"Pascal, a landowner fallen on hard times and trapped in a miserable marriage, runs away from home and wins a lot of money at the gaming tables in Monte Carlo. Meanwhile a body has been found in the millrace of his village and it is assumed that Pascal has killed himself. Seizing what looks like a chance to create a new life, he travels to Rome under an assumed name and struggles to invent a different identity which he can inhabit. He fails, returns home, finds his wife has remarried and has to act out the role of being as it were a living ghost. All these tragic events are recounted with verve and wit and comes across clearly in Simborowski's spirited translation from the Italian."Robert Nye in The Guardian

Masterly stories include "Little Hut," "With Other Eyes," "A Voice," "Citrons from Italy," "A Character's Tragedy," six more. English translations.

A young wife in a nineteenth-century Sicilian village, Marta is deeply in love with her husband Rocco and pregnant with his child. But when Rocco discovers a letter written to Marta by a would-be suitor, he falsely accuses her of infidelity and banishes her from their home. Soon the whole village turns against the supposed adulteress, setting in motion a series of tragic events that culminates in the loss of Marta’s family home and business, as well as the deaths of her father and newborn child. Plunged into poverty and treated as a social leper, with practically nothing else to lose, Marta is determined to claw her way back into a society bent on excluding her.    The Outcast is an early masterwork from Nobel Prize–winning Italian author Luigi Pirandello that combines elements of Zolaesque naturalism with emerging modernist aesthetics. This fresh English translation, the first in nearly one hundred years, showcases Pirandello’s deft play with language and his use of irony.  

In this meeting of two of the twentieth century's greatest playwrights. Tom Stoppard has reinvigorated Luigi Pirandello's masterpiece of madness and sanity. After a fall from his horse, an Italian aristocrat believes he is the obscure medieval German emperor Henry IV. After twenty years of living this royal illusion, his beloved appears with a noted psychiatrist to shock the madman back to sanity. Their efforts expose that for the past twelve years the nobleman has in fact been sane. With his mask of madness unveiled, the aristocrat launches an offensive to deflect their unwanted attention. While Pirandello's characters race linguistically about in Stoppardian dervishes, battling for the upper hand--and the greatest laughs--one question emerges: What constitutes sanity?

An Italian nobleman falls from his horse during a pageant. When he comes round, he believes he's the medieval German emperor, King Henry IV. For twenty years he lives this illusion but today a plot is being hatched to shock him out of this 'madness' and into the twenty-first century. Pirandello's Henry IV, in Tom Stoppard's new version, premiered at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in May 2004.

Originally published in Italian in 1915, "Shoot! "is one of the first novels to take as its subject the heady world of early motion pictures. Based on the absurdist journals of fictional Italian camera operator Serafino Gubbio, "Shoot!" documents the infancy of film in Europe--complete with proto-divas, laughable production schedules, and cost-cutting measures with priceless effects---and offers a glimpse of the modern world through the camera's lens.
"Shoot!, "presented here in its 1927 English translation, is a classic example of Nobel Prize-winning Sicilian playwright Luigi Pirandello's (1867-1936) literary talent and genius for blurring the line between art and reality. From the film studio Kosmograph, Pirandello's Gubbio steadily winds the crank of his camera by day and scribbles with his pen by night, revealing the world both mundane and melodramatic that unfolds in front of his camera. Through Gubbio's narrative--saturated with fantasy and folly--Pirandello grapples with the philosophical implications of modernity. Like much of Pirandello's work, "Shoot!" parodies human weaknesses, drawing attention to the themes of isolation and madness as emerging tendencies in the modern world.
Enhanced by new critical commentaries, "Shoot!" is an entertaining caricature, capturing early twentieth-century Italian filmmaking and revealing its truths as only a parody can.

This unique selection of plays by Luigi Pirandello contains some of his best-known works, such as Six Characters in Search of an Author - an absurdist piece in which the characters, actors and Pirandello himself interact during the rehearsal of a fictional play within the play - and Henry IV - a tragicomic tale of a man who falls from a horse and believes himself to be the eponymous Holy Roman Emperor. Preoccupied with the nature of truth and delusion, and treading dangerously on the borderline between sanity and madness, Pirandello's plays are a daring exploration of human actions and the dark motives lying behind them, and the culmination of the naturalistic school of theatre inaugurated by authors such as Ibsen and Chekhov.

A masterful collection by a literary giant of the past century, rendered by one of our most esteemed Italian translators Regarded as one of Europe's great modernists, Pirandello was also a master storyteller, a fine observer of the drama of daily life with a remarkable sense of the crushing burdens of class, gender, and social conventions. Set in the author's birthplace of Sicily, where the arid terrain and isolated villages map the fragile interior world of his characters, and in Rome, where modern life threatens centuries-old traditions, these original stories are sun baked with the deep lore of Italian folktales. In "The Jar," a broken earthenware pot pits its owner, a quarrelsome landholder, against a clever inventor of a mysterious glue. "The Dearly Departed" tells the story of a young widow and her new husband on their honeymoon, haunted at every turn by the sly visage of the deceased. The scorned lover, the despondent widow, the intransigent bureaucrat, the wretched peasant-Pirandello's characters expose the human condition in all its fatalism, injustice, and raw beauty. For lovers of Calvino and Pasolini, these picturesque stories preserve a memory of an Italy long gone, but one whose recurring concerns still speak to us today.

