Primo Levi, an Italian chemist and Auschwitz survivor, is a writer whose explorations of contemporary moral history put him at the forefront of Holocaust literature. He is most often associated with Holocaust writing through his first book, Se questo è un uomo (1947; translated as If This Is a Man, 1959; republished as Survival in Auschwitz, 1961), a memoir of his imprisonment in Auschwitz, and his last book, I sommersi e i salvati (1986; translated as The Drowned and the Saved, 1988), a series of essays and meditations on the Holocaust. Levi published many other kinds of writing during a forty-year career--occasional and op-ed pieces, poetry, short fiction, and novels. He translated books and poetry from French, English, and German, and he wrote several prefaces for books, some of which he had personally championed with publishers. Levi's different writing styles range from science fiction to Holocaust testimony, from the picaresque to the Western...