Reading
(I’m leading with texts/sources that are widely available in English. Scroll down to the end of this bibliography for untranslated Italian sources.)
Italian front/perspectives
Lussu, Emilio, Un Anno sull’Altipiano. 1938. (Translated into English in 2012 by Gregory Conti and published under the title A Soldier on the Southern Front.)
Thompson, Mark. The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919. 2009.
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Helprin, Mark, Soldier of the Great War
Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms
Monelli
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Austrian
Kreisler, Fritz, Four Weeks in the Trenches
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British
Brittain, Vera, Testament of Youth
Graves, Robert, Goodbye to All That
Owen
Sassoon, Siegfried, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston
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Secondary:
Faulks, Sebastian, Birdsong, 1991 novel.
Garth, John, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshhold of Middle Earth.
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General Great War Thoughts
Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory, 1970 classic analysis of (mostly British) historiography and literature related to the Great War
Labutat, Benjamin, When We Cease to Understand the World, translated by HT Lowe-Porter.
Tuchman, Barbara, The Guns of August
Films/Other
Joyeux Noel, 2005 film by Christian Carion about the 1914 Christmas truce. Richly detailed and powerfully executed.
La Grande Guerra, 1959 Italian film. Darkly comic and drawn in part from Lussu’s memoir; Salsa served as a script consultant.
They Shall Not Grow Old, an excellent 2018 documentary film by Peter Jackson. The entirety of the film is color-touched still photography and video footage of the actual war paired with a soundtrack of survivor interviews conducted decades later with British soldiers.
The Silent Mountain, 2014 film by Ernst Gossner about the Italian-Austrian conflict in the Dolomites, set in the bilingual/bicultural Trentino, where men in one family are drafted into opposite armies and fight each other for their home turf.
My very specific bibliography
Gadda
Meneghetti, Nazzareno. Montepiana. 1935.
Meneghetti, Nazzareno. Un Battaglione Sacro. 1929.
Raffaelli, Enzo. Quei Fanti Biancoazzuri… Dalle tre cime di Lavaredo agli abissi dell'Adriatico. Con il 55º reggimento sui campi di battaglia della grande guerra. 2008.
Salsa