Antonio Tabucchi describes his novella Indian Nocturne (winner of the Medicis Prize in its French translation) as 'an insomnia' but 'also a journey… in which a Shadow is sought.' In his provocatively elusive but totally compelling way, Tabucchi takes us along on a nightmarish trip through the Indian subcontinent, producing sensations by turns exotic, sensual, menacing, and oppressive, as the profound weight of an ancient culture settles on the unwary traveler

Each story can be seen from at least two perspectives, and each protagonist can be seen as experiencing an objective 'reality' or having his own imagined and quite possibly distorted view of events

The eleven short stories in this prize-winning collection pivot on life’s ambiguities and the central question they pose in Tabucchi’s fiction: is it choice, fate, accident, or even, occasionally, a kind of magic that plays the decisive role in the protagonists’ lives? Blended with the author’s wonderfully intelligent imagination is his compassionate perception of elemental aspects of the human experience, be it grief as in “Waiting for Winter,” about the widow of a nation’s literary lion, or madcap adventure as in “The Riddle,” about a mysterious lady and a trip in Proust’s Bugatti Royale. Translation of: Piccoli equivoci senza importanza

“A masterpiece of compression. A political history of 1930s Portugal, a love story between a man and his dead wife, a gloriously successful formal experiment, and an irresistible thriller — and it can be read with enormous pleasure in a single afternoon.” — Mohsin Hamid “Pereira Maintains is small only in size. Its themes are great ones — courage, betrayal, fidelity, love, corruption; and its treatment of them is subtle, skilful, and clear. It’s so clear, in fact, that you can see a very long way down, into the heart of a flawed but valiant human being, into the sickness of a nation, into the depths of political evil. It’s the most impressive novel I’ve read for years, and one of the very few that feels truly necessary.” — Philip Pullman “Close to being a perfect novel — brief, tragic, inspiring” — John Carey, Chairman of the International Man Booker 2002 “Pereira is a marvelously complex creation. One of the most intriguing and appealing character studies in recent European fiction.” — Kirkus Reviews In the sweltering summer of 1938 in Portugal, a country under the fascist shadow of Spain, a mysterious young man arrives at the doorstep of Dr Pereira. So begins an unlikely alliance that will result in a devastating act of rebellion. This is Pereira’s testimony

In this enchanting and evocative novel, Antonio Tabucchi takes the reader on a dream-like trip to Portugal, a country he is deeply attached to. He spent many years there as director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Lisbon. He even wrote Requiem in Portuguese; it had to be translated into Italian for publication in his native Italy. Requiem's narrator has an appointment to meet someone on a quay by the Tagus at twelve. But, it turns out, not twelve noon, twelve midnight, so he has a long time to while away. As the day unfolds, he has many encounters — a young junky, a taxi driver who is not familiar with the streets, several waiters, a gypsy, a cemetery keeper, the mysterious Isabel, an accordionist, in all almost two dozen people both real and illusionary. Finally he meets The Guest, the ghost of the long dead great poet Fernando Pessoa. Part travelog, part autobiography, part fiction, and even a bit of a cookbook, Requiem becomes an homage to a country and its people, and a farewell to the past as the narrator lays claim to a literary forebear who, like himself, is an evasive and many-sided personality

Con esta novela epistolar -«una pequeña comedia humana de bolsillo» la define irónicamente su autor- Tabucchi renueva una ilustre tradición narrativa, si bien rompiendo sus códigos y pervirtiendo el género. Poco a poco nos damos cuenta de que algo «no funciona» en todas estas misivas: el paisaje parece desplazarse ante nuestros ojos, los tiempos se vuelven del revés, como si las cartas llegaran anticipadamente o con retraso respecto al propio mensaje que transmiten, como si los destinos de los hombres, según exige el Mito, siguieran sin encontrarse y las personas se extraviaran en el laberinto de sus breves existencias. Como si la vida fuera una película perfecta, pero cuyo montaje resultara totalmente equivocado. El conjunto resulta un extraordinario recorrido por las pasiones humanas, donde el amor parece el ilusorio punto central, cuando en realidad no es más que el punto de fuga que nos conduce hacia las zonas más oscuras del alma. Ternura, sensualidad, nostalgia, diecisiete cartas de personajes masculinos a otras tantas figuras femeninas, en las que se tejen los hilos de una insólita trama narrativa hecha de círculos concéntricos que parecen ensancharse en la nada, pobres voces monologantes, ávidas de una respuesta que nunca llegará. A todas ellas responde, por último, una voz femenina distante e implacable, y al mismo tiempo rebosante de pena

Lisboa, 1938. La opresiva dictadura de Salazar, el furor de la guerra civil española llamando a la puerta, al fondo el fascismo italiano. En esta Europa recorrida por el virulento fantasma de los totalitarismos, Pereira, un periodista dedicado durante toda su vida a la sección de sucesos, recibe el encargo de dirigir la página cultural de un mediocre periódico, el Lisboa

Late on night, the body of a young man is delivered to the morgue of an Italian town. The next day's newspapers report that he was killed in a police raid, and that went by the obviously false name "Carlo Nobodi." Spino, the morgue attendant on duty at the time, becomes obsessed with tracing the identity of the corpse. "Why do you want to know about him?" asks a local priest. "Because he is dead and I'm alive," replies Spino. In this spare yet densely packed cautionary tale, Tabucchi reminds us that it is impossible to reach the edge of the horizon since it always recedes before us, but suggests that some people "carry the horizon with them in their eyes."

