Idealistic young officer Giovanni Drogo is full of determination to serve his country well. But when he arrives at a bleak border station in the Tartar desert, where he is to take a short assignment at Fort Bastiani, he finds the castle manned by veteran soldiers who have grown old without seeing a trace of the enemy. As his length of service stretches from months into years, he continues to wait patiently for the enemy to advance across the desert, for one great and glorious battle . . . Written in 1938 as the world waited for war, and internationally acclaimed since its publication, The Tartar Steppe is a provocative and frightening tale of hope, longing and the terrible sorcery of dreams and desires.

Accomplished in his career but unaccomplished in love, a middle-aged architect is torn apart by his obsession with an enigmatic young woman in this delicately told story of desire and abjection by a titan of Italian literature. Antonio Dorigo is a successful architect in Milan, nearing fifty, who has always been afraid of women. A regular at an upscale brothel for years, he mourns the lack of close female companionship in his life. One afternoon, the madam at the brothel introduces Tonio to “a new girl,” Laide. Tonio sees nothing especially remarkable about her, though it intrigues him that she dances at La Scala and also at a strip club, and yet in a very short time he becomes completely obsessed with her. Laide leads Antonio on, confounds him, uses and humiliates him, treats him tenderly from time to time, lies to him, makes no apologies to him, and he loves her ever more. This helpless and hopeless love, he feels, is what he is, even as it prevents him from ever seeing Laide for who she is. Because Who is she? is the question at the heart of Buzzati’s clear-eyed and darkly comic tale of infatuation. Is A Love Affair a love story or is it a story of anything but love? Buzzati’s novel, with its psychological subtleties, vivid cityscapes, unsettling comedy, and compassion, keeps the reader guessing till the end.

The bears who come down from the solitude of their bleak mountains to invade the land of the humans were magnificent beasts: frank, upstanding, courageous, if somewhat simple-minded, and we feel sure that you will love them and applaud their hard-won victory. But what will happen once they mix with humans? Poems are added into the story.

A glory-starved soldier spends his life awaiting an absent, long-expected enemy in this influential Italian classic of existentialism, now newly translated and with its originally intended title restored. At the start of Dino Buzzati’s The Stronghold, newly commissioned officer Giovanni Drogo has just received his first posting: the remote Fortezza Bastiani. North of this stronghold are impassable mountains; to the south, a great desert; and somewhere out there is the enemy, whose attack is imminent. This is the enemy that Lieutenant Drogo has been sent to draw out of his lair, to defeat once and for all, returning home in triumph. And yet time passes, and where is the enemy? As the soldiers in the fortress await the foretold day of reckoning, they succumb to inertia, and though death occurs, it is not from bravery. Decades pass. A lifetime passes. Drogo, however, still has his lonely vigil to keep. Buzzati is one of the great Italian writers of the twentieth century, renowned for his fantastical imagination and for a touch that is as lyrical as it is light. The Stronghold, previously translated as The Tartar Steppe, is his most celebrated work, a book that has been read as a veiled attack on Mussolini’s fascist militarism, a prophetic allegory of the Cold War, and an existentialist fable. Lawrence Venuti’s new translation reverts to the title that Buzzati originally intended to give his book, and seeks to bring out both the human and the historical dimensions of a story of proven power and poignancy.

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. 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.

“Weird [and] wonderful” stories by a Strega Prize winner with “shades of Fellini, shades of Dickens, shades of the great Italian horror director Mario Bava” (Los Angeles Times). From “The Epidemic,” which traces the gradual effects of a “state influenza” that targets those who disagree with the government, to “The Collapse of the Baliverna,” in which a man puzzles over whether a misstep on his part caused the collapse of a building, to “Seven Floors,” which imagines a sanatorium where patients are housed on each floor according to the gravity of their illness and brilliantly highlights the ominous machinations of bureaucracy, Strega Prize–winning Italian writer Dino Buzzati’s surreal, unsettling tales reckon with the struggle that lies beneath everyday interactions and the sometimes perverse workings of human emotions and desires, and, with wit and pathos, describe the small steps we take as individuals and as a society in our march toward catastrophe. In “twenty riveting stories” (Publishers Weekly), Buzzati brings to vivid life the slow and quietly terrifying collapse of our known everyday world. In stories touched by the fantastical and the strange, and filled with humor, irony, and menace, Catastrophe illuminates the nightmarish side of our ordinary existence, and feels as timely today as ever. “Each of these stories is steeped in terror . . . Judith Landry’s vibrant translations render [Buzzati] at once witty and sinister.” —Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times–bestselling author of The Namesake “Out of a gothic tale . . . Frightening, lyrical, and provocative.” —The New York Times “[A] fantasist and moralist in the vein of Kafka [with] a bold inventive power that shows his kinship with such other unconventional spirits as Poe, Gogol, Borges, Donald Barthelme, and his countryman Italo Calvino.” —Christian Science Monitor “Some of Buzzati’s stories have the delicacy of fairy tales. . . Other stories have the visceral thrust of horror fiction. . . Buzzati’s varied and immensely satisfying stories will appeal to readers receptive to the possibility of the bizarre behind the banal.” —Publishers Weekly “An evocative collection that might pull the rug from under your feet.” —Kirkus Reviews

In this prophetic allegory about artificial intelligence by a renowned figure of twentieth-century Italian literature, a modest university professor becomes involved in a remote and enigmatic project in the middle of the Cold War. At the beginning of Dino Buzzati’s The Singularity, Ermanno Ismani, an unassuming university professor, is summoned by the minister of defense to accept a two-year, top-secret mission at a mysterious research center, isolated from the world among forests, plunging cliffs, and high mountains. What’s he supposed to do there? Not clear. How long will he be there? No saying. Still, Ismani takes the mystifying job and, accompanied by his no-nonsense wife, Elisa, heads to the so-called Experimental Camp of Military Zone 36, wondering whether, in the midst of the Cold War, it’s some sort of nuclear project he’s been assigned to. But no, the colleagues the couple meets on arrival assure them, it’s nothing like that. It’s much, much more powerful. At the center of the research complex is strange, shining, at times murmurous, white wall. Behind it, a deep gorge drops away, full of wires and radio towers and mobile sensors and a host of eccentric structures. A question begins to dawn: Could this be the shape of consciousness itself? And if so, whose? Buzzati's novella of 1960, a pioneering work of Italian science fiction, is published here in a brisk new translation by Anne Milano Appel. In it, Buzzati explores his favorite themes of love and longing while offering a startlingly prescient parable of artificial intelligence.

Stories create a psychological fantasy world that involves a traveling prince, the end of the world, UFOs, a mysterious city, anonymous prisoners, and the supernatural

This is the first account of Giro d''Italia p ublished in English which includes maps and illustrations of the legendary 1949 Tour of Italy. '