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.