On the occasion of the publication by W. W. Norton & Company of The Novel of Ferrara (il Romanzo di Ferrara) of acclaimed Italian author Giorgio Bassani (1916–2000), a conversation with Judith Thurman, journalist, and author André Aciman.
Now published in English for the first time as the unified masterwork Bassani intended, The Novel of Ferrara brings together Bassani’s six classics, fully revised by the author at the end of his life: Within the Walls, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Behind the Door, The Heron, and The Smell of Hay.
The Novel of Ferrara memorializes not only the Ferrarese people, but the city itself, which assumes a character and a voice deeply inflected by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs. Suffused with new life by acclaimed translator and poet Jamie McKendrick, this seminal work seals Bassani’s reputation as “a quietly insistent chronicler of our age’s various menaces to liberty” (Jonathan Keates).
Among the masters of twentieth-century literature, Giorgio Bassani and his Northern Italian hometown of Ferrara “are as inseparable as James Joyce and Dublin or Italo Svevo and Trieste”.
Giorgio Bassani (Bologna, 1916 – Rome, 2000) spent his childhood and adolescence in Ferrara, which will remain forever in his heart, and will become the theater of his literary creations. He took part in the Italian Resistance and, after the war, dedicated himself to the cultural life as a narrator and a poet, but also as an editorial consultant for Feltrinelli publishing house, and as RAI Italian TV’s deputy director.
Judith Thurman began her career as a translator of writers and has written dozens of essays about artists and writers who share an extraordinary capacity for self-invention, many of which are collected in Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire. She began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987, and became a staff writer in 2000. She writes about books, culture, and fashion. Her story on Yves Saint Laurent was chosen for “The Best American Essays of 2003”. She is the author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, which won the 1983 National Book Award for nonfiction, and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography and the Salon Book Award for biography. She received the Rungstedlund Prize and the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
André Aciman is distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York teaching the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust. His memoir, Out of Egypt (1995), won a Whiting Award. He previously taught creative writing at New York University and French literature at Princeton University. In 2009 Aciman was Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University. His influences include Marcel Proust and James Joyce.
He is the author of four novels, Call Me by Your Name – adapted for the big screen in the eponymous film directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by James Ivory (2017)- Eight White Nights, Harvard Square, and of Enigma Variations.
He holds a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Lehman College and an A.M. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University.
Reservation no longer available