Every language is a walled entity. English is a particularly fortified one. To step outside the Anglophone world is to grow aware of the near-total domination of the English language when it comes to what is being read and celebrated as literature today. It is a domination that few, at least on the English-speaking side of the border, stop to question. I am aware that my orientation at the moment – to look outside English, and to put forth for consideration what is now overlooked even in Italy – separates me from the literary mainstream both in the Italian- and English-language context. In Italy, I note the overwhelming number of English-language authors prominently displayed in bookshops, and reviewed, each week, in newspapers and magazines; the number of prizes and residencies and festivals designed to host and honour English-language authors in Italy. I myself have been the grateful recipient of such invitations, prizes and residencies. And yet the discrepancy is clear. The fact remains that Italian writers, for good and for ill, for well over a century now, have looked outside their own literature for inspiration, and the tradition of translation out of English, at least on behalf of Italian publishers, is critical, not peripheral, to the literary landscape.

Of these forty stories, sixteen have not been translated into English until now, and nine have been retranslated intentionally for this anthology. The vast majority, I imagine, will be fresh discoveries for English readers. And of these forty authors, a great many have been ignored and thus practically forgotten in Italy as well. Most of the magazines in which they originally appeared no longer exist. There was a period, particularly after the Second World War, when small literary journals, many of them founded by the authors in this anthology, flourished in Italy. Some were short-lived but editorially clamorous. Each represented a hope, a different direction, a new cultural climate or point of view. They put short stories at the forefront. Their presence corresponded to a period of extraordinary literary ferment, and their editors prided themselves on promoting new, innovative, heterodox voices. They were proof of how individually published short stories, free from the economic machinery of book publishing, are by definition autonomous texts: a source of resistance, a means for creative risk and experimentation. Fortunately, there are still talented young writers in Italy who embrace the short form, and once in a while, in Italy as in other places, a short-story collection creeps on to the shortlist for a major literary prize. Another promising sign is Racconti Edizioni, a Roman publishing house founded in 2016, dedicated exclusively to publishing short-story collections.

Until recently, schools of creative writing were unheard of in Italy. They are beginning to grow in numbers, though they remain independent from academic institutions. The term scrittura creativa (creative writing) and the borrowed term ‘storytelling’ have entered the vocabulary, but their meanings are still largely shrouded in mystery, regarded, rightly, as foreign phenomena. What has happened in the United States and, to a lesser degree, also in Great Britain – the reign of the Master of Fine Arts and the calculated marriage between art and academy – has not yet been sanctioned in Italy, and as a result, most Italian writers still have, by and large, a different centre of gravity, either as journalists or scholars or editors, or, in some cases, all of the above. The separation between writers and publishers is less rigid in Italy, and the editorial milieu, more intimate, less corporate than its American counterpart, is an engrossing story in and of itself. Tracing its evolution and dynamics is fundamental to understanding how and why so many short stories were written in Italy in the course of the previous century, and in such a rich array of styles. The Chronology at the end of this volume operates on two tracks: providing background on the historical and political events that accompanied these authors’ lives, while paying attention to the country’s publishing history as well.