‘Eleganza’ (‘Elegance’) by Goffredo Parise, translated by James Marcus

In the early 1970s, Goffredo Parise wrote a series of brief stories/vignettes for Il Corriere della Sera, later collected in two books titled ‘Sillabari’. Each of the stories depicts a human feeling and has a one-word title; the stories are in alphabetical order: ‘Affetto’ (‘Affection’), ‘Amore’ (‘Love’), and so on. The atmosphere is highly enigmatic. The dialogues are reduced to a minimum, the characters tend to aphasia, while their gaze takes on a central importance. Parise’s prose reads as if it came from another world, and this otherworldly, meditative touch is even more surprising considering that he was a war correspondent.

‘Eleganza’ (‘Elegance’) is a masterpiece of subtle intimate perceptions. The main character meets an old friend for dinner in an elegant palace. The two have grown apart over the years, they don’t share much anymore, and their conversation is stiff. But the old friend is with his new girlfriend; the main character is fascinated with the elegance of the couple, and with the sophisticated atmosphere of the place where they are. This seems just enough for him to ignore the feeling of awkwardness for the situation. But then two other strangers enter the room, breaking the fragile atmosphere, and “elegance flew away in the Roman sky.”

First published in Sillabario No.1, Einaudi, 1972 / Abecedary, Northwestern University Press, 1999

‘Lui e io’ (‘He and I’) by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Dick Davis

These days, many Italian (female) authors seem to be discovered or re-discovered thanks to the “Elena Ferrante effect”. We couldn’t imagine two authors more different than Ferrante and Natalia Ginzburg, but, regardless of the reasons, we are happy for the recent rediscovery of Ginzburg’s seminal work in the English-speaking world, where her books are having a period of new popularity.

Little Virtues is something between a collection of short stories and a collection of personal essays; one of our favourite pieces in the book is ‘He and I’, a delicately ironic recount of the author’s life with her second husband, Gabriele Baldini, who was also a writer. The piece is at times funny, at times melancholic; it is a quintessential example of Ginzburg’s distinctive voice, intimate and intelligent, graceful and deep, and able to observe everyday life and human relationships from an astonishingly original perspective.

First published in Le piccole virtù, Einaudi, 1962 / The Little Virtues, Daunt Books, 2018

‘La sirena’ (‘The siren’) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, translated by Stephen Twilley

This short story was the last work the author completed before his death. Like Tomasi di Lampedusa’s famous masterpiece, the historical novel The Leopard, ‘The Siren’ was published only after his death; and, like The Leopard, it is a meditation on the past and the passage of time. What makes this beautiful story stand apart, though, is its streak of romanticism and eroticism, and its heartbreaking mixture of realistic and fantastic.

Two men become friends in 1930s Turin; they are both Sicilian-born, and their friendship deepens to the point that the oldest one, renowned classicist Rosario La Ciura, opens up to his friend about his past. He has a story to tell. As a young man, on a wild remote Sicilian beach, he once met the experience of true love. She was sixteen. She had beautiful pale lips. And she was a siren. The memory of that impossible love will haunt Rosario for his entire life.

First published in I racconti, Feltrinelli, 1961. Collected in The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, edited by Jhumpa Lahiri, 2019

‘Il visconte dimezzato’ (‘The Cloven Viscount’) by Italo Calvino, translated by Archibald Colquhoun

Did we mention that we love Italo Calvino? We couldn’t resist including in this anthology another of his stories. ‘The Cloven Viscount’ tells of Viscount Medardo, who is bisected by a Turkish cannonball during the Crusades; when his two halves come back to his homeland, walking around independently from each other, one reveals to be the kind half of the viscount, while the other terrifies everyone.

When this longish short story appeared at the start of the 1950s, Calvino was criticised for abandoning the realism of his early writing. Later he revealed that the story had developed from a visual image that he saw in his mind – the image of a man split in two halves. But more than with a moral good/evil division, this splitting had to do with a feeling of being incomplete and the impossibility of feeling whole, of being everything that one would like to be. This novella includes one of our favourite literary quotes: “Alle volte uno si crede incompleto ed è soltanto giovane.” (“Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.”)

First published by Einaudi, 1952 / collected in Our Ancestors, Vintage, 1992

‘Postoristoro’ (‘The Station Bar’) by Pier Vittorio Tondelli, translated by Emery

The 1970s were an eventful decade everywhere, but in Italy they really were a time of extremes. Student movements, counterculture, mass strikes and protests dominated especially the last part of the decade, and had their epicentre in Bologna, where in 1977 tanks where deployed to disperse student protests in the streets. Bologna was also a main centre for the Italian creative avant garde movements, and for the feminist and gay movements. It was a time of radical contradictions, full of energy but also dark sides, including political terrorism and a devastating epidemic of heroin addictions.

