The Mirror Maker: Stories and Essays

by Primo Levi

Overview

With the publication of The Periodic Tableon 1984, Primo Levi became one of America’s most beloved writers. This new collection of his stories and essays reveals the full imaginative range of this great Italian writer. Most of the stories are science fiction and fantasy, combining Levi’s love for science with his keen perception of human nature. The essays, originally written for the Italian newspaper La Stampa, cover a broad range of his interests, from art and literature to politics and current affairs. Levi’s quick wit and humanity shine through in these gemlike pieces.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780805209891
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/19/1990
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	188
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

PRIMO LEVI was born in Turin in 1919 to an Italian-Jewish family. Arrested as a member of the anti-Fascist resistance, he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. After the war, Levi resumed his careers as a chemist and a writer in Turin until his untimely death in 1987.

Table of Contents

Preface by Lorenzo Mondo

Premise
To My Friends

STORIES
The Thaw
The Interview
They Were Made To Be Together
The Great Mutation
The Two Flags
Five Intimate Interviews
The Mirror Maker
Through the Walls
The Ant's Wedding
Force Majeure
A Mystery of the Lager
Time Checkmated
The Tommy-Gun under the Bed

ESSAYS
A Valley
The Commander of Auschwitz
The Moon and the Man
Sic!
Our Dreams
The Struggle of Life
Spears Become Shields
Translating Kafka
Rhyming on the Counterattack
Dear Horace
Bacteria Roulette
Among the Peaks of Manhattan
The Wine of the Borgias
Reproducing Miracles
The Man Who Flies
About Gossip
Jack London's Buck
Adam's Clay
The Spider's Secret
The Dispute among German Historians
Defiance in the Ghetto
Hatching the Cobra

Editorial Reviews

There are writers, a few of them, who stir an immediate personal response. For me, the Italian-Jewish memoirist and novelist Primo Levi is such a writer . . . He is a writer of integrity, seriousness, and charm.”
—Irving Howe
 
“Levi’s fascination with life guarantees touches of optimism in both the essays and the stories . . . Here, his range is flawlessly represented by Raymond Resenthal’s translation.”
—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Bristling with finesse and intelligence. The reader . . . will instantly recognize the qualities for which this cultivated, intensely humane Italian writer has been widely praised.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher