Love in Vain: Selected Stories

Love in Vain: Selected Stories of Federigo Tozzi is the debut short-story collection in English of one of Italy's most distinguished early modern writers. The twenty stories of Love in Vain were selected and translated by Minna Proctor, who received the 1998 PEN/Renato Poggioli Award for her then unpublished renderings of Tozzi's fiction. "The investigation of naturalism, of truth," writes Proctor in her biographical introduction, "defined Tozzi's poetics. Impassioned by literature, yet isolated from the mainstream, Tozzi found nothing so fascinating as the unfettered expression of the inner lives of normal people." His