United States - "The Novel of Ferrara" by Giorgio Bassani
Novelist, poet, essayist, editor, Giorgio Bassani spent his childhood and adolescence in Ferrara, a place that lived forever in his hearth and became the scene of his literary works.
The series of works known as "Il romanzo di Ferrara" – including Within the Walls, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Behind the Door, The Heron, and The Smell of Hay - tells about 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.
Now (on October 16, 2018) the publishing company W. W. Norton & Company has published The Novel of Ferrara, that brings together Bassani’s six classics, fully revised by the author at the end of his life, now published in English for the first time as the unified masterwork Bassani intended.
Suffused with new life by acclaimed translator and poet Jamie McKendrick, this work seals Bassani’s reputation as «a quietly insistent chronicler of our age’s various menaces to liberty». (Jonathan Keates)
On the occasion of the publication, the Italian Cultural Institute in New York hosts a conversation with Judith Thurman, journalist, and author André Aciman, who curated the foreword of the volume.
The appointment at the Institute is on November 7th, at 06:00 pm.