Luigi Pirandello's Books

Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays

By: Luigi Pirandello

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Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays

By: Luigi Pirandello

A volume of plays from the founding architect of twentieth-century drama, including his most popular and controversial work A Penguin Classic Pirandello is brilliantly innovatory in his forms and themes, and in the combined energy, imagination and visual colours of his theatre. This volume of plays, translated from the Italian by Mark Musa, opens with Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which six characters invade the stage and demand to be included in the play. The tragedy Henry IV dramatizes the lucid madness of a man who may be King. In So It Is (If You Think So), the townspeople exercise a morbid curiosity attempting to discover “the truth” about the Ponza family. Each of these plays can lay claim to being Pirandello’s masterpiece, and in exploring the nature of human personality, each one stretches the resources of drama to their limits. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

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228

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Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

014018922X

ISBN 13

9780140189223

Her Husband

By: Luigi Pirandello

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Her Husband

By: Luigi Pirandello

One of the twentieth century's greatest literary artists and winner of the Nobel prize in 1934, Luigi Pirandello wrote the novel Her Husband in 1911, before he produced any of the well-known plays with which his name is most often associated today. Her Husband--translated here for the first time into English--is a profoundly entertaining work, by turns funny, bitingly satirical, and tinged with anguish. As important as any of the other works in Pirandello's oeuvre, it portrays the complexities of male/female relations in the context of a newly emerging, small but vocal Italian feminist movement. Evoking in vivid detail the literary world in Rome at the turn of the century, Her Husband tells the story of Silvia Roncella, a talented young female writer, and her husband Giustino Boggiolo. The novel opens with their arrival in Rome after having left their provincial southern Italian hometown following the success of Silvia's first novel, the rather humorously titled House of Dwarves. As his wife's self-appointed (and self-important) promoter, protector, counselor, and manager, Giustino becomes the primary target of Pirandello's satire. But the couple's relationship--and their dual career--is also complicated by a lively supporting cast of characters, including literary bohemians with avant-garde pretensions and would-be aristocratic esthetes who are all too aware of the newly acquired power of journalists and the publishing establishment to make or break their careers. Having based many of the characters--including Silvia and Giustino--on actual literary acquaintances of his, Pirandello reacted to the novel's controversial reception by not allowing it to be reprinted after the first printing sold out. Not until after his death were copies again made available in Italy. Readers will find Her Husband eerily evocative of the present in myriad ways--not the least of which is contemporary society's ongoing transformation wrought by the changing roles of men and women, wives and husbands.

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266

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822326000

ISBN 13

9780822326007

One, None, and a Hundred Thousand

Luigi Pirandello

By: Luigi Pirandello

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One, None, and a Hundred Thousand

Luigi Pirandello

By: Luigi Pirandello

One, None, and One Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello is a profound exploration of identity, perception, and the fluidity of the self. In this novel, Pirandello presents a protagonist, Vitangelo Moscarda, who begins to question his sense of self after a casual remark about his appearance. This seemingly trivial event leads Moscarda to realize that he is perceived differently by every person he encounters, resulting in a crisis of identity. The novel delves into themes of existentialism, highlighting the disparity between how we see ourselves and how others perceive us. Moscarda's journey illustrates the fragmentation of identity, as he grapples with the notion that he is not a single, fixed individual but rather a multiplicity of selves shaped by the perspectives of others. The title itself — One, None, and One Hundred Thousand—reflects this idea, signifying the many versions of a person that exist in the minds of others, as well as the elusive nature of true self-knowledge.

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222

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Lebooks Editora

Published Date

ISBN 10

6558945053

ISBN 13

9786558945055

The Late Matia Pascal - Pirandello

By: Luigi Pirandello

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The Late Matia Pascal - Pirandello

By: Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello was an Italian writer and playwright, author of enormously successful works such as "The Late Mattia Pascal" and "The Outcast." " The Late Mattia Pascal" tells the story of the titular character who, after successive misfortunes in life, culminating in an unwanted marriage, has the opportunity to start his life anew after winning a fortune in France and, at the same time, is declared dead in his hometown. Returning to Italy, he decides to live in Rome, where he begins a new life with a new identity. Disappointed with his existence and challenged to a duel, he fakes a second death, ultimately deciding to resume his former existence: an existence that no longer exists. "The Late Mattia Pascal" was one of the works that contributed most to the author's popularity, both within Italy and internationally. In 1934, Luigi Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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340

