This stunning hardcover collection brings alive the magnificent Italian city of Florence through the eyes of literary greats from Dante to Salman Rushdie.
In this gorgeously jacketed anthology of classic stories, an international array of brilliant writers provide windows onto the city's gilded past and full-blooded present. Florence's world-famous Renaissance is represented here by its most illustrious chroniclers, beginning with Dante's vision of an Inferno teeming with his Florentine enemies, Boccaccio's young Florentine nobles escaping the plague in The Decameron, and the artist Cellini's swashbuckling adventures. The city's long tradition of mesmerizing foreign visitors is celebrated in selections from Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad, E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, and the rapturous impressions of Stendhal (who gave his name to Stendhal syndrome). Mary McCarthy provides a vivid depiction of a twentieth-century market town; Penelope Fitzgerald weaves a gentle comedy of manners among Florence's fading aristocracy; Vasco Pratolini, one of the city's most renowned modern authors, tells a tender tale of class struggle under 1930s fascism; and Salman Rushdie dazzles with the magical realism of The Enchantress of Florence. George Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, and Iris Origo are among the other brilliant writers whose stories illuminate facets of this fascinating city.
Über den Autor Ella (Hrsg.) Carr
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Ella Carr is the editor of Florence Stories in the Everyman's Library Pocket Classics series. She is the author of the guide Florence Walks and has contributed to a number of travel and hotel guides and to publications including The Oldie and Exberliner.Elsa Morante was an Italian novelist, poet, and translator. She was born in 1912 in Rome and wrote her debut novel, Lies and Sorcery, while hiding in the countryside during the German occupation of Italy in the Second World War. Alongside Lies and Sorcery, which won the Viareggio Prize, Morante's novels include Arturo's Island, which was awarded the Strega Prize, and History: A Novel which became a national bestseller in Italy on publication. She died in 1985.William Somerset Maugham, famous as novelist, playwright and short-story writer, was born in 1874, and lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He spent some time at St. Thomas' Hospital with a view to practising medicine, but the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897, won him over to letters. Of Human Bondage, the first of his masterpieces, came out in 1915, and with the publication in 1919 of The Moon and Sixpence his reputation as a novelist was established. His position as a successful playwright was being consolidated at the same time. His first play, A Man of Honour, was followed by a series of successes just before and after World War I, and his career in the theatre did not end until 1933 with Sheppey. His fame as a short story writer began with The Trembling of a Leaf, subtitled Little Stories of the South Sea Islands, in 1921, after which he published more than ten collections. His other works include travel books such as On a Chinese Screen, and Don Fernando, essays, criticism, and the autobiographical The Summing Up and A Writer's Notebook.In 1927, he settled in the south of France, and lived there until his death in 1965.
