3 Ergebnisse.

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 t...

To enter Anna Maria Ortese's short stories is to surrender to a strangely intimate voice and a disturbing vision of enchantment: a realm of the imagination just beyond the senses, yet grounded to life in all its complexity. Her deceptively forthright tales include a chance encounter with a 112-year-old pixie, a walk through Jesus and Mary's celestial flower garden, a midnight journey through the Milan train station, a haunting tale of forbidde...

This first volume of a planned two-volume collection could almost serve as a primer on old-fashioned Italian short fiction. Ortese (The Iguana, 1987) drifts from one dreamlike subject to the next in these cerebral and enjoyable stories, most related in the same educated, uninvolved first-person voice. The narrator of "The Submerged Continent" describes a wealthy family from Naples with three daughters who may or may not be real. "Torture" has ...