Stories with Pictures

by Antonio Tabucchi

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Pub Date 30 Mar 2021 | Archive Date 5 Mar 2021

Archipelago

General Fiction (Adult) | Literary Fiction

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Description

A masterful collection about intimacy, loneliness, and time, each inspired by different works of art, spanning the entirety of the great Italian writer's career.

In Stories with Pictures, Antonio Tabucchi responds to photographs, drawings, and paintings from his dual homelands of Italy and Portugal, among other European countries. The stories in this collection spring forth from the shadows of Tabucchi's imagination, as he steps into worlds just hidden from view. From inscrutable masks of pre-Columbian gods, stamps of bright parrots and postcars of yellow cities, portraits of devilish Portuguese nuns, the way to these remote landscapes appear like a "train emerging from a thick curtain of heat." As we peer through the curtain, what we find on the other side rings distinctly human, a world charged with melancholic longing for time gone by. "Sight, hearing, voice, word" Tabucchi writes, "this flow isn't in one direction, the current is back and forth." Reading these stories, one feels the pendulum current, and the desire in this remarkable author to hold the real in the surreal.

Advance Praise

• Tabucchi's stories...drip with longing and too, with a dreamlike quality that is tempting to characterize as magical realism. In these stories, the world as we know it and its author's "shadow world" are often indistinguishable - to the reader's great benefit. - Thrillist, Best Books of 2019

• Tabucchi is a master of the form in imagination, beauty, scope, and scale even at the tiniest calibration. - Kerri Arsenault, Lit Hub

• [Tabucchi's] prose creates a deep, near-profound and sometimes heart-wrenching nostalgia and constantly evokes the pain of recognizing the speed of life's passing which everyone knows but few have the strength to accept...Wonderfully thought provoking and beautiful. - Alan Cheuse, NPR's All Things Considered

• There is in Tabucchi's stories the touch of the true magician, who astonishes us by never trying too hard for his subtle, elusive, and remarkable effects. - The San Francisco Examiner

• In her deft, lyrical translation, Elizabeth Harris captures the multi-layered complexity of Tabucchi's prose, from Joycean rapture to darker musings, in a novel that is once a tribute to experimental narrative and a meditation on Contemporary Italy. - Michael F. Moore, Chair of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund

"Tabucchi's writing is, above all, an artifice, a self-referring stem whose decodification demands a previous knowledge of the intellectual and artistic coordinates of the writer. Tabucchi is one of the most careful observers and original interpreters of the narrative and esthetic tendencies which emerged in Europe during the last two decades." - Anthony Costantini, World Literature Today

"Tabucchi is always a disturbing writer. He understands that life (and art) is filled with plots, omens, secrets." - Irving Malin, Review of Contemporary Fiction

• Tabucchi's stories...drip with longing and too, with a dreamlike quality that is tempting to characterize as magical realism. In these stories, the world as we know it and its author's "shadow...