Cover art for The Leucothea Dialogues
Published
New York Review Books, November 2025
ISBN
9781962770378
Format
Softcover, 250 pages
Dimensions
16.5cm × 15.2cm

The Leucothea Dialogues

Not yet released
Due November 25, 2025.
Fast $7.95 flat-rate shipping!
Only pay $7.95 per order within Australia, including end-to-end parcel tracking.
100% encrypted and secure
We adhere to industry best practice and never store credit card details.
Talk to real people
Contact us seven days a week – our staff are here to help.

A shifting, primordial work by Cesare Pavese, plumbing the netherworlds of philosophy, myth, human feeling, and mortality

Above all Pavese's novels are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings . . . Each one of Pavese's novels revolves around a hidden theme, something unsaid which is the real thing he wants to say.

  • Italo Calvino

A shifting, primordial work by Cesare Pavese, plumbing the netherworlds of philosophy, myth, human feeling, and mortality

"Above all Pavese's novels are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings . . . Each one of Pavese's novels revolves around a hidden theme, something unsaid which is the real thing he wants to say." - Italo Calvino

Cesare Pavese's The Leucothea Dialogues is peopled with gods, centaurs, clouds, poets, hunters, snakes, and nymphs. These are the beings who spoke to him through the ancient plays and poems he read in primary school. Here they speak again in the twenty-seven dialogues that form the novel. Pavese calls mythology a "hothouse of symbols." His hothouse is liveliest at night, in the peculiar clarity of darkness. Pavese's characters are more than "characters," they play like the dreams of earliest childhood, they pose questions that seem to travel through the minds of the dead to the minds of the living and back again. Through reeds, shadows, glens, fields of blazing straw, homes and villages on the edges of valleys, and over cliffs, we follow their harried stories. In Minna Zallman Proctor's radiant translation, The Leucothea Dialogues is an expression of an exhilarating intelligence.

Related books