Italo Svevo's Books

Zeno's Conscience - Svevo

By: Italo Svevo

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Zeno's Conscience is a novel presented as the fictional autobiography of Zeno Cosini, an unreliable narrator who recounts his life story to his psychoanalyst. The novel is structured around Zeno's attempts to quit smoking, his relationships with his father and wife, his business ventures, and his extramarital affairs. Svevo employs a stream-of-consciousness technique to delve into Zeno's psyche, revealing his self-deceptions, rationalizations, and contradictions. Zeno's reflections on his life are marked by irony and humor, and his unreliable narration adds layers of complexity to the story. One of the central themes of Zeno's Conscience is the exploration of human irrationality and self-delusion. Zeno's repeated failures to quit smoking serve as a metaphor for his broader inability to control his impulses and understand his true motivations. Svevo's portrayal of Zeno's inner life anticipates many of the themes and techniques later associated with psychoanalysis and modernist literature. The novel also reflects Svevo's interest in the emerging field of psychoanalysis, influenced by his reading of Sigmund Freud's works. Svevo's depiction of Zeno's sessions with his psychoanalyst serves as a vehicle for exploring the complexities of human consciousness and the limitations of self-knowledge.

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550

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Lebooks Editora

Published Date

ISBN 10

6558945509

ISBN 13

9786558945505

As a Man Grows Older

By: Italo Svevo

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As a Man Grows Older

By: Italo Svevo

Not so long ago Emilio Brentani was a promising young author. Now he is an insurance agent on the fast track to forty. He gains a new lease on life, though, when he falls for the young and gorgeous Angiolina—except that his angel just happens to be an unapologetic cheat. But what begins as a comedy of infatuated misunderstanding ends in tragedy, as Emilio’s jealous persistence in his folly—against his friends’ and devoted sister’s advice, and even his own best knowledge—leads to the loss of the one person who, too late, he realizes he truly loves. Marked by deep humanity and earthy humor, by psychological insight and an elegant simplicity of style, As a Man Grows Older (Senilità, in Italian; the English title was the suggestion of Svevo’s great friend and admirer, James Joyce) is a brilliant study of hopeless love and hapless indecision. It is a masterwork of Italian literature, here beautifully rendered into English in Beryl de Zoete’s classic translation.-Print ed. “The poem of our complex modern madness.”—EUGENIO MONTALE “Svevo has the capacity—so rare as to be almost unknown in the English novel—of handling emotional relationships with a combined tenderness, humour and realism.”—THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

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Page Count

328

Publisher

Pickle Partners Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1786258358

ISBN 13

9781786258359

Zeno's Conscience - Svevo

By: Italo Svevo

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Zeno's Conscience - Svevo

By: Italo Svevo

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Lebooks Editora

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ISBN 10

6558945509

ISBN 13

9786558945505

"This England is So Different--"

Italo Svevo's London Writings

By: Italo Svevo

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"This England is So Different--"

Italo Svevo's London Writings

By: Italo Svevo

This is the first time that the personal letters and writings of Italian Novelist Italo Svevo have been brought together into one volume. These writings cover the period 1901- 1926 during which Svevo stayed in London. Under his real name of Ettore Schmitz, he managed a factory in Charlton that manufactured underwater paints for the Royal Navy. Svevo was perpetually surprised by England, which he admired and criticised in equal measure. His letters to his wife chronicle his day to day life in Charlton. The writings are intriguing because they reveal a different side of the novelist and allow a glimpse of how his English experiences filtered through into his fiction writing!

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280

Publisher

Troubador Publishing Ltd

Published Date

ISBN 10

1899293590

ISBN 13

9781899293599

"This England is So Different--"

Italo Svevo's London Writings

By: Italo Svevo

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"This England is So Different--"

Italo Svevo's London Writings

By: Italo Svevo

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280

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Troubador Publishing Ltd

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ISBN 10

1899293590

ISBN 13

9781899293599

Emilio's Carnival

By: Italo Svevo

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Emilio's Carnival

By: Italo Svevo

In this novel, Svevo tells the story of the amorous entanglement of Emilio, a failed writer already old at 35, and Angiolina, a beautiful but promiscuous young woman. A study in jealousy and self torment, it is suffused with a tragic sense of existence.

