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  • Published: 24 September 2014
  • ISBN: 9780141192123
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 112
  • RRP: $24.99

The Smell of Hay





A new translation of this haunting collection of short stories that evoke 1930s Ferrara, with an introduction by Ali Smith

Isolated lives and a lost world are evoked in these haunting stories set in the Jewish-Italian community of 1930s Ferrara. A young man's unrequited love; a strange disappearance; a faded hotel; a lonely funfair; the smell of mown hay at the gates of the Jewish Cemetery - these vivid, impressionistic snapshots build a picture of life's brevity and intensity. Part of the sequence including The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and featuring people and places from these novels, The Smell of Hay is told with a voice that is by turns intimate, ironic, elegiac and rueful.

This new translation contains two pieces, added by Bassani to his earlier collection, which have never appeared in English before.

  • Published: 24 September 2014
  • ISBN: 9780141192123
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 112
  • RRP: $24.99

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Praise for The Smell of Hay

Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists

Guardian
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