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Lebooks Editora

Published Date

ISBN 10

6558942844

ISBN 13

9786558942849

Absolutely Perhaps

By: Luigi Pirandello

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Absolutely Perhaps

By: Luigi Pirandello

A brand new adaptation of Pirandello's first play. No one has ever seen Signor Ponza's wife and her mother, Signora Frola together. Also, the neighbours have become suspicious because Signora Ponza never leaves her home and start asking questions. Ponza claims that this wife is really his second wife, the first having died in an earthquake that destroyed all records. Meanwhile his wife only pretends to be Signora Frola's daughter to humour Signora Frola, who, he claims, is insane. Thoroughly bewildered, Agazzi demands to meet Ponza's wife, who arrives heavily veiled proclaiming herself as both the daughter of Signora Frola and the second wife of Signor Ponza. Absolutely! {Perhaps} is brilliant comedy on the elusive nature of identity and reality and, like all of Pirandello's work, shows truth as subjective and relative and drama itself a mystery.Absolutely! {Perhaps} is published to coincide with the production at London's Wyndham's theatre starring Joan Plowright and directed by Franco Zeffirelli.

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Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1474226000

ISBN 13

9781474226004

One, None and a Hundred Thousand

By: Luigi Pirandello

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One, None and a Hundred Thousand

By: Luigi Pirandello

Nobel prize-winning Luigi Pirandello's classic novel on the nature of identity brims with sly humor, compelling drama, and skillfully depicted, oddly modern characters-all capped with timeless insight into the fragile human psyche. Luigi Pirandello's extraordinary final novel begins when Vitangelo Moscarda's wife remarks that Vitangelo's nose tilts to the right. This commonplace interaction spurs the novel's unemployed, wealthy narrator to examine himself, the way he perceives others, and the ways that others perceive him. At first he only notices small differences in how he sees himself and how others do; but his self-examination quickly becomes relentless, dizzying, leading to often darkly comic results as Vitangelo decides that he must demolish that version of himself that others see.

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Page Count

210

Publisher

General Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

9389716330

ISBN 13

9789389716337

Plays

By: Luigi Pirandello

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Plays

By: Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello is best known for his ability to create farcical tragedies that pit reality against appearance in such a way that objective truth is never revealed. Time magazine called Pirandello's work a fascinating precursor of the entire theater of the absurd -- the anguish over existence in Sartre and Camus, the guerilla warfare against ossified language and the mass mind in Ionesco, the bleak, alienated vision of Beckett, the sense of man eternally acting a role in Genet, and the use of the stage as a self-contained universe in Pinter. In new translations by acclaimed playwright and translator Eric Bentley, these versions of four of Pirandello's most celebrated plays -- Six Characters in Search of an Author, Emperor Henry, The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, and Right You Are -- are considered to be the standards for American productions. They capture the playwright's unique voice with remarkable precision, while at the same time attending to the rigors of the American stage.

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Page Count

212

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810116529

ISBN 13

9780810116528

Luigi Pirandello

By: Luigi Pirandello

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Luigi Pirandello

By: Luigi Pirandello

The first collection of selected poems by Luigi Pirandello translated into English. This dual-language edition includes works from his first-published volumes to his scattered later works, which appeared in various literary journals. With an introduction, select bibliography, notes, two appendices, chronology and index of first lines"--

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239

Published Date

ISBN 10

1599103206

ISBN 13

9781599103204

The Late Mattia Pascal

By: Luigi Pirandello

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The Late Mattia Pascal

By: Luigi Pirandello

Mattia Pascal endures a life of drudgery in a provincial town. Then, providentially, he discovers that he has been declared dead. Realizing he has a chance to start over, to do it right this time, he moves to a new city, adopts a new name, and a new course of life—only to find that this new existence is as insufferable as the old one. But when he returns to the world he left behind, it's too late: his job is gone, his wife has remarried. Mattia Pascal's fate is to live on as the ghost of the man he was. An explorer of identity and its mysteries, a connoisseur of black humor, Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello is among the most teasing and profound of modern masters. The Late Mattia Pascal, here rendered into English by the outstanding translator William Weaver, offers an irresistible introduction to this great writer's work

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276

Publisher

New York Review of Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1590171152

ISBN 13

9781590171158

Right You Are, If You Think You Are

By: Luigi Pirandello

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Right You Are, If You Think You Are

By: Luigi Pirandello

This famous drama, an expressionistic parable by the Nobel Prize–winning playwright, explores such themes as the relativity of truth, the vanity and necessity of illusion, and the instability of human personalities.

