On Tuesday, April 7, please join us to celebrate the release of Antonio Tabucchi’s wonderful short story collection Time Ages in a Hurry, translated from the Italian by Martha Cooley and Antonio Romani and published in English for the first time by Archipelago Books. Co-hosted by The Center For Fiction, the evening will feature a conversation with Alexander Stille and translators Martha Cooley and Antonio Romani.

Antonio Tabucchi (1943-2012) is one of Italy’s most original and admired writers. A master of short fiction, he won the Prix Médicis Etranger for Indian Nocturne, the Italian PEN Prize for Requiem: A Hallucination, the Aristeion European Literature Prize for Pereira Declares, and was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government. Together with his wife, Maria José de Lancastre, Tabucchi translated much of the work of Fernando Pessoa into Italian. Tabucchi’s works include The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico, The Woman of Porto Pim, and Tristano Dies: A Life.

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Professor Alexander Stille graduated with a B.A. from Yale University and earned an M.S. at Columbia. He has worked as a contributor to The New York Times, La Repubblica, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Republic, among others. His books include Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism, Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic, The Future of the Past, and The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi. Stille is the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for best work of history (1992), Premio Acqui (1992), San Francisco Chronicle Critics Choice Award (1995), and the Alicia Patterson Foundation award for journalism (1996).

Martha Cooley is the author of two novels, The Archivist and Thirty-Three Swoons. Her works of short fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in PEN America, The Common, A Public Space, and others. She has translated numerous poems by Italian poet Giampiero Neri, and she served as Judge of the Poetry in Translation Prize at the PEN American Center in 2011. Cooley is currently a professor of English at the University of Adelphi and teaches writing in the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program.

Antonio Romani‘s translations of poems by Italian poet Giampiero Neri have been published in AGNI, Atlanta Review, PEN America, A Public Space, and others. He formerly taught Italian Literature and History in two high schools in Cremona and was the owner and manager of two bookstores. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

This splendid collection of stories by Antonio Tabucchi is a delight to read. Tabucchi’s fertile and offbeat imagination ranges over a broad spectrum of themes–family, aging, war, travel–always approached obliquely, teasing, engaging, and above all rewarding the reader. The translation by Martha Cooley and Antonio Romani is acutely sensitive to the rhythms of Tabucchi’s fluid sentences and the uncanny nature of his sensibility.
— Lynne Schwartz

A pensive, beautifully written meditation on personhood and nationhood in the new age of European unity…  Many of the characters in this joined collection—something more than short stories but not quite a novel—are stateless and uprooted; they come from somewhere else, and they’re never quite at home where they are… A pleasure…  for fans of modern European literature.
— Kirkus Reviews

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