There, in the middle of this, was a young student named Pier Vittorio Tondelli. When he published his first collection of short stories in 1980, he didn’t know he was set to become the most iconic Italian author of his generation. His book was put on trial for “blasphemy” – one of the last cases of censorship in Italy – officially because of the too realistic dialogue, full of swearing and profanities, but more likely because of its depiction of gay sex. “Postoristoro”, the opening story of the book, culminates with a young woman injecting heroin in a friend’s erect penis: it sounds crude but in the story it comes, in fact, as a nearly-poetic act of desperation and love.

Tondelli died too soon at the age of 36, but left a mark on generations of Italian readers.

First published in Altri libertini, Feltrinelli, 1980. Collected in The Quality of Light: Modern Italian Short Stories, Serpent’s Tail, 1993, edited by Ann & Michael Caesar

‘Lettera ai cittadini sovietici nell’anniversario della rivoluzione’ (‘Letter to the Soviet Citizens on the Anniversary of the Revolution’) by Davide Orecchio

In his collection of stories published in 2017, Davide Orecchio recounts the Russian Revolution from unusual, uchronic and alternative-history perspectives. Each story is a piece of fictional history with a central real character in it, who is somehow connected with the Russian Revolution. The language is extremely poetic, baroque, quite unique in the Italian contemporary literary scene. In Letter to the Soviet Citizens on the Anniversary of the Revolution, the author imagines Rosa Luxemburg still alive in 1947, and president of a land sprawling from Berlin to Moscow; in the story she sends to her citizens, now living in peace in a sort of utopia, a letter to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Revolution. What is briefly described, with simple brushes and touches, are thirty years of alternative European history – what could have happened if peace and thought were chosen over war and rivalry. The closing remarks of the letter are so touching that the first time we read them we had to stop, look at the sky and think “what if things had indeed gone that way?”

We felt like the citizens of the Rosa Luxemburg’s land: we get out of our houses to go to work, for another day of our lives, and we feel moderately happy, happy enough, which is as happy as we should be.

First published in Mio Padre la Rivoluzione, Minimum Fax, 2017

‘Sirene’ (‘Sirens’) by Laura Pugno

We love Laura Pugno’s writing. We seriously love it. This is why we have invited her to the festival this year, for a panel discussion with French author Olivia Rosenthal, discussing their literary “untameable creatures”. Pushing the boundaries of realism, Pugno tells powerful stories of female characters and freedom. In her novella ‘Sirens’, first published in 2007, the female characters are – indeed – sirens, but the setting and the atmosphere are radically different from Tomasi di Lampedusa’s classic story. Here, we are in a futuristic Japan. Sirens are trafficked by the yakuza, kept in “breeding tanks”, slaughtered for their meat or sold to brothels. Human-mermaid sex (or rather, rape) is common and as brutal as you can imagine. As a book blogger described it, the story is “dystopia, but with mermaids”. Then something unexpected happens – but we will not spoil it, as we hope that sooner or later this story will become available in English.

When we first read Pugno’s novella, we had that rare and yet very distinctive feeling – this story came from Italy, yes, but it seemed to come from another world. We love it when a story has that alien, beyond-genre feel to it. We can’t wait to hear Laura Pugno at the festival.

First published by Einaudi, 2007

‘The First Sally (A) or Trurl’s Electronic Bard’ by Stanisław Lem, translated by Michael Kandel

Pulling together my own personal anthology of short stories made me think for the first time in a really long time about the world literature textbook I had in my first year of high school, which is when I first started reading literature from a lot of different places and not just those interminable books about boys and their dogs they make you read in middle school (Where the Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller). It was in this textbook, which I loved, that I came across Stanislaw Lem, through his story ‘The First Sally (A) or Trurl’s Electronic Bard’. I thought it was so hilarious that I immediately borrowed The Cyberiad from the bookstore where I worked. (I was surprised they had it, because it was a bookstore in a suburban mall full of Oprah’s picks and true crime and Christian books.) I was more into the absurd as a teenager than I am now, but I have a lot of nostalgia for the adventures of Trurl and Klapaucius, two robotic engineers who go on adventures across the universe. And literature-writing machines, the subject of this story, have been on my mind since I read John Seabrook’s piece in the Oct 14 New Yorker, ‘The Next Word: Where will predictive text take us?’