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Courier Dover Publications

Published Date

ISBN 10

0486159191

ISBN 13

9780486159195

Naked Masks

Five Plays

By: Luigi Pirandello

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Naked Masks

Five Plays

By: Luigi Pirandello

This special one-volume edition features five great plays by one of the most celebrated and fascinating dramatists of the twentieth century. Pirandello, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1934, was the playwright par excellence of the conflict between illusion and reality. His modern and sensationally original plays dramatize with force and eloquence the isolation of the individual from society and from himself. The editor, Eric Bentley, is an international theater authority. In addition to the Introduction and the biographical and bibliographical material in the Appendices, Mr. Bentley has prepared for this volume the first English translations of the play Liolà and Pirandello’s important “Preface” to Six Characters in Search of an Author. Included Plays: Liolà It Is So! (If You Think So) Henry IV Six Characters in Search of an Author Each in His Own Way

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Page Count

417

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

0452010829

ISBN 13

9780452010826

Pirandello's Henry IV

By: Luigi Pirandello

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Pirandello's Henry IV

By: Luigi Pirandello

The Italian playwright’s masterful comedy interrogating the meaning of madness is reimagined in this translation by the author of Leopoldstadt. In this meeting of two of the twentieth century’s greatest playwrights, Tom Stoppard has reinvigorated Luigi Pirandello’s masterpiece exploring the nature of madness and the limits of sanity. After a fall from his horse, an Italian aristocrat believes he is the obscure medieval German emperor Henry IV. After twenty years of living this royal illusion, his beloved appears with a noted psychiatrist to shock the madman back to sanity. Their efforts expose that for the past twelve years the nobleman has in fact been sane. With his mask of madness unveiled, the aristocrat launches an offensive to deflect their unwanted attention. While Pirandello’s characters verbally spar in Stoppardian flourishes, battling for the upper hand—and the greatest laughs—one question emerges: What constitutes sanity?

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Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802195342

ISBN 13

9780802195340

The Late Matia Pascal - Pirandello

By: Luigi Pirandello

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The Late Matia Pascal - Pirandello

By: Luigi Pirandello

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340

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Lebooks Editora

Published Date

ISBN 10

6558942844

ISBN 13

9786558942849

Pirandello's Love Letters to Marta Abba

By: Luigi Pirandello

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Pirandello's Love Letters to Marta Abba

By: Luigi Pirandello

In February 1925, the 58-year-old world-famous playwright Luigi Pirandello met Marta Abba, an unknown, beautiful actress less than half his age, and fell in love with her. She was to become, until his death in December 1936, not only his confidante but also his inspiring muse and artistic collaborator, helping him in his plans to reform Italian theater under the Fascist regime. Pirandello's love for the young actress was neither a literary infatuation nor a form of fatherly affection, but rather an unfulfilled, desperate passion that secretly consumed him during the last decade of his life. Bitterly disillusioned by the conditions of the theatrical world in Italy, Pirandello and Abba shared a dream of going abroad to earn their fortune and returning to Italy with the means to establish a national theater dedicated to high artistic standards. In March 1929, when Marta finally yielded to family pressure and left Pirandello alone in Berlin to revive her Italian stage career and to end rumors over their involvement, he endured a devastating heartbreak and fell into a life-threatening depression--more profound and long-lasting than any of his biographers have yet imagined. The hundreds of letters Pirandello wrote to Abba during these years are the only source that reveals the true story of his relentless torment. Selected, translated, and introduced here for the first time in any language, these powerful and moving documents reward the reader with the unique experience of living in intimacy with a profound poet of human pain. Here Pirandello encourages his beloved in her difficult career as actor/manager, rejoices in her triumphs, and desperately implores her to return to him. The letters are filled with glimpses of this major artistic personality at some of his most distinctive moments--such as the award of the Nobel Prize, his meetings with Mussolini, and Marta's long-dreamed-of success on Broadway--but they remain foremost an authentic confession of a Pirandello, without the mask of his art, telling the story of his real-life tragedy. In 1986, two years before she died, Marta Abba authorized the publication of the present correspondence so that the world might understand how deeply Pirandello had suffered. This English-language volume contains a selection of 164 letters from the complete edition of 552, which Princeton University Press will publish in cooperation with Mondadori, in the original Italian, in 1995. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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434

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400887283

ISBN 13

9781400887286

Pirandello's Theatre of Living Masks

New Translations of Six Major Plays

By: Luigi Pirandello,Umberto Mariani,Alice Gladstone Mariani

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Pirandello's Theatre of Living Masks

New Translations of Six Major Plays

By: Luigi Pirandello,Umberto Mariani,Alice Gladstone Mariani

In Pirandello's Theatre of Living Masks, Umberto Mariani and Alice Gladstone Mariani offer the first new edition in nearly sixty years of six of his major works.

