The Quality of Light: Modern Italian Short Stories. This item is unavailable.The Quality of Light: Modern Italian Short Stories

'The quality of light is a quality of intelligence. But it is an intelligence that discovers that it has recourse only to language, more specifically only to writing. The meaning ... is forthcoming only in the writing, and it comes naturally to speak of these fictions, in very many cases, as possessing their own luminosity, their own glow.' (from the editors' introduction) Italy is known for 'opera, olive oil and the Mafia'. It is also a country with a famous literary tradition that stretches back to Dante and Ariosto. The Quality of Light gives a scintillating taste of the range and richness of Italian writing today. Its many discoveries will whet the reader's appetite for more.

Ann Caesar is Professor of Italian and serving in her third year as Chair of the Board of the Faculty of Arts. She began her professional career as an extra-mural lecturer in European Literature and Women's Studies for the Workers' Educational Association and the University of Kent before taking up a University Lectureship in Italian at Cambridge in 1984 where she was Fellow at Corpus Christi College. She moved to Warwick in 1999 to the University's first Chair in Italian Studies. Her particular interests are in 18th, 19th and 20th century Italian narrative and theatre and European avant-gardes. She has recently completed a cultural history of Italian literature and is currently working on the origins of the modern Italian novel.

Michael Caesar graduated in modern languages from Cambridge, and moved from a post at the University of Kent to the chair of Italian at Birmingham in 1994. He has researched and published principally on Leopardi, the reception of Dante, and twentieth-century fiction and thought, most recently on Umberto Eco.

Born in Venice in 1956, Enrico Palandri published Boccalone in 1979, a manifesto of a young generation that gained him acclaim in Italy. Formerly a language coach at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Enrico Palandri is now writer in residence at London University. The Way Back, a best seller in Italy, has been a success throughout Europe.

Born in Milan in 1962, Paola Capriolo is one of the most respected of her generation of Italian writers. Her novel, Il Nocciero, won the 1990 Rapallo Prize. Her translated novels include Floria Tosca, a New York Times notable book and The Woman Watching. In 1991 Paola Capriolo was awarded the Förder Prize in Germany for her work. She is a journalist and translator.

Born in the Po Valley in 1955, Pier Vittorio Tondelli died of AIDS in Milan in 1991. The author of four novels and a collection of short stories, Tondelli was recognized as one of the most gifted Italian writers of his generation. Separate Rooms is the only book of Tondelli's fiction to be translated into English.