Primo Levi’s Universe A Writer’s Journey

by Magavern, Sam; Rosen, Jonathan; Sodi, Risa

• ISBN13: 9780230606470
• ISBN10: 0230606474
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-07-07
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Summary

Primo Levi is best known for his memoir,Survival in Auschwitz, but he was also a scientist, fiction writer, and poet: in short, a Renaissance man, who did not want to be known exclusively as a Holocaust writer. Using Levi's own words as a springboard, Sam Magavern offers here for the first time a multi-faceted portrait of the man - as a writer. By exploring all of Levi's writings--including his short stories, poems, his delightful novels about blue-collar workers--Magavern introduces us to a talented writer who had a profound love of humanity, a sharp wit, a passion for his profession as a chemist--a man inspired by variety of things beyond his Holocaust experience. Magavern brings a fresh, personal sensibility to the way we think about Levi and produces a hybrid book--part life story and part literary biography, finally doing justice to the man's calm rationality and essential beliefs.

Author Biography

Sam Magavern has written for many of the nation’s finest literary journals, including Poetry, The Partisan Review, and The Paris Review.  He is a Professor at the University at Buffalo Law School and serves for the city's Living Wage Commission. He has worked as a public interest lawyer while publishing a wide variety of work, from poetry to legal essays to comic books.

Jonathan Rosen is the author of the novels Eve’s Apple and Joy Comes in the Morning, and two works of non-fiction, “The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds” and his most recent publication, “The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature,” which was published earlier this year. His essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and other publications. He is editorial director of Nextbook, where he edits the “Jewish Encounters” series, published by Nextbook\Schocken. Risa Sodi is the Director of Undergraduate Study, Senior Lector II, and Language Program Director at Yale University. She is the author of Narrative and Imperative: The First Fifty Years of Italian Holocaust Writing, 1944-1994 and A Dante of Our Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz, as well as articles on modern Italian literature and history.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. v
Chronology of Primo Levi's Life	p. xiii
A New Cosmos	p. 1
Frogs on the Moon	p. 7
Black Stars	p. 15
Magic Mountains	p. 27
Hell's Circles	p. 35
Truces	p. 97
Life Inside the Law	p. 119
Uncertain Hours	p. 137
The Thaw	p. 157
Into the Sea	p. 167
What We Make of Each Other	p. 175
Afterword	p. 189
Notes	p. 209
Sources	p. 227
Index	p. 229
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