1. Dino Buzzati The Falling Girl

Sadly not very well-known outside of his native Italy, Dino Buzzati stands out as one of the best and most subtle, delicate, profound and inventive storytellers of the recent times. While most of us, who aren't Italians, heard something about Buzzati only because of his novel 'The Tartar Steppe' which served as an inspiration for the classical Valerio Zurlini film and was famously included by Borges in his 'Private Library', Buzzati was a master of intellectual short story fiction comparable to Sadly not very well-known outside of his native Italy, Dino Buzzati stands out as one of the best and most subtle, delicate, profound and inventive storytellers of the recent times. While most of us, who aren't Italians, heard something about Buzzati only because of his novel 'The Tartar Steppe' which served as an inspiration for the classical Valerio Zurlini film and was famously included by Borges in his 'Private Library', Buzzati was a master of intellectual short story fiction comparable to Borges himself. '60 novels' very well can be the best of his short stories collections, so, in my eyes, this is an absolutely essential reading.Stylistically, it draws from Kafka and aforementioned Borges with a pinch of Poe's disturbing uneasiness thrown in for a good measure, but still 'Sessanta Racconti' is a very original reading.

Dino Buzzati The Falling Girl

These stories are diverse and often surrealistically weird but they have something in common. Buzzati always strives to explore the deepest and the most hidden strata of human psyche and in order to do this he puts his heroes into bizarre, weird and sometimes grotesque experiences for the sake of revealing their true human essence. This method has very much in common with typically existentialist 'put a hero into borderline state and see his real self' way, which was inherited by the early continental tradition of 'magical realism' (Nossack, Kasack), the tradition to which Buzzati himself probably belongs. Yet he is different from Nossack/Kasack (anf Kafka/Borges also) in the warm emotional tone of his writing (even when he talks about reality nor far from tragic).