Title:
The bewitched bourgeois : fifty stories / Dino Buzzati ; edited and translated from the Italian with an introduction by Lawrence Venuti.
ISBN:
9781681378671
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Publication Information:
New York, NY : The New York Review of Books, 2025.
Physical Description:
xiii, 328 pages ; 21 cm.
Contents:
Our moment (1936) -- Seven floors (1937) -- The shadow of the South (1939) -- The seven messengers (1939) -- Personal escort (1941) -- The bewitched bourgeois (1942) -- An interrupted story (1942) -- Prank (1944) -- The end of the world (1944) -- Panic at La Scala (1948) -- Appointment with Einstein (1950) -- The saucer has landed (1950) -- The survivor's story (1950) -- The caliph awaits us (1950) -- The collapse of the Baliverna (1951) -- The five brothers (1951) -- The time machine (1952) -- The gnawing worm (1952) -- The walls of Anagoor (1954) -- The prohibited word (1956) -- Human greatness (1956) -- The plague (1956) -- The writer's secret (1958) -- The late mistaken (1958) -- The flying carpet (1958) -- The wind (1959) -- Quiz at the prison (1959) -- Confidential (1960) -- The Colomber (1961) -- The jacket (1962) -- The ubiquitous (1962) -- The elevator (1962) -- The falling girl (1963) -- The Eiffel Tower (1964) -- The scandal on Via Sesostri (1965) -- Kafka's houses (1965) -- The bogeyman (1967) -- The scriveners (1967) -- What will happen on October 12th? (1967) -- Elephantiasis (1967) -- The count's wife (1967) -- A difficult evening (1969) -- Alienation (1969) -- A boring letter (1970) -- Stories in tandem (1970) -- A solicitous young man (1971) -- Stefano Caberlot, writer (1974) -- Alfredo Brilli, accountant (1975) -- Wladimiro Ferraris, chief customs inspector (1985) -- Why (1985).
Summary:
"Poe and Kafka meet The Twilight Zone in this anthology of fifty fantastical tales, many of them reflecting the political and social energies of the time, by an Italian master of the short story. The modern Italian writer Dino Buzzati wrote a huge body of short fiction, several hundred pieces, spanning a forty-year period. They offer a remarkable inventory of fantastic premises and tropes, international in the reach of their geographical settings, at times commenting on Italian issues but usually reflecting the worldwide horrors, catastrophes, and fanaticisms that characterized the twentieth century. A journalist for much of his life, Buzzati was adept at turning current events into fantasies that depicted social and political nightmares. He challenged the ideological complacencies of his era in accessible stories that solicit the reader's vicarious response, mixing sentiment, humor, and tragedy. Here Poe and Kafka meet Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. Lawrence Venuti presents a retrospective anthology that ranges from Buzzati's first publications to texts written as he was dying of cancer. Buzzati's own book-length selections are sampled, so that previously untranslated stories join new versions of classics like "Seven Floors," an absurdist tale of a patient fatally caught in hospital bureaucracy; "Panic at La Scala," where, fearful of a left-wing revolution, the Milanese bourgeoisie are imprisoned at the opera house; and "Appointment with Einstein," in which the scientist encounters a gas station attendant who is the Angel of Death. Venuti's crisp translations re-create Buzzati's technique of making the fantastic seem frighteningly plausible, establishing unreal worlds that disrupt dominant notions of what is real. The Bewitched Bourgeois is a definitive gathering of Buzzati's work in short fiction"-- Provided by publisher.
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OCLC Number:
on1418888191
Availability:
~0
