A Music Behind the Wall: Selected Stories, Volume 2

by Anna Maria Ortese, Henry Martin (Translator)

To enter Anna Maria Ortese's short stories is to surrender to a strangely intimate voice and a disturbing vision of enchantment: a realm of the imagination just beyond the senses, yet grounded to life in all its complexity. Her deceptively forthright tales include a chance encounter with a 112-year-old pixie, a walk
through Jesus and Mary's celestial flower garden, a midnight journey through the Milan train station, a haunting tale of forbidden love, a sea voyage to Tripoli, and the end of the world. Ortese intertwines elements of the fantastic with autobiography, imbues documentary realism with devastating undertones of
social satire, and addresses personal griefs in apocalyptic dreams. Widely considered one of the most important Italian writers of the century, Ortese
published, in addition to several major novels, seven fiction collections between 1937 and her death in 1998 at the age of 84. The ten stories in this second volume
of brilliant English language translations by Henry Martin further demonstrate why critics compare her works of "magic realism" with Kafka and Poe, Hamsun, Borges and Gabriel Garc

222 pages, Hardcover

Published May 15, 1998

About the author

Born in Rome in the year 1914, Anna Maria Ortese grew up in southern Italy (primarily Naples) and in Lybia, the fifth of nine children of a soldier's family often short on money. Like many poor girls of her generation, Ortese left school at age thirteen, initially with the idea of studying (and then, teaching) music in mind; until the discovery of literary romanticism, particularly the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Katherine Mansfield, and her need for creative self-expression made her turn to writing.

She eventually studied with Massimo Bontempelli, proponent of the "magical realism" she herself would soon make her own as well, and in 1937 published her first collection of short stories, entitled "Angelici Dolori." Her work garnered her native Italy's most prestigious literary prizes (most notably, the 1953 Premio Viareggio for the collection of stories "Il Mare Non Bagna Napoli" – published in English under the title "The Bay Is Not Naples" - and the 1967 Premio Strega for the novel "Poveri e Semplici"), and she is considered one of the foremost Italian writers of the 20th century.