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