Short Stories for a Year
The 14 stories selected in this volume evoke sadness, smiles, astonishment, sympathy, reflection on the multifaceted human fate provided by the imagination of a great writer and humanist - the Italian Nobel laureate Luigi Pirandello.
With discerning psychologism, Pirandello depicts a colorful mosaic of fragments of human lives - tragic, comic and tragicomic, paradoxical, grotesque, sometimes absurd, injuring or enlightening, turning fates or killing.
Luigi Pirandello
In Six Characters in Search of an Author – his most familiar play – author and playwright Luigi Pirandello wrote: “We think we understand each other,” and added: “but we never really do.”
Pirandello was born in Sicily in 1867. His widely-known works in prose include the novel The Late Mattia Pascal and the fifteen-volume short story collection, Short Stories for a Year. Articulating the sense of absurd that underlies in human existence, Pirandello titled one of his plays Each in His Own Way, and in another has written: “If only we could see in advance all the harm that can come from the good we think we are doing.”
Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934. He died two years later, in 1936, at the age of 69.
