Stories with Pictures
  • Published: 1 June 2021
  • ISBN: 9781939810687
  • Imprint: Archipelago
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 300
  • RRP: $59.99

Stories with Pictures

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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.

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.
  • Published: 1 June 2021
  • ISBN: 9781939810687
  • Imprint: Archipelago
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 300
  • RRP: $59.99
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About the author

Antonio Tabucchi

Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa in 1943, where he still lives. His previous fiction includes Little Misunderstandings of No Importance and Indian Nocturne - now a film - which won the Prix Medici Etranger in 1987. Both of these titles are published by Vintage.

Tim Parks, the translator, lives in Italy and has won critical acclaim for his own writing.

Also by Antonio Tabucchi

Pereira Maintains
Little Misunderstandings of No Importance
Message from the Shadows
For Isabel: A Mandala
Tristano Dies
Time Ages in a Hurry
Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico
See all

Praise for Stories with Pictures

  • 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 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