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345

Publisher

University of Toronto Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1442642114

ISBN 13

9781442642119

The Oil Jar and Other Stories

By: Luigi Pirandello

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The Oil Jar and Other Stories

By: Luigi Pirandello

Celebrated title story plus "Little Hut," "Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, Her Son-in-Law," "Citrons from Sicily," "With Other Eyes," "A Voice," and 5 other tales from the 1934 Nobel Prize-winning author.

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Page Count

100

Publisher

Courier Corporation

Published Date

ISBN 10

0486154793

ISBN 13

9780486154794

Naked

By: Luigi Pirandello

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Naked

By: Luigi Pirandello

Typically provocative, at once comic and tragic, Pirandello's "Naked" (Vestire gli ignudi) uncovers the machinery of guilt, deceit, and betrayal underlying the motives of five people. The heroine is a young governess who has been reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes. Dismissed from service when the baby in her care fell from a terrace to its death; abandoned by her prospective husband and penniless; she turns to prostitution but fails at this too and poisons herself. She nevertheless does not die -- and the action turns farcical, resembling a contemporary media event. She invents a romantic tale about her history which appears in a newspaper and generates more than casual interest in four men: the newspaper reporter; a best-selling writer who rescues her; her faithless lover; and her former employer; all of whom pursue her, demanding she account for her lies. As she feels hounded beyond endurance, her situation grows increasingly dark. The unexpected ending shocks the audience into new awareness about the consequences of fantasy and illusion in our daily lives.

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Guernica Editions

Published Date

ISBN 10

155071161X

ISBN 13

9781550711615

The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio

Shoot!

By: Luigi Pirandello

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The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio

Shoot!

By: Luigi Pirandello

Serafino is a typical Pirandellian anti-hero, a spectator rather than a participant in the tragi-comedy of human existence. Indeed he has the perfect job for it, that of a film cameraman. Serafino is an observer, an impersonal tool of a new industry based on make-believe. All he has to do is turn the handle of his camera and watch. He has no part in what is going on and is so removed from life that the mauling of an actor by a tiger cannot deflect him from filming the action. The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio is set in Rome circa 1915, partly on a film set, partly in the city. ‘Pirandello's critique of industrial-technological advance and the human toll such work takes was not entirely novel, even in his time, but is still powerful and well-presented. As far as his analysis of the film-industry goes, it's remarkable for its times -- and not without relevance even today. The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio is a slightly strangely-woven story, meandering in its reflection and action at times, but all the more striking in those blows it does deliver -- against dehumanizing industrial advances, and the loss of the human element. It has one hell of a conclusion, too. All in all, it's still well worth reading.' M.A. Orthofer in The Complete Review ‘Though Pirandello first published this book on the heels of the Edwardian era, it remains curiously relevant to the modern-day reader – who, like Gubbio, will likely be familiar with the numbness of discerning the world through a lens or a screen.’ Naomi Griffiths in Buzz Magazine

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Page Count

191

Publisher

SCB Distributors

Published Date

ISBN 10

1912868598

ISBN 13

9781912868599

Pirandello's One-act Plays

By: Luigi Pirandello

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Pirandello's One-act Plays

By: Luigi Pirandello

DramaCharacters: 3 male, 3 female Simple Set Zelda Preston inherits her father's pecan farm located just steps from the U.S. border with Mexico and struggles to maintain it without help from undocumented workers. Ines Sandoval, a dangerously ill young mother-to-be, and her sister Angie lobby for the return of their recently deported family member Tia Rosita. Angie's husband, Carlos, defends to his community and family his choice to work for the Border Patrol. And Cooper Daniels, an industrial pecan grower and head of the civilian border surveillance group, Citizens United, forges ahead with the building of a volunteer fence. These forces collide in Ground, which examines the very human costs of our immigration issues, and the strength of personal beliefs about family, home, and civil human rights in the face of our shifting political and social landscape. Two acts."Breathtaking in every way." -- Charles Whaley, TotalTheater.com..".Tackles the hot-button issue of illegal immigration." -- David Shreward, Back Stage

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