In this magical novel a count from Milan stumbles upon a desolate community of lost noblemen on an uncharted island off the coast of Portugal. When he discovers, to his astonishment, that their ill-treated servant is in fact a maiden iguana, and then proceeds to fall in love with her, the reader is given a fantastic tale of tragic love and delusion that ranks among the most affecting in contemporary literature. "The reptilian servant is only the first in a series of fantastic touches that tansform the narrative into a satiric fable dense with the echoes of Shakespeare's 'Tempest' and Kafka's 'Metamorphosis.' . . . The Iguana is a superb performance.""€"New York Times Book Review

Classic short stories set in Naples in the 1940s and 50s that inspired Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels

In 18th century Naples, three visitors from Flanders vie for the hand of a glovemaker's daughter. One is a merchant, a second is a duke and a third a sculptor. All are intrigued be her mysterious sorrow.

Anna Maria Ortese: Celestial Geographies features a selection of essays by established Ortese scholars that trace her remarkable creative trajectory.

A collection of surrealistic stories by a late Italian writer. Typical is The Villa, in which a man buys his mother a villa in heaven so she can have a place to entertain.

Classic and contemporary Christmas stories by great writers from Boccaccio to Strega Prize winner Anna Maria Ortese to Nobel laureate Grazia Deledda. The third in the very popular Very Christmas series, this volume brings together the best Italian Christmas stories of all time in a vibrant collection featuring classic tales and contemporary works. With writing that dates from the Renaissance to the present day, from Boccaccio to Pirandello, as well as Anna Maria Ortese, Natalia Ginzburg, and Grazia Deledda, these literary gems are filled with ancient churches, trains whistling through the countryside, steaming tureens, plates piled high with pasta, High Mass, dashed hopes, golden crucifixes, flowing wine, shimmering gifts, and plenty of style. Like everything the Italians do, this is Christmas with its very own verve and flair, the perfect literary complement to a Buon Natale italiano. Includes stories by: Luigi Pirandello ·• Camillo Boito • Matilde Serao • Anna Maria Ortese • Andrea De Carlo • Grazia Deledda • Giovanni Verga • Giovanni Boccaccio • Natalia Ginzburg

This collection of thirteen essays brings together Italian and American scholars to present a cooperative analysis of the Italian short story, beginning in the fourteenth century with Giovanni Boccaccio and arriving at the twentieth century with Alberto Moravia and Anna Maria Ortese. Throughout the book, the contributors carefully and intentionally unpack and explain the development of the short story genre and demonstrate the breadth of themes – cultural, historical and linguistic – detailed in these narratives. Dedicated to a genre “devoted to lightness and flexibility, as well as quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity,” this collection paints a careful and exacting picture of an important part of both Italian and literary history.

"Since the early 1980s, the novel has been deemed by many Italian women writers to be the most apt vehicle for creating positive images of the future of women. The novel becomes the space for confession, while at the same time allowing greater expressive freedom. There is no longer one voice for the ""feminine role"" and, by creating heroines who are also intellectuals, these authors offer their readers models of alternative versions of self. This study is a partial inventory of the new women's narrative and aims to provide a broad literary framework through which both the general reader and the student can appreciate the characteristics and innovations of contemporary Italian women's fiction. The writers chosen for this study (Ginerva Bompiani, Edith Bruck, Paola Capriolo, Francesca Duranti, Rosetta Loy, Giuliana Morandini, Marta Morazzoni, Anna Maria Ortese, Sandra Petrignanni, Fabrizia Ramondino, Elisabetta Rasy and Francesca Sanvitale) have achieved both critical acclaim and public recognition and their texts show the richness of voices, topics and structures in Italian women's writing today."

Luigi Pirandello is best known in the English-speaking world for his radical challenge to traditional Western theatre with plays such as Six Characters in Search of an Author. But theatre is just one manifestation of his experiments with language which led to a remarkable collection of novels,short stories, and essays as well as his work for a film industry then in its infancy. This study, which is based on the view that Pirandello's writings are most fruitfully discussed in a European context, takes as its starting-point the author's belief in the primacy of the literary character in acreative process which is necessarily conflictual.The book argues that all Pirandello's characters are engaged in a continual performance which transcends the genre distinction between narrative and dramatic forms. In this performance it is the spoken word in which the characters invest most heavily as they struggle to sustain an identity of theirown, tell their life-stories, and assert themselves before their most prominent antagonist, the author himself.

'Rich. . . eclectic. . . a feast' Telegraph This landmark collection brings together forty writers that reflect over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradition, from the birth of the modern nation to the end of the twentieth century. Poets, journalists, visual artists, musicians, editors, critics, teachers, scientists, politicians, translators: the writers that inhabit these pages represent a dynamic cross section of Italian society, their powerful voices resonating through regional landscapes, private passions and dramatic political events. This wide-ranging selection curated by Jhumpa Lahiri includes well known authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante and Luigi Pirandello alongside many captivating new discoveries. More than a third of the stories featured in this volume have been translated into English for the first time, several of them by Lahiri herself.