"There is only one pleasure, that of being alive. All the rest is misery," wrote Cesare Pavese, whose short, intense life spanned the ordeals of fascism and World War II to witness the beginnings of Italy's postwar prosperity. Searchingly alert to nuances of speech, feeling, and atmosphere, and remarkably varied, his novels offer a panoramic vision, at once sensual and finely considered, of a time of tumultuous change. This volume presents readers with Pavese's major works. "The Beach" is a wry summertime comedy of sexual and romantic misunderstandings, while "The House on the Hill" is an extraordinary novel of war in which a teacher flees through a countryside that is both beautiful and convulsed with terror. "Among Women Only" tells of a fashion designer who enters the affluent world she has always dreamed of, only to find herself caught up in an eerie dance of destruction, and "The Devil in the Hills" is an engaging road novel about three young men roaming the hills in high summer who stumble on mysteries of love and death.

Winner of the 2003 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize
A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL
The nameless narrator of "The Moon and the Bonfires," Cesare Pavese's last and greatest novel, returns to Italy from California after the Second World War. He has done well in America, but success hasn't taken the edge off his memories of childhood, when he was an orphan living at the mercy of a bitterly poor farmer. He wants to learn what happened in his native village over the long, terrible years of Fascism; perhaps, he even thinks, he will settle down. And yet as he uncovers a secret and savage history from the war--a tale of betrayal and reprisal, sex and death--he finds that the past still haunts the present. "The Moon and the Bonfires" is a novel of intense lyricism and tragic import, a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature that has been unavailable to American readers for close to fifty years. Here it appears in a vigorous new English version by R. W. Flint, whose earlier translations of Pavese's fiction were acclaimed by Leslie Fiedler as "absolutely lucid and completely incantatory."