First published in Polish in 1965. First published in English in The Cyberiad – Fables for the Cybernetic Age, Secker and Warburg, 1975. Currently available from Penguin Modern Classics, 2014

‘Spider Lilies’ by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by Juliet Winter Carpenter / ‘Night Journey’ by Taeko Kono, translated by Lucy North

If we’re continuing with the autobiographical thread for now—which we are because I am doing this the day before it’s meant to be sent out to you, showing I haven’t changed much from my high-school self—then here are some Japanese short stories, because I taught English in Japan for two years after college. I had read Murakami in middle school, encouraged by a Russian friend just as zany, who had the most fun and drunken bat mitzvah I had ever been to, and we had to take two languages at my high school, so I took French and Japanese. I tried reading Murakami untranslated a few times, but I could never be sure if I was reading correctly and there really was a talking cat or a vanishing woman or if I was getting my verbs and subjects wrong. It wasn’t until much later that I read work by Japanese women writers like these two stories. Both are creepy in their own way – Hiroko Oyamada’s ‘Spider Lilies’ is about the deceit that lies beneath the surface of family stories, and Taeko Kono’s ‘Night Journey’ is the story of a couple who are on their way to visit another couple when their evening takes a strange turn.

‘Spider Lilies’ first published in English in 2014 in Granta 127: Japan, April 2014 and available for subscribers to read online here.

‘Night Journey’ originally published in Japanese in 1963. First published in English in Toddler Hunting, New Directions, 1996, and in a revised edition, 2018

‘The Red-Headed Miss Daintreys’ by Rosamond Lehmann

Not sure how long this story-of-my-life-through-short-stories is going to last, but the author of the next story is one I discovered while writing my doctoral dissertation on how abortion is represented in British fiction and film (soon coming to an academic library near you). Rosamond Lehmann’s 1936 The Weather in the Streets was one of the most fantastic things I read during my dissertation and it’s always top of my recommendation list. Lehmann wrote mainly novels, but during WWII she wrote some short stories, including this one, and it shares a lot of the concerns of her novels: the deft, economical character sketches, the retrospective structure, the nostalgia for Edwardian Britain.

Collected in The Gypsy’s Baby, Collins, 1946, which has been a Virago Modern Classic and is currently available from Hesperus Press, 2007

‘Joanne Wilson’ by Pat Barker

I started reading a lot more about WWI when I moved to the UK from the US, and that’s how I came across Pat Barker. The Regeneration Trilogy is great, but I also really like her first book, an interlinked series of seven stories, each named for a woman living in a working-class community in the Northeast during the 1970s. She thought it was too depressing and too much about women to be published—she had been trying to write “middle-class novels of manners” — and it took her ten years to find a publisher (go Virago!) even with the encouragement of Angela Carter, who told her “If they can’t sympathise with the women you’re creating, then sod their fucking luck.” It was finally published in 1982. I could choose any one of these seven stories, but I went with the second, ‘Joanne Wilson’, because of its vivid depiction of factory life.

First published in Union Street, Virago 1982. It has since been published as a Virago Modern Classic and in collected in a combined edition with Blow Your House Down by Picador, 1999

‘The Isabel Fish’ by Julie Orringer

The first novel I ever reviewed was The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, and I did not love it because all the challenges in the novel arose from the situation, not the psyches of the main characters themselves. But I did like her recent novel, The Flight Portfolio, and also her first book, the short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which included some beautifully-told stories from the perspective of children, like this one, in which a girl tries to get over bereavement by learning to swim.

First published in the Yale Review, Vol 91, Issue 3, July 2003. Collected in How to Breathe Underwater, Knopf 2003, which is now available as a Vintage Contemporary, 2005

‘Sultana’s Dream’ by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

I came across this short story while doing my PhD and thought it was fascinating to read a SF story about a society that flips patriarchy on its head, making women dominant while the men are locked up in purdah, and even more fascinating still since it’s like a less eugenicist version of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland but came out in 1905, ten years earlier. And the amazing women in this story invent solar power and helicopters. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain was a Muslim feminist and social reformer.

First published in English in The Indian Ladies’ Magazine, 1905, and available here

‘Kew Gardens’ by Virginia Woolf

I taught ‘Kew Gardens’ to undergrads and even they liked it. I’ll just quote it:

Even when she wondered what sort of tea they gave you at Kew, he felt that something loomed up behind her words, and stood vast and solid behind them; and the mist very slowly rose and uncovered–O, Heavens, what were those shapes?–little white tables, and waitresses who looked first at her and then at him; and there was a bill that he would pay with a real two shilling piece, and it was real, all real, he assured himself, fingering the coin in his pocket, real to everyone except to him and to her; even to him it began to seem real; and then–but it was too exciting to stand and think any longer, and he pulled the parasol out of the earth with a jerk and was impatient to find the place where one had tea with other people, like other people.

First published privately in 1919, then in the collection Monday or Tuesday, The Hogarth Press, 1921. Widely available since, including as a standalone edition from Kew Publications, 2015, and in the Selected Short Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000