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Mariella Rinaldi
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Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol
James Mustich
In the library of great nineteenth-century Russian novels, Dead Souls stands out as the most bizarre, eclipsing in its strangeness even the tortured subjectivity of Dostoevsky’s most fervid pages. Proceeding from an outrageous comic premise, Dead Souls hastens through the Russian landscape with demo...show more
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Ficciones
Jorge Luis Borges
«M'inganneranno, forse, la vecchiezza e il timore ma sospetto che la specie umana - l'unica - stia per estinguersi, e che la Bibioteca perdurerà: illuminata, solitaria, infinita, perfettamente immobile, armata di volumi preziosi, inutile, incorruttibile, segreta.
Aggiungo: infinita. Non introduco q...show more
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Oliver Sacks
Imagine this: You lose the ability to recognize people and objects, although all of your senses remain intact. So you can describe a glove as “a continuous surface [with] five out-pouchings” but not have a clue about its use. At the end of your medical exam, you reach out for your hat. Taking hold o...show more
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino
«[…] E Polo: — L'inferno dei viventi non è qualcosa che sarà; se ce n'è uno, è quello che è già qui, l'inferno che abitiamo tutti i giorni, che formiamo stando insieme. Due modi ci sono per non soffrirne. Il primo riesce facile a molti: accettare l'inferno e diventarne parte fino al punto di non ved...show more
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” That’s the famous opening sentence of Rebecca, a suspenseful romantic tale that has cast its irresistible spell over millions of readers since it was published in 1938. The “I” is the novel’s unnamed narrator. She is a timid and inexperienced young wo...show more
A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry
Born and raised in Bombay but a longtime resident of Canada, a Parsi rather than a Hindu, a realist in an age of magic realists, Rohinton Mistry has never neatly fit expectations. The tightly focused artistry of his first two works of fiction, Tales from Firozsha Baag and Such a Long Journey, gave n...show more
Walden
Henry David Thoreau
«Andai nei boschi perché desideravo vivere deliberatamente, affrontare solo i fatti essenziali della vita, e vedere se non potessi imparare cosa avesse da insegnare, senza scoprire, giunto alla morte, di non aver vissuto. Non desideravo vivere ciò che non era una vita, per quanto caro mi sia il vive...show more
The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank
«Qui ci mancano molte cose, e già da molto tempo, e mancano a me proprio come a te. Non devi pensare che mi riferisca a cose materiali, perché in quel senso abbiamo tutto quello che ci serve. No, parlo di cose interiori. Desidero proprio quanto te la libertà e l'aria, ma credo che siamo stati abbond...show more
The Plague
Albert Camus
Welcome to the epidemic city: a place where rumors run wild, government can’t coordinate relief, religious authorities rave ineffectually, and no one knows what today, much less tomorrow, holds in store. At first the citizens of Oran panic and revolt, but before long, as if numbed by the summer sun,...show more
Bleak House
Charles Dickens
Although it lacks the affectionate warmth of David Copperfield and the narrative unity of Great Expectations, Bleak House is considered by many critics to be its author’s greatest achievement. Unlike those other two novels, which, of course, have their own ardent champions, Bleak House is not steepe...show more
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
David Quammen
This book has helped me to get a more rational insight into the Global Pandemic we're all experiencing, allowing me to cope with the fear and anxiety it has naturally brought to our lives.
Spillover is extremely well written, precise and accurate from the scientific point of view and full of referen...show more
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
H. P. Lovecraft
Inspired by the fusty, antiquarian glories of his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft composed this short novel—which did not see publication until 1943, six years after his death—around the legend of a haunted mansion just a couple of blocks from his own dwelling place at the time of wr...show more
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
The Remains of the Day tells, in the first person, the story of Stevens, a proper British butler who has spent three decades in service at Darlington Hall. Stevens has been devoted to his career, playing a reliably unobtrusive role in polishing the etiquette of the upper class while pursuing—in acti...show more
The Drowned World
J. G. Ballard
Christ Stopped at Eboli
Carlo Levi
I've loved every passage of this book, maybe because the places described are so near to me yet so far in time...
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Valleys of the Assassins
Freya Stark