History: A Novel (King Penguin)

Literature & Fiction

MORANTE, ELSA

Contemporary

Penguin Books, Ltd.

History was written nearly thirty years after Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia spent a year in hiding among remote farming villages in the mountains south of Rome. There she witnessed the full impact of the war and first formed the ambition to write an account of what history - the great political events driven by men of power, wealth, and ambition - does when it reaches the realm of ordinary people struggling for life and bread.The central character in this powerful and unforgiving novel is Ida Mancuso, a schoolteacher whose husband has died and whose feckless teenage son treats the war as his playground. A German soldier on his way to North Africa rapes her, falls in love with her, and leaves her pregnant with a boy whose survival becomes Ida's passion. Around these two other characters come and go, each caught up by the war which is like a river in flood. We catch glimpses of bombing raids, street crimes, a cattle car from which human cries emerge, an Italian soldier succumbing to frostbite on the Russian front, the dumb endurance of peasants who have lived their whole lives with nothing and now must get by with less than nothing. "One of the few novels in any language that renders the full horror of Hitler's war, the war that never gets into the books . . ."-- Alfred Kazan, Esquire"A storyteller who spellbinds."-- Stephen Spender, The New York Review of Books"A marvel of a novel . . . all the pleasures that fiction can offer."-- Doris Grumbach, Saturday Review

History: A Novel

Genre Fiction

Avon/Books

The cramped and squalid slums of wartime Rome witness and harbor the struggles of a desperately poor, ill-educated, half-Jewish widow, her uncontrollable, charming, delinquent older son, and the precocious, frail, and vulnerable child fathered on her by a young German soldier

HISTORY: A NOVEL

KNOPF

An aging Italian man discovers a terrible secret from his mother's past and is prompted to scrutinize his own childhood and later life as a homosexual

Aracoeli

Random House, Inc.

The cramped slums of wartime Rome witness the struggles of a poor, ill-educated, half-Jewish widow, her uncontrollable, charming, delinquent older son, and the precocious, frail, and vulnerable child fathered on her by a young German soldier

HISTORY: A NOVEL (Aventura)

Vintage

First published in Italian in 1968, The World Saved by Kids was written in the aftermath of deep personal change and in the context of what Elsa Morante called the “great youth movement exploding against the funereal machinations of the organized contemporary world.” Morante believed that it was only the youth who could truly hear her revolutionary call. With the fiftieth anniversary of the tumultuous events of 1968 approaching, there couldn’t be a more timely moment for this first English translation of Morante’s work to appear. Greeted by Antonio Porta as one of the most important books of its decade, The World Saved by Kids showcases Morante’s true mastery of tone, rhythm, and imagery as she works elegy, parody, storytelling, song, and more into an act of linguistic magic through which Gramsci and Rimbaud, Christ and Antigone, Mozart and Simone Weil, and a host of other figures join the sassy, vulnerable neighborhood kids in a renewal of the word’s timeless, revolutionary power to explore and celebrate life’s insoluble paradox. Morante gained international recognition and critical acclaim for her novels History, Arturo’s Island, and Aracoeli, and The World Saved By Kids may be her best book and the one that most closely represents her spirit.

The World Saved by Kids: And Other Epics (The Italian List)

Poetry

Seagull Books

Alibi, with posthumous appendix Narcissus, is translated into English for the first time. Elsa Morante (1912-1985) is best known as one of Italy's great twentieth-century novelists. Her works include Arturo's Island, History, and the early vast Lies and Sorcery recently translated complete for the first time (NYRB). Lesser known, Morante also published two volumes of poetry: The World Saved by Kids and Other Epics, which has been translated (by Cristina Viti, Seagull), and, long before that, in 1958, Alibi. I learned about the existence of Alibi from the essay "Taking Leave of Tragedy" in Giorgio Agamben's The End of the Poem. Alibi collects seventeen poems, some long, some short, written 1940s-1950s, always musical, as she herself wished, often interweaving myths and fables with private affairs laid bare, almost, and with tributes to her cats. It is translated into English for the first time now. "I was born to difficult loves."--from the poem 'Adventure' "Rest a while close to those who love you."--from the title poem 'Alibi' Poetry.

Alibi

Allardyce Barnett Pub

History was written nearly thirty years after Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia spent a year in hiding among remote farming villages in the mountains south of Rome. There she witnessed the full impact of the war and first formed the ambition to write an account of what history - the great political events driven by men of power, wealth, and ambition - does when it reaches the realm of ordinary people struggling for life and bread. The central character in this powerful and unforgiving novel is Ida Mancuso, a schoolteacher whose husband has died and whose feckless teenage son treats the war as his playground. A German soldier on his way to North Africa rapes her, falls in love with her, and leaves her pregnant with a boy whose survival becomes Ida's passion. Around these two other characters come and go, each caught up by the war which is like a river in flood. We catch glimpses of bombing raids, street crimes, a cattle car from which human cries emerge, an Italian soldier succumbing to frostbite on the Russian front, the dumb endurance of peasants who have lived their whole lives with nothing and now must get by with less than nothing.

Literary

Steerforth

ON A SMALL ISLAND in the Tyrrhenian Sea there lives a boy as innocent as a seabird. Arturo's mother is dead; his father away. Black-clad women care for him, give him the freedom to come and go as he likes. Then the father returns with a new wife, Nunziata, a girl barely older than Arturo. At first hatred and contempt are all the boy feels for his stepmother. In time, Arturo and Nunziata re-create the tragedy and passion that are as old as the history of men and women.

Arturo's Island: A Novel (Italia)

Zoland Books

Elsa Morante’s novels are “astonishing for the quality of the writing, . . . the complexity of the invented world, the wide-ranging view of the human condition” (Elena Ferrante).
Once considered the greatest writer of Italy’s postwar generation―and admired by authors as varied as John Banville and Rivka Galchen―Elsa Morante is experiencing a literary renaissance, marked not least by Ann Goldstein’s translation of Arturo’s Island, the novel that brought Morante international fame. Imbued with a spectral grace, as if told through an enchanted looking glass, the novel follows the adolescent Arturo through his days on the isolated Neapolitan island of Procida, where―his mother long deceased, his father often absent, and a dog as his sole companion―he roams the countryside and the beaches or reads in his family’s lonely, dilapidated mansion. This quiet, meandering existence is upended when his father brings home a beautiful sixteen-year-old bride, Nunziatella.
A novel of longing and thwarted desires, filled with Morante’s “brutal directness and familial torment” (James Wood), Arturo’s Island reemerges in this splendid translation to take its rightful place in the world literary canon.

Arturo's Island: A Novel

United States

Liveright

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Books by MORANTE, ELSA

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MORANTE, ELSA. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

History: A Novel (King Penguin)

History: A Novel

HISTORY: A NOVEL

Aracoeli

HISTORY: A NOVEL (Aventura)

The World Saved by Kids: And Other Epics (The Italian List)

Alibi

History: A Novel

Arturo's Island: A Novel (Italia)

Arturo's Island: A Novel