“These marvelous stories inhabit a bewitched space. Borges and Poe are evident, but more importantly Buzzati’s alchemical blend of the known world and some other, invading realm looks forward to the time of Stephen King, and Robert Aickman, and Shirley Jackson. These are tales that stick to your ribs.” —John Darnielle

THE BEWITCHED BOURGEOIS

FIFTY STORIES

Dino Buzzati
Translated from the Italian by Lawrence Venuti

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.

“Buzzati’s short-form fiction seems perfectly suited to our time of TikToks, tweets and online attention spans…. Pick up this book, and read one story each week…. Recreate the experience of those Italian newspaper readers who got to experience Buzzati’s seductive skills regularly. One at a time is enough because the stories are so tightly packed they continue to unfold in your mind after you finish. With 50 stories here, they will last you almost a year. Then you can go back to the beginning and start again.” —John Self, The Times (UK)

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For three days only, The Bewitched Bourgeois is available at 25% off along with three other books by Dino Buzzati:

THE SINGULARITY
Translated by Anne Milano Appel

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THE STRONGHOLD
Translated by Lawrence Venuti

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