Alfred A. Knopf
Price: $24.00
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DAN HOFSTADTER discusses his book Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples.
Harvard Book Store is delighted to announce that on Thursday, January 26th Dan Hofstadter will read from and discuss his new non-fiction book Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples .
Weaving the tale of an elusive romance with a vivid and haunting evocation of a legendary metropolis, Dan Hofstadter reveals the city of Naples to us. He is our guide to the dilapidated architectural beauty and the irrepressible theater of the city’s everyday life; the centuries-old festivals that regularly overtake the jumbled streets; the conversations in dialect that start in the cafés after work and continue into the night; the countless curio shops where treasures mingle with kitsch. And he describes the natives he befriends, people whose gestures and superstitions seem as ancient as Vesuvius: a master baker who’d rather be playing the stock market; an agoraphobic aunt who must meddle by phone; and, always, Benedetta, the object of our narrator’s fascination.
“Beautiful…Outstanding…Hofstadter’s book—free of knowingness, charged with experience—is written with the ease of affection and discovery…. It is a story of love—for an arcane city and for a girl, Benedetta, who embodies the Neapolitan enigma. The city prevails on every page….Hofstadter has penetrated the extended labyrinth, and his account of his explorations, literally breathtaking, is lyrical in the Neapolitan tradition.” —Shirley Hazzard, The New York Times Book Review
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Dan Hofstadter’s books include Goldberg's Angel: An Adventure in the Antiquities Trade and Temperaments: Artists Facing Their Work. His most recent, The Love Affair as a Work of Art, a collection of essays on French writers, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He has written for most national magazines and was for eight years a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in the Hudson River Valley area of New York.
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