Condition: Acceptable. Please see the images for more details. May show signs of wear such as:
• Shelf wear or scuffing on the cover
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Cover art: Dino Buzzati, Untitled, 1971
Blurb: “AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINAL
"These marvelous stories inhabit a bewitched space.
Borges and Poe are evident, but more importantly Buzzati's alchemical blend of the known world and some other, invading realm looks forward to the time of Stephen King, and Robert Aickman, and Shirley Jackson. These are tales that stick to your ribs."
-JOHN DARNIELLE
Dino Buzzati was a prolific writer of stories, publishing several hundred over the course of forty years. Many of them are fantastic-reminiscent of Kafka and Poe in their mixture of horror and absurdity, and at the same time anticipating the alternate realities of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror in their chilling commentary on the barbarities, catastrophes, and fanaticisms of the twentieth century.
In The Bewitched Bourgeois, Lawrence Venuti has put together an anthology that showcases Buzzati's short fiction from his earliest stories to the ones he wrote in the last months of his life. Some appear in English for the first time, while others are reappearing in Venuti's crisp new versions, such as the much-anthologized "Seven Floors," an absurdist tale of a patient fatally caught in hospital bureaucracy; "Panic at La Scala," in which the Milanese bourgeoisie, fearing a left-wing revolution, find themselves imprisoned in the opera house; and "Appointment with Einstein," where the physicist, stopping at a filling station in Princeton, New Jersey, encounters a gas station attendant who turns out to be the Angel of Death.
"There are very few writers whose stories feel so unique and original that you can't imagine anyone else writing them.
Lawrence Venuti's deft translation of these fifty stories makes it clear that Buzzati is one of these few. Smart, quirky, buoyant and wonderfully absurd, Buzzati is the missing link between Kafka and twenty-first-century fabulism." -BRIAN EVENSON