Words in Commotion and Other Stories
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Tommaso Landolfi, Italy's most extraordinarily idiosyncratic storyteller, has been compared to Kafka, Joyce, Borges, and Poe; his fictions are a striking blend of fact and fantasy, the disturbing and the playful. This wonderful collection of twenty-four stories is unpredictable, funny, bizarre, and, especially, imaginative: a writer innocently brushes his teeth and out spill dozens of mutinous words, demanding new meanings; a man pursues a perverse fantasy inspired by the sight of a woman's breast; a struggling poet discovers, to his horror, that he has been composing in a nonexistent language. Sharply observed details, startling whimsy, and a subtle seriousness inform these tales that test the boundaries of language and invite us to view existence in a different light.
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Titles within:
- Introduction: Precision and Chance, by Italo Calvino
- The Labrenas
- Chicken Fate
- Two Wakes
- The Kiss
- Gogol's Wife
- The Werewolf
- The Provincial Night
- Maria Guiseppa
- Uxoricide
- The Test
- The Ampulla
- A Woman's Breast
- The Eternal Province
- Prefigurations: Prato
- Literary Prize
- The Grace of God
- Prize in Spite Of
- Rain
- The Eclipse
- The Gnat
- An Abstract Concept
- Personaphilologicaldramatic Conference with Implications
- Dialogue of Greater Systems
- Words in Commotion
- Translators Afterword
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