Book Description
Written by Antonio Tabucchi, one of the most renowned voices in European literature and the foremost Italian writer of his generation, this sublimely questioning, superbly imaginative collection of fragments and quasi-stories moves from impression to association to conjecture. The reader meets a delicate flying creature of ambiguous species–replete with feathers in ochre, yellow, deep blue, and emerald green–in Fra Angelico’s vegetable garden; and a revolutionary who is told her incredible future by Mademoiselle Lenormand, a fortune teller from the shadow world.
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
Tabucchi's work has an almost palpable sympathy for the oppressed.
— The New York Times
By now the appearance of a new novel by Antonio Tabucchi is a literary event.
— World Literature Today
Ten months after Tabucchi’s death, Tim Parks’s elegant translation of The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico embodies the author’s lifelong interest in states of consciousness, time, and visual memory.
— Elisa Wouk Almino, Words Without Borders
Like good short fiction, the stories in this volume act in ways that suggest a wider world outside the frame of the story.
— Sycamore Review
A witty and subtle meditation on the limitations of memory and imagination.
— Nick Hornby, Times Literary Supplement
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