The Mirror Maker: Stories and Essays

by Primo Levi, Lorenzo Mondo (Preface by), Raymond Rosenthal (Translator)

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	ix
	Premise	3
	To My Friends	5
	Stories
	The Thaw	9
	The Interview	11
	They Were Made to Be Together	14
	The Great Mutation	17
	The Two Flags	23
	Five Intimate Interviews	28
	The Mirror Maker	47
	Through the Walls	52
	The Ant's Wedding	57
	Force Majeure	62
	A Mystery in the Lager	66
	Time Checkmated	71
	The Tommy-Gun under the Bed	76
	Essays
	A Valley	83
	The Commander of Auschwitz	85
	The Moon and Man	89
	Sic!	93
	Our Dreams	95
	The Struggle for Life	98
	Spears Become Shields	101
	Translating Kafka	106
	Rhyming on the Counterattack	110
	Dear Horace	115
	Bacteria Roulette	120
	Among the Peaks of Manhattan	125
	The Wine of the Borgias	130
	Reproducing Miracles	135
	The Man Who Flies	140
	About Gossip	145
	Jack London's Buck	149
	Adam's Clay	154
	The Spider's Secret	158
	The Dispute among German Historians	163
	Defiance in the Ghetto	167
	Hatching the Cobra	172

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

Like Other People's Trades , a collection of Levi's essays issued earlier this year, this assemblage of two poems, 12 stories and 21 essays consists of an ``extreme dispersion of themes, tones, and cycles of approach.'' Originally written for La Stampa over a period of more than 20 years, the brief, experimental, fantastic, metaphysical pieces discuss astronauts, gossip, Kafka, Manhattan, poetry, wine adulterants, the origins of life, defiance in the Warsaw Ghetto, East-West negotiations, Jack London's The Call of the Wild . Also featured are interviews with an ant, giraffe, gull, mole, spider and E. coli. Although selected for this book by Levi himself, the pieces seem not as polished or satisfying as the earlier collection, and may be read less for their intrinsic merit than because they are by Primo Levi. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The literary reputation of the late Italian-Jewish author and Holocaust survivor is a solid one that this latest offering only augments. This is a collection of the fablelike short stories and essays Levi wrote for the Italian newspaper La Stampa over a period of 25 years. The tone-setting title story concerns a man who invents a mirror that reflects how others really perceive one--an invention, needless to say, that is unpopular. Levi always causes the reader to see things anew, whether he is writing of his visit to Manhattan or discussing such diverse literary characters as Kafka and Jack London. Recommended for most libraries.-- Paul Kaplan, Highland Park P.L., Ill.

Library Journal