The Leucothea Dialogues [Paperback]

Winner of the 2026 PEN Translation Prize

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.“Minna Zallman Proctor’s vigorous retranslation from Italian of Cesare Pavese’s singular yet multiplicitous The Leucothea Dialogues stands out from a superb shortlist as a brilliant meditation on, as well as in, translation... [Proctor] makes the book come alive for readers today. Her introduction is especially remarkable for soaring beyond the usual necessary context about author and book into its own mythological register. — PEN Translation Prize Judges

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