Fiction. Seventy years after their publication in Italy and forty years after Bontempelli's death, these short stories are separated from us by a century's epochal transformations, yet they are stories so deeply imagined and so eminently readable, so alive with grace and irony and piercing intelligence, that they transcend time and place and speak directly to our most contemporary anxieties.

Richly imbued with imagination, charming in their irony, and eminently readable, The Boy with Two Mothers and The Life and Death of Adria and Her Children are alive with a subtle "magic," presenting unforgettable characters across a canvas of European socio-political upheaval. These are classic stories which will haunt the mind long after their reading. In each, Bontempelli fulfills what he believed was the writer's ultimate goal: "to tell a dream as if it were reality and reality as if it were a dream."