Emmaus - Hardcover

Alessandro Baricco is an Italian writer, director, and performer. He has won the Prix Médicis Étranger in France and the Selezione Campiello, Viareggio, and Palazzo al Bosco prizes in Italy.

Ann Goldstein is an editor at The New Yorker. She has translated three novels by Elena Ferrante?The Days of Abandonment, Troubling Love, The Lost Daughter?Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, The Chill by Romano Bilenchi, The Father and the Stranger by Giancarlo de Cataldo, and The Worst Intentions by Alessandro Piperno. Her translation of Linda Ferri's Cecilia is forthcoming in May 2010. She received a PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award and was a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome. She is currently editing the complete works of Primo Levi, for which she received a Guggenheim Translation fellowship. She lives in New York.

"Alessandro Baricco's new novel is about religion and sin, the sacred and the blasphemous, but perhaps above all about life, about the complicated and painful ways in which we approach it, the prices we pay, the losses and gains that add up to a figure that is always open-ended. It's an eternal story not new yet always containing original elements that can render it authentic, possible, verifiable, if we know how to see it."
Il Mattino

"Emmaus is a book about how difficult it is to see truly, in all times and in our own time. Thus it is the story of a fiction that is to say a universe molded over time that shatters under pressure of the cruelties of truth. But, at the same time, it is also the story of how, amid the ruins, the confusing world of resurrection appears."
La Repubblica

"A short, haunting philosophical novel."
Shelf Awareness

"Darkly beautiful."
Hey Small Press!

The haunting prose is soaked in a poetic sense of doom and brokenness, a hard-edged working-class lyricism reminiscent of Tillie Olson’s dustbowl classic Yonnondio.”
The Daily Beast

A riveting read” Switchback Journal

"It’s the sinister caprice with which he and his characters seem to take in blowing out their fine lines that takes this from being a beautifully written novel, to being a beautifully human novel." City Book Review