> Skip to content
  • Published: 19 May 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241299852
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 528
  • RRP: $27.99

The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories




Jhumpa Lahiri's rich and varied selection of the greatest Italian writing of the twentieth century, now a Penguin Classics paperback

This landmark collection brings together forty writers that reflect over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradition, from the birth of the modern nation to the end of the twentieth century.

Poets, journalists, visual artists, musicians, editors, critics, teachers, scientists, politicians, translators: the writers that inhabit these pages represent a dynamic cross section of Italian society, their powerful voices resonating through regional landscapes, private passions and dramatic political events.

This wide-ranging selection curated by Jhumpa Lahiri includes well-known authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante and Luigi Pirandello alongside many captivating new discoveries. More than a third of the stories featured in this volume have been translated into English for the first time, several of them by Lahiri herself.

  • Published: 19 May 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241299852
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 528
  • RRP: $27.99

Praise for The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

A fantastically rich - and beautiful - anthology that's teaching me a lot

Chris Power

A feast . . . her choice of 40 authors embraces familiar greats and sows them with fascinating additions . . . they remind us of the short story's playfulness, it's ability to move us with unexpected sharpness while it experiments with voices, styles and boundaries

Julian Evans, Telegraph

Jhumpa Lahiri has pulled off something quite striking here: a literary anthology that sparkles with invention and variety, makes a remarkably convincing case for the vitality of the modern Italian short story and also beguiles, thanks to her sharp-eyed work as editor, compiler and part-translator.

Robert S C Gordon, Literary Review

Taken one by one, each story in this volume is a jewel. Taken all together, the book is a remarkable introduction to Italian literature and a great gift to the English-speaking reader. Remarkable stories from a wide range of writers describe the mundane and the fantastic, the everyday and the sublime.

Kirkus

An enticing collection . . . a remarkable sample of the literary form . . . the tales are by turns startling, moving, intriguing and provocative; they bring melancholy, humour and a dose of the uncanny.

Vilma de Gasperin, TLS

The best anthology of its kind I've read

John Self, Observer