Manyebook

Words in Commotion and Other Stories

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

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 304
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 978-0-14-009477-0
  • EAN
  • 9780140094770
  • Genres
  • fiction, fantasy, italy
  • Release date
  • 1988