Written by Antonio Tabucchi, author of Indian Nocturne, 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

Antonio Tabucchi's new novel The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro continues the experiment so successfully begun with his Pereira Declares (New Directions, 1994) — a European best-seller and winner of the prestigious Aristeion European Literature Prize in 1997. Tabucchi has now written a thriller, but one with a subtle intellectual depth not usual in that genre. The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro intriguingly reflects on current social issues: crime, police corruption, yellow journalism, and the courts — both of the law and of public opinion. Tabucchi hooks the reader on page one of this book and the story advances with electric and unflagging suspense. A gypsy discovers a headless body; Firmino, a young journalist who writes for a scandal-sheet, takes up the case; the headless corpse turns out to be that of one Damasceno Monteiro, an employee at an import-export company who, having stumbled upon a heroin smuggling ring at his work, had stolen a drug shipment; and, the police are supressing evidence — all the stuff of familiar daily news, here made riveting in the hands of a rare and brilliant writer

"Triumphs of nuance and suggestion." — Chicago Tribune "Ruminative, elegiac, and mordantly funny, Tabucchi's prose conjures a state between waking and dreaming." — The New York Times From "A Whale's View of Man": Always so feverish, and with those long limbs waving about. Not rounded at all, so they don't have the majesty of complete, rounded shapes sufficient unto themselves, but little moving heads where all their strange life seems to be concentrated. They arrive sliding across the sea, but not swimming, as if they were birds almost, and they bring death with frailty and graceful ferocity. . Sometimes they sing, but only for themselves, and their song isn't a call to others, but a sort of longing lament. They soon get tired and when evening falls they lie down on the little islands that take them about and perhaps fall asleep or watch the moon. They slide silently by and you realize they are sad. By the Médicis Prize–winning author of Indian Nocturne and Pereira Declares comes a collage of evocative, hallucinatory fragments about the Azores islands from the perspective of an Italian traveler seeking something that he is yet to discover. Along the way, he collects legends, relics, and stories of the island-dwellers: an elegant married woman's love of an Azorean fisherman, glimpses of a whaling expedition, and assorted shipwrecks, both figurative and real. Antonio Tabucchi (1943–2012) is one of the most beloved Italian writers of his generation. His works have been translated into more than forty languages and have received many prestigious prizes including the Médicis Prize and the Europäeischer Staatspreis. His most celebrated titles include Pereira Declares, Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, Requiem: A Hallucination, and Indian Nocturne. In France he was named a Chevalier of Arts and Letters. Tim Parks teaches literary translation at IULM University in Milan, Italy

As the collection's title suggests, time's passage is the fil rouge of these stories. All of Tabucchi's characters struggle to find routes of escape from a present that is hard to bear, and from places in which political events have had deeply personal ramifications for their own lives. Each of the nine stories in Time Ages in a Hurry is an imaginative inquiry into something hidden or disguised, which can be uncovered not by reason but only by feeling and intuition, by what isn't said. Disquieted and disoriented yet utterly human in their loves and fears, the characters in these vibrant and often playful stories suffer from what Tabucchi once referred to as a "corrupted relationship with history." Each protagonist must confront phantoms from the past, misguided or false beliefs, and the deepest puzzles of identity-and each in his or her own way ends up experiencing "an infinite sense of liberation, as when finally we understand something we'd known all along and didn't want to know."

It is a sultry August at the very end of the twentieth century, and Tristano is dying. A hero of the Italian Resistance, Tristano has called a writer to his bedside to listen to his life story, though, really, “you don’t tell a life…you live a life, and while you’re living it, it’s already lost, has slipped away.” Tristano Dies, one of Antonio Tabucchi’s major novels, is a vibrant consideration of love, war, devotion, betrayal, and the instability of the past, of storytelling, and what it means to be a hero

Una casa de campo en alguna parte de la Toscana. La canícula del mes de agosto, en el último año del siglo XX. Tristano, un hombre que ha combatido por la libertad de su país bajo ese nombre, tomado de un personaje de Leopardi, llama a la cabecera de su cama a un escritor que, aparentemente, en otro tiempo se inspiró en él para escribir una novela. Pero ¿es posible inscribir en el cuadro de un relato la geometría ambigua de la vida, hecha de contradicciones, dudas, omisiones, deseos incumplidos, recuerdos falsos o imaginados? El destino personal de un héroe como Tristano, cargado de esperanza y desolación, puede tener, además matices imperceptibles: un centímetro a la izquierda o a la derecha en la mirilla de un fusil