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Page Count

261

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300090498

ISBN 13

9780300090499

A Very Old Man

Stories

By: Italo Svevo

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A Very Old Man

Stories

By: Italo Svevo

A newly translated collection of fiction by the influential Italian modernist, continuing on his landmark work Zeno's Conscience. A Very Old Man collects five linked stories, parts of an unfinished novel that the great Triestine Italo Svevo wrote at the end of his life, after the international success of Zeno’s Conscience in 1923. Here Svevo revisits with new vigor and agility themes that fascinated him from the start—aging, deceit, and self-deception, as well as the fragility, fecklessness, and plain foolishness of the bourgeois paterfamilias—even as memories of the recent, terrible slaughter of World War I and the contemporary rise of Italian fascism also cast a shadow over the book’s pages. It opens with “The Contract,” in which Zeno’s manager, the hardheaded young Olivi, expresses, like the war veterans who were Mussolini’s early followers, a sense of entitlement born of fighting in the trenches. Zeno, by contrast, embodies the confusion and paralysis of the more decorous, although sleepy, way of life associated with the onetime Austro-Hungarian Empire which for so long ruled over Trieste but has now been swept away. As always, Svevo is attracted to the theme of how people fail to fit in. It is they, he suggests, who offer a recognizably human countenance in a world ravaged by the ambitions and fantasies of its true believers.

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Page Count

153

Publisher

New York Review of Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

168137594X

ISBN 13

9781681375946

Further Confessions of Zeno

By: Italo Svevo,Ettore Schmitz

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Further Confessions of Zeno

By: Italo Svevo,Ettore Schmitz

5 short stories and a play dealing with old age - its frustrations and consolations.

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Page Count

308

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520017536

ISBN 13

9780520017535

Perfect Hoax

By: Italo Svevo

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Perfect Hoax

By: Italo Svevo

Travelling salesman Enrico Gaia decides to play a trick on the conceited ageing litterateur Mario Samigli: he dupes him into thinking that a representative of a prestigious Viennese publishing house wants to commission a German translation of a long-forgotten novel Samigli had written and published at his own expense forty years ago. This leads the old man to reach new heights of self-delusion, spurred on by Gaia's succession of ruses.In this tragicomic study of deception and disappointment, Italo Svevo - who himself was an undiscovered writer until his old age - parodies elements of his own life and offers an insightful psychological portrait of a person who has lost touch with reality.

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Alma Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0714549347

ISBN 13

9780714549347

As a Man Grows Older

By: Italo Svevo

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As a Man Grows Older

By: Italo Svevo

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328

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Pickle Partners Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1786258358

ISBN 13

9781786258359

Confessions of Zeno (riverrun editions)

a beautiful new edition of the Italian classic

By: Italo Svevo

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Confessions of Zeno (riverrun editions)

a beautiful new edition of the Italian classic

By: Italo Svevo

I am sure a cigarette has a more poignant flavour when it is the last' A neurotic Italian businessman obsessed by his own hypochondria, Zeno Cosini recounts his early years to his psychoanalyst Dr S as a form of therapy. With a cigarette clutched permanently between his fingers, he explores the important themes of his life: his love of smoking, his relationship with his parents, his marriage. Structured as a series of conversations with his psychoanalyst, Zeno was an innovation in its time, and remains a curious and intriguing delight. Michael Hoffman places Confessions of Zeno in its European context in his sparkling introduction.

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Page Count

410

Publisher

Hachette UK

Published Date

ISBN 10

178747416X

ISBN 13

9781787474161

A Life

By: Italo Svevo

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A Life

By: Italo Svevo

A Life is the gruelling tale of the frustrated existence of a bank clerk with a poetic soul. The artistic aspirations of the protagonist and the emptiness of his daily life become tragic in the great divide between what he wants and what he actually has and gets. Alfonso the bank clerk wants to be a poet and seems to be falling in love with Annetta, the vain and arrogant daughter of his boss. But the emptiness of both his attempts at writing and at love lead to an ironic and painful conclusion.

