to see him, as it were, complete.--James Marcus

Wonderful.... You cannot forget [Levi]. He writes clearly, cogently, concretely, compactly. His is a scientist's eye, and he often said (with his trademark dry humor) that the main model for his writing was the lab report. Yet in the best contemporary sense, he's also stylish, laboratory-scrupulous in sentence, description, and word choice, always with a sense of the lively mind behind the words.... Levi is among the prime writers to emerge after World War II. This treasure trove will cement his reputation.--John Timpane

A major and most welcome cultural event. It will astonish most of Levi's English-speaking readers by revealing the richness and extent of his oeuvre.... Levi discharged this duty triumphantly in works of unequaled intellectual rigor, compassion, and modesty.--Louis Begley

Represents a monumental and noble endeavor on the part of its publisher, its general editor, Ann Goldstein, and the many translators who have produced new versions of Levi's work. Although his best-known work has already benefited from fine English translation, it's a gift to have nearly all his writing gathered together, along with work that has not before been published in English.--James Woods

The triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction glows virtually everywhere in Levi's writing...Time and time again we are moved by his narratives of how men refuse erasure.--Toni Morrison, from the introduction

The Complete Works of Primo Levi is an act that transfigures publishing into conscience at its most sublime.--Cynthia Ozick

About the Author:

Primo Levi (1919-1987) was an Italian chemist and writer, best known for his memoirs If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table.

Ann Goldstein, the editor of The Complete Works of Primo Levi and the award-winning translator of Elena Ferrante's novels, is a former editor at The New Yorker.

Toni Morrison is a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0871404567
• ISBN 13: 9780871404565
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 3008