A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories of Primo Levi »

A chemist by training, Primo Levi (1919-1987) was arrested as an anti-fascist partisan during World War II, and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His books include The Drowned and the Saved, If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table. He died in 1987. Norton will publish The Complete Works of Primo Levi in 2010.

Ann Goldstein, an editor at The New Yorker, won the PEN Prize for Italian translation in 1993.

Alessandra Bastagli has previously translated Jurek Becker’s The Boxer. She works as a book editor in New York City.

A Tranquil Star, the first new American collection of Primo Levi previously untranslated fiction to appear since 1990, affirms his position as one of the twentieth century's most enduring writers.

The Washington Post - Dara Horn

… the most poignant stories here are those that deal with the act of writing itself, and in particular its failure to meet the expectation of immortality. As the narrator relates in "The Fugitive," about a poem that physically eludes its author's grasp, "To compose a poem that is worth reading and remembering is a gift of destiny: it happens to only a few people, without regard for rules or intentions, and to them it happens only a few times in their lives." Levi has been granted this gift of destiny, and American readers now have the gift of rediscovering it.