Mattia Pascal endures a life of drudgery in a provincial town. Then, providentially, he discovers that he has been declared dead. Realizing he has a chance to start over, to do it right this time, he moves to a new city, adopts a new name, and a new course of life--only to find that this new existence is as insufferable as the old one. But when he returns to the world he left behind, it's too late: his job is gone, his wife has remarried. Mattia Pascal's fate is to live on as the ghost of the man he was.
An explorer of identity and its mysteries, a connoisseur of black humor, Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello is among the most teasing and profound of modern masters. "The Late Mattia Pascal," here rendered into English by the outstanding translator William Weaver, offers an irresistible introduction to this great writer's work

In February 1925, the 58-year-old world-famous playwright Luigi Pirandello met Marta Abba, an unknown, beautiful actress less than half his age, and fell in love with her. She was to become, until his death in December 1936, not only his confidante but also his inspiring muse and artistic collaborator, helping him in his plans to reform Italian theater under the Fascist regime. Pirandello's love for the young actress was neither a literary infatuation nor a form of fatherly affection, but rather an unfulfilled, desperate passion that secretly consumed him during the last decade of his life. Bitterly disillusioned by the conditions of the theatrical world in Italy, Pirandello and Abba shared a dream of going abroad to earn their fortune and returning to Italy with the means to establish a national theater dedicated to high artistic standards. In March 1929, when Marta finally yielded to family pressure and left Pirandello alone in Berlin to revive her Italian stage career and to end rumors over their involvement, he endured a devastating heartbreak and fell into a life-threatening depression--more profound and long-lasting than any of his biographers have yet imagined. The hundreds of letters Pirandello wrote to Abba during these years are the only source that reveals the true story of his relentless torment. Selected, translated, and introduced here for the first time in any language, these powerful and moving documents reward the reader with the unique experience of living in intimacy with a profound poet of human pain. Here Pirandello encourages his beloved in her difficult career as actor/manager, rejoices in her triumphs, and desperately implores her to return to him. The letters are filled with glimpses of this major artistic personality at some of his most distinctive moments--such as the award of the Nobel Prize, his meetings with Mussolini, and Marta's long-dreamed-of success on Broadway--but they remain foremost an authentic confession of a Pirandello, without the mask of his art, telling the story of his real-life tragedy. In 1986, two years before she died, Marta Abba authorized the publication of the present correspondence so that the world might understand how deeply Pirandello had suffered. This English-language volume contains a selection of 164 letters from the complete edition of 552, which Princeton University Press will publish in cooperation with Mondadori, in the original Italian, in 1995. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Pirandello (1867-1936) is the founding architect of twentieth-century drama, brilliantly innovatory in his forms and themes, and in the combined energy, imagination and visual colours of his theatre.

This volume of plays, translated from the Italian by Mark Musa, opens with Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello's most popular and controversial work in which six characters invade the stage and demand to be included in the play. The tragedy Henry IV dramatizes the lucid madness of a man who may be King. In So It Is (If You Think So) the townspeople exercise a morbid curiosity attempting to discover 'the truth' about the Ponza family. Each of these plays can lay claim to being Pirandello's masterpiece, and in exploring the nature of human personality each one stretches the resources of drama to their limits.

Pirandello, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a little known to most English readers. Too few of his plays and stories have been translated. This hook, therefore, serves the double purpose of introducing the Italian genius through a summary of all his dramatic work and interpreting his accomplishments fron an artistic viewpoint. As a background for his criticism, the Domenico Vittorini shows first how Pirandello's compassionate pessimism and tragic mockery resulted from his own tortured existence and in what way his art is relates to Italian literary tradition and contemporary thought. Proceeding chronologically, Pirandello's growth is traced from the elementary naturalism of his early writing, through his more reflective plays, to the crowning achievements of later years in which dramatic situations are approached from a highly intellectualized point of view.

SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR * HENRY IV * THE MOUNTAIN GIANTS Pirandello ranks with Strindberg, Brecht, and Beckett as a seminal figure in modern drama. Innovative and influential, he broke decisively with the conventions of realist theatre to foreground the tensions between art and reality. In his best known play, six characters, imagined but then abandoned by their author, intrude on the rehearsals of a provincial theatre company in an attempt to play out their family drama. In the brilliant Henry IV, a young man believes himself to be the Holy Roman Emperor; attempts to cure him of his delusion have disastrous consequences. The Mountain Giants is Pirandello's last, unfinished masterpiece, in which he moves towards the mythical, and make-believe and real life once more become entangled. The play reflects its author's growing anxiety about the function of art under a fascist regime. This new edition includes Pirandello's important Preface to Six Characters, an essential critical document for understanding the play that made him famous. Anthony Mortimer's lively and performable translations remain scrupulously faithful to the letter and spirit of the originals.