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322

Publisher

Pushkin Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

190896877X

ISBN 13

9781908968777

The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl

By: Italo Svevo

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The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl

By: Italo Svevo

...the sin of an old man is equal to about two sins of a young man. The fable-like story of an old man's sexual obsession with a young woman is a distillation of Italo Svevo's concerns--attraction of an older man to a younger woman, individual conscience versus social convention, and the cost of sexual desire. This novella is a marvel of psychological insight, following the man's vacillations and tortuous self-justifications to their tragic-comic end. It is presented here in a translation first commissioned and published by Virginia Woolf for her Hogarth Press. The Art of The Novella Series Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

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Melville House

Published Date

ISBN 10

1612190839

ISBN 13

9781612190839

Italo Calvino

Letters, 1941-1985 - Updated Edition

By: Italo Calvino

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Italo Calvino

Letters, 1941-1985 - Updated Edition

By: Italo Calvino

The first collection of letters in English by one of the great writers of the twentieth century This is the first collection in English of the extraordinary letters of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Italy's most important postwar novelist, Italo Calvino (1923-1985) achieved worldwide fame with such books as Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. But he was also an influential literary critic, an important literary editor, and a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Gore Vidal, Leonardo Sciascia, Natalia Ginzburg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Luciano Berio. This book includes a generous selection of about 650 letters, written between World War II and the end of Calvino’s life. Selected and introduced by Michael Wood, the letters are expertly rendered into English and annotated by well-known Calvino translator Martin McLaughlin. The letters are filled with insights about Calvino’s writing and that of others; about Italian, American, English, and French literature; about literary criticism and literature in general; and about culture and politics. The book also provides a kind of autobiography, documenting Calvino’s Communism and his resignation from the party in 1957, his eye-opening trip to the United States in 1959-60, his move to Paris (where he lived from 1967 to 1980), and his trip to his birthplace in Cuba (where he met Che Guevara). Some lengthy letters amount almost to critical essays, while one is an appropriately brief defense of brevity, and there is an even shorter, reassuring note to his parents written on a scrap of paper while he and his brother were in hiding during the antifascist Resistance. This is a book that will fascinate and delight Calvino fans and anyone else interested in a remarkable portrait of a great writer at work.

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Page Count

640

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691162433

ISBN 13

9780691162430

The Written World and the Unwritten World

Essays

By: Italo Calvino

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The Written World and the Unwritten World

Essays

By: Italo Calvino

“Wonderful… Calvino’s prose is sparkling as ever, and he approaches ideas with wit and an open mind, always ready to challenge a stale point of view. This anthology will delight Calvino fans old and new.” —Publishers Weekly A rich collection of essays offering an extraordinary global view of Calvino’s approach to writing, reading, and interpreting literature. An extraordinary collection of essays, forewords, articles, and interviews, The Written World and the Unwritten World displays the remarkable intelligence and razor-sharp wit of prolific Italian writer Italo Calvino as he explores the meaning of literature in a rapidly changing world. From classics to contemporary literature, from tradition to the avant-garde, Calvino masterfully explores reading, writing, and translating through careful and illuminating discussion of the works of Bakhtin, Brecht, Cortázar, Thomas Mann, Octavio Paz, Georges Perec, Salman Rushdie, Gore Vidal, and more. Drawn from Mondo scritto e mondo non scritto (2002), Sulla fiaba (1988), and other uncollected essays, this volume of previously untranslated work—now rendered in English by acclaimed translator Ann Goldstein—is a major statement in literary criticism.

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Page Count

321

Publisher

HarperCollins

Published Date

ISBN 10

054423085X

ISBN 13

9780544230859

Confessions of Zeno (riverrun Editions)

By: Italo Svevo

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Confessions of Zeno (riverrun Editions)

By: Italo Svevo

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Page Count

432

Publisher

riverrun

Published Date

ISBN 10

1787474178

ISBN 13

9781787474178

Perfect Hoax

By: Italo Svevo

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Perfect Hoax

By: Italo Svevo

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Alma Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0714549347

ISBN 13

9780714549347

Emilio's Carnival

By: Italo Svevo

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Emilio's Carnival

By: Italo Svevo

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261

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300090498

ISBN 13

9780300090499

Senilità

roman

By: Italo Svevo

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Senilità

roman

By: Italo Svevo

La passion, douloureuse et tourmentée, d'Emilio, vieux garçon provincial, pour la jeune et belle Angiolina, et celle d'Amélie pour l'avantageux sculpteur Stefano forment la trame de ce premier " roman d'amour moderne " italien, tant joué par Joyce, Montale et Valery Larbaud.

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