A landmark translation of passionate, fiercely intelligent poetry about coming of age by one of the most influential Italian writers of the twentieth century. In the spring of 1935, the young Cesare Pavese was sentenced, for "antifascist activities," to three years of detention in a small seaside village in Calabria. Far away from his familiar life in the city of Turin and forced to rely on his own resources, he began to write poems of tremendous power, in terse lines and unsentimental language, giving voice to country people and hard country lives untainted by the propaganda of Fascism. "When I found my friends, I found my real home— / land so worthless a man's got a perfect right / to do absolutely nothing." Though Pavese is now most famous for his fiction, he was a poet first of all, and Hard Labor was the work for which he hoped to be remembered. It is a book, he once said, "that might have saved a generation." William Arrowsmith's translations—with their strong lines and bold American diction—marvelously convey the spirit and complex vitality of the original.

The Beautiful Summer is a trilogy of short novels published in Turin in 1949. The Beautiful Summer was written in 1940 under the title La tenda; The Devil in the Hills dates from 1948, and Among Women Only from 1949. The protagonist of the first novel is the very young Ginia, who works in a fashion atelier and lives with her brother Severino. She meets the more experienced Amelia, who leads her through a kind of initiation ritual, encouraging her to leave behind adolescent prejudices and modesty. Amelia occasionally works as a model for painters and introduces Ginia to Rodriguez and Guido—the latter serving in the military—two artists with very different personalities. Personal relationships intertwine: Ginia falls in love with Guido, while Amelia's ambiguous relationship with Rodriguez is complicated by her love for Ginia and her consequent jealousy toward Guido. Eventually, Ginia decides to pose nude for Guido but, overwhelmed by shame, distances herself from all three. Later, she reunites with Amelia—who has in the meantime recovered from syphilis contracted with another woman—and it seems that both have completed their journey toward maturity and a sense of responsibility. The Devil in the Hills follows three university students—Pieretto, Oreste, and the unnamed narrator—who spend their nights wandering through the hills of Turin, drinking and engaging in deep conversations. During one of these nocturnal excursions, they meet Poli, a wealthy young man who seems interested in their discussions, though his privileged background prevents him from truly appreciating their spontaneity. Poli drags along his barely tolerated lover, Rosalba, who, betrayed and humiliated, ends up shooting him—wounding him—and later takes her own life. The three friends then decide to spend the summer in the countryside at Oreste's family home. However, during their stay, they encounter Poli again, this time accompanied by his beautiful wife, Gabriella. Oreste falls in love with Gabriella, and she seems to reciprocate his feelings, but when Poli, weakened by tuberculosis, has to return to Milan, she ultimately chooses to stay with him. The contrast between the simplicity and naturalness of rural life and the corruption, boredom, and decadence embodied by Poli and the enigmatic Gabriella seems to push the three friends toward a more mature awareness. Among Women Only serves as an indictment of the wealthy bourgeoisie in the aftermath of the war. Clelia, a woman from Turin who has built a successful career in the fashion industry in Rome, returns to her hometown to open a new boutique on Via Po. This endeavor draws her into a world of corruption and vice, represented through three women: Rosetta, Momina, and Mariella, each embodying different aspects of this decadent society and the clash of contrasting psychologies. In this struggle, cynicism and boredom prevail, leading Rosetta to two suicide attempts—the second of which is successful—while Momina remains cynical and Mariella reacts with foolish indifference. Clelia is powerless in the face of this tragedy, and her despair makes her attempt to reconnect with the lost innocence of her childhood seem impossible. This nostalgic longing forms the novel's central theme, with the only positive moment emerging from her fleeting relationship with the working-class Becuccio. The other male characters are deliberately insignificant, serving only to emphasize the pettiness and decay of the world of villas and high-society gatherings. The novel Among Women Only was later adapted into Michelangelo Antonioni's 1955 film Le amiche (The Girlfriends).

On June 23rd, 1950, Pavese, Italy's greatest modern writer received the coveted Strega Award for his novel Among Women Only. On August 26th, in a small hotel in his home town of Turin, he took his own life. Shortly before his death, he methodically destroyed all his private papers. His diary is all that remains and for this the contemporary reader can be grateful. Contemporary speculation attributed this tragedy to either an unhappy love aff air with the American film star Constance Dawling or his growing disillusionment with the Italian Communist Party. His Diaries, however, reveal a man whose art was his only means of repressing the specter of suicide which had haunted him since childhood: an obsession that finally overwhelmed him. As John Taylor notes, he possessed something much more precious than a political theory: a natural sensitivity to the plight and dignity of common people, be they bums, priests, grape-pickers, gas station attendants, office workers, or anonymous girls picked up on the street (though to women, the author could--as he admitted--be as misogynous as he was affectionate). Bitter and incisive, This Business of Living, is both moving and painful to read and stands with James Joyce's Letters and Andre Gide's Journals as one of the great literary testaments of the twentieth century.

