num_pages: 304
description: 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.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
language: English
title: Words in Commotion and Other Stories
titlecomplete: Words in Commotion and Other Stories
genres: Italian Literature, Italy, Fiction, Short Stories, Fantasy
ratings_count: 63
publisher: Penguin Books Ltd