Stories, by: Giuseppa Tomasi di Lampedusa

During two painful and bitter years of his life (1955-1957), Lampidusa placed alongside the eight chapters of "The Leopard" three stories and an autobiography. Recently, after discovering some original manuscripts, it was possible to subject the texts to a rigorous philological investigation, and some of them, especially "Childhood Memories," gained a cohesive structure that they did not have before. The book "Stories" opens with childhood memories written in the summer of 1955, followed by the story "Joy and the Mosquito," a symbolic story characterized by an ideal style and structure. The most famous story in the collection is "The Siren," written after a trip along the southern coast of Sicily. At the heart of this story, in the boundary between the real and the surreal, we encounter the character of the old Latchura, who, when he was young, fell in love with a mermaid and became unable to love any other woman afterward. The book concludes with the story "The Blind Cats," which is the closest of the four stories to the novel "The Leopard" in essence, although it was written as the first chapter of a novel that was supposed to carry the same name. Number of pages: 270