'Pavese's novels are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings' Italo Calvino June, 1943. Allied aircraft are bombing Turin; fascist Italy is on its knees. Every evening, after a day's teaching in the city, Corrado returns to the safety of the hills and the care of his two doting landladies. He has no attachments, no obligations. Yet against his better judgement he is drawn to the easy warmth of a circle of anti-fascists who congregate at a nearby tavern, and confronted with a painful choice: emotional and political commitment, with all its dangers - or devastating retreat. Pavese's extraordinary semi-autobiographical novel is a lucid portrayal of missed opportunities and human weakness, set against the seductive intensity of the Italian countryside. Translated with an introduction by Tim Parks Shortlisted for The Society of Authors Translation Award 2022

"There is only one pleasure, that of being alive. All the rest is misery," wrote Cesare Pavese, whose short, intense life spanned the ordeals of fascism and World War II to witness the beginnings of Italy's postwar prosperity. Searchingly alert to nuances of speech, feeling, and atmosphere, and remarkably varied, his novels offer a panoramic vision, at once sensual and finely considered, of a time of tumultuous change. This volume presents readers with Pavese's major works. The Beach is a wry summertime comedy of sexual and romantic misunderstandings, while The House on the Hill is an extraordinary novel of war in which a teacher flees through a countryside that is both beautiful and convulsed with terror. Among Women Only tells of a fashion designer who enters the affluent world she has always dreamed of, only to find herself caught up in an eerie dance of destruction, and The Devil in the Hills is an engaging road novel about three young men roaming the hills in high summer who stumble on mysteries of love and death.

'Insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive' The New York Times Book Review A new translation by Tim Parks Twenty years after making his fortune in America, Eel is drawn back to the closest thing he has to a home: the Piedmontese countryside where he grew up poor and illegitimate. Wandering the valleys and vineyards with his childhood friend Nuto, Eel remembers the farm where he worked, his employer's beautiful daughters, the rituals of rural life. Yet as he discovers more about what happened there during the war, he realizes that these timeless landscapes hide terrible, savage secrets. By turns fond and evocative, seductive and troubling, The Moon and the Bonfires is a lyrical masterpiece of memory and betrayal. Translated with an Introduction by Tim Parks

In 1950, shortly after winning Italy's highest literary award, Cesare Pavese committed suicide. Shocked and bewildered, his friends sought an explanation. Some suggested that it was Pavese's disillusionment with Communism. Others believed it might have been his unhappy love affair with an American film star. The truth was revealed only when Pavese's private diaries were brought to light, for the diaries revealed a tormented man struggling to achieve an elusive emotional maturity consistent with a poet's sensibility. In this quest Pavese failed. In his life the threat of suicide was always implicit. Above all, and despite his extraordinarily powerful intellect, he was a man who sought, until the bitter end, for a "perfect love." His diaries reveal the succession of harrowing disappointments that he met along the way with a pitiless self-analysis, touching nerves which most of us cannot bear to have exposed. It is no accident that the Diaries were hailed on the continent as the finest literary journals since Gide.--From publisher description.

Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) is generally recognized as one of the most important writers of his period. Between the years 1929 and 1933, Pavese enjoyed a rich correspondence with his Italian American friend, the musician and educator Antonio Chiuminatto (1904-1973). The nature of this correspondence is primarily related to Pavese's thirst to learn about American culture, its latest books, its most significant contemporary writers, as well as its slang. This volume presents an annotated edition of Pavese and Chiminatto's complete epistolary exchange. Mark Pietralunga's brilliant introduction provides historical and cultural context for the letters and traces Pavese's early development as a leading Americanist and translator. The volume also includes an appendix of Chiuminatto's detailed annotations and thorough explanations of colloquial American terms and slang, drawn from the works of Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and William Faulkner. A lively and illuminating exchange, this collection ultimately corroborates critical opinion that America was the igniting spark of Pavese's literary beginnings as a writer and translator.

Published just months before the author's suicide in 1950, this novel has since become one of Pavese's most sought-after books. In this classic, a successful couturier returns to Turin, the city in which she grew up, at the end of World War II. Opening a salon of her own leads her into a nihilistic circle of young hedonists, including the charismatic Rosetta, whose tragic death forms the novel's climax. But Turin itself is at the heart of the story, its pervading melancholy deftly rendered by a master craftsman.