Cesare Pavese (Author) Cesare Pavese was born in 1908 in Santo Stefano Belbo, a village in the hills of Piedmont. He worked as a translator (of Melville, Joyce and Faulkner) and as an editor for the publishing house Einaudi Editore, while also publishing his own poetry and a string of successful novels, including The House on the Hill and The Moon and the Bonfires. Never actively anti-Fascist himself, he was nevertheless sent into internal exile in Calabria in 1935 for having aided other subversives. He killed himself in 1950, shortly after receiving Italy's most prestigious literary prize, the Strega. Tim Parks (Translator) Tim Parks moved to Italy in 1981 and lives in Milan. Well known for his non-fiction writings on Italy - Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education - and his novels - Europa (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Destiny, In Extremis - he has translated a number of Italian writers, in particular Macchiavelli, Leopardi, Moravia, Calvino, Tabucchi and Calasso. He has twice been awarded the John Florio Prize for Translation from the Italian.
The Moon and the Bonfires [is Pavese's] masterpiece on the aftermath of the partisan war in the hills around Turin * The Daily Telegraph * Insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive * The New York Times Book Review * Cesare Pavese's cool, contemplative voice was the most important among postwar Italian writers -- W. S. DiPiero Pavese's nine short novels make up the most dense, dramatic, and homogeneous narrative cycle of modern Italy ... But above all they are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings -- Italo Calvino Pavese is one of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century -- Susan Sontag