Böcker av Giorgio Bassani

First published in 1982, In rima e senza brought together all the poetry Giorgio Bassani wished to preserve. The Collected Poems offers anglophone readers for the first time the opportunity to experience his full poetic range. Not only do Bassani's early poems foreshadow key themes of the fiction, such as his classic The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, but his later free verse scrutinizes with a startling directness the life and work of this major Italian writer."Everything is connected in Giorgio Bassani's work, everything articulated through the first verses in Poor Lovers' Stories to the last in Epitaph and In Great Secret and through his entire lyrical and narrative production. And yet, there are twists, major fractures, starting with perhaps the most critical and poignant of all, the author's last production in verse, in which Bassani most likely reaches the apex of his artistic expression [...] Welcome back to life, dear Father, welcome back among us!"-Paola Bassani, from the Foreword

The haunting, classic novel of Fascist Italy on the brink of World War II, made into an Academy Award-winning film The Finzi-Continis are an aristocratic Jewish family who live an insular life behind the walls of their estate in the northern Italian city of Ferrera. The narrator, a young middle-class Jew, has been intrigued by the Finzi-Continis from boyhood and especially by the two children, Alberto and Micol. Not until he is twenty-two, in the autumn of 1938, is he invited to enter their private world, a place seemingly immune from the racial laws of Fascist Italy. Thirteen years after the war, he traces his intricate relationship with the beautiful Micol and shares the predicament of all the Ferrarese Jews on the eve of their destruction. Critically acclaimed and award-winning, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is an unforgettable, wrenching novel that re-creates a tragic era in history.

Giorgio Bassani's six classic books, collected for the first time in English as the epic masterwork they were intended to be.

Giorgio Bassani (Author) Giorgio Bassani was born in 1916. From 1938 onwards he became involved in various anti-fascist activities for which he was imprisoned in 1943. His works include The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, and Five Stories of Ferrara (Within the Walls), which won the Strega Prize. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis was awarded the Viareggio Prize in 1962 and was made into a feature film.

A new translation of Giorgio Bassani's award winning collection of novellas, which inspired his masterpiece The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.A young working class woman abandoned by her bourgeois lover; the tensions of intermarriage between established classes and communities; a holocaust survivor seemingly back from the dead; a formidable socialist activist defying house arrest; the only surviving witness to the first local atrocity of the Second World War. In these five unforgettable stories, Bassani gave life to the characters that would inform the Romanzo di Ferrara, his suite of novels depicting life in the city. Moving, poetic, atmospheric and artfully observed, this collection is a distillation of Bassani's genius. It won the Strega Prize on first publication as Cinque Storie Ferraresi in 1956, and established Bassani as one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century.'Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists' Guardian'The most uncompromising, merciful and merciless writer' Ali Smith

A new translation of Giorgio Bassani's haunting collection of short stories that evoke 1930s Ferrara, with an introduction by Ali Smith.Isolated lives and a lost world are evoked in these memorable stories set in the Jewish-Italian community of 1930s Ferrara. A young man's unrequited love; a strange disappearance; a faded hotel; a lonely funfair; the smell of mown hay at the gates of the Jewish Cemetery - these vivid, impressionistic snapshots build a picture of life's brevity and intensity. Part of the sequence including The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and featuring people and places from these novels, The Smell of Hay is told with a voice that is by turns intimate, ironic, elegiac and rueful. This new translation contains two pieces, added by Bassani to his earlier collection, which have never appeared in English before.'Powerful new translations . . . Bassani began as a poet, and McKendrick's redelivery of this taut uncompromising fiction reveals resonance and generosity' Ali Smith'Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists' GuardianGiorgio Bassani (1916-2000) was an Italian poet, novelist and editor. The Smell of Hay is the last in a series of six works collected together as Il romanzo di Ferrara. Other works in the cycle include The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which received the Viareggio Prize and inspired an Academy Award-winning film adaptation by Vittorio de Sica, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, and Within the Walls (originally published as Five Stories of Ferrara), which won the Strega Prize. Jamie McKendrick is a poet and translator. His translations of Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles are already available as Penguin Modern Classics, and he is in the process of translating the rest of the Romanzo di Ferrara cycle anew.

Into the insular town of 1930s Ferrara, a new doctor arrives. Fadigati is hopeful and modern, and more than anything wants to fit into his new home. But his fresh, appealing appearance soon crumbles when the townsfolk discover his homosexuality, and the young man he pays to be his lover humiliates him publicly. As anti-Semitism spreads across Italy, the Jewish narrator of the tale begins to feel pity for the ostracized doctor, as the fickle nature of a community changing under political forces becomes clear. The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles is a gripping and tragic study of how lives can be destroyed by those we consider our neighbours.

A novel that aims to capture the mood and atmosphere of Italy (and in particular Ferrara) in the last summers of the thirties, focusing on an aristocratic Jewish family moving towards its doom.