A Tranquil Star: Book summary and reviews of A Tranquil Star by Primo Levi

A Tranquil Star

Unpublished Stories of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

A Tranquil Star by Primo Levi X
A Tranquil Star by Primo Levi
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  • Published Apr 2007
    176 pages
    Genre: Short Stories

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Book Summary

A Tranquil Star, the first new American collection of Primo Levi previously untranslated fiction to appear since 1990, affirms his position as one of the twentieth century's most enduring writers. These seventeen stories, first published in Italian between 1949 and 1986, demonstrate Levi's extraordinary range, taking the reader from the primal resistance of a captured partisan fighter to a middle-aged chemist experimenting with a new paint that wards off evil, to the lustful thoughts of an older man obsessed with a mysterious woman in a seaside villa. In the title story, Levi demonstrates his unerringly tragic understanding of the fragility of the universe through the tale of a pensive astronomer, terrified by the possibility that a long-dormant star might explode and reduce the entire planet to vapor. This remarkable new collection affirms Italo Calvino's conviction that Levi was "one of the most important and gifted writers of our time."

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Media Reviews

"While these pieces ...don't really stand on their own, they shed further light on Levi's life and work." - PW.

This information about A Tranquil Star was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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more short stories...

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