Bitter Asylum

For the first time, a major collection of the stories, characters and fragments by the celebrated Italian writer Gabriella Maleti is published in English. Bitter Asylum (Amari Asili, 1994) creates a human world out of fragments, each hard-won from a run-down provincial world by an incisive and at the same time sympathetic imagination.
Old women in their kitchens, old men haunted by their pasts and humbled by decrepitude, mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, brothers, sisters - all are caught in the careful, unsparing gaze of a writer without illusions. Her ear detects the specific inflections of speech, the different idioms appropriate to each of her subjects. Sharon Wood's translations capture the vitality and rage which flow beneath the surface of a world starkly sketched and coloured in by the author.

Gabriella Maleti is a journalist on the Florence literary magazine Area di Broca and administrator of the poetry and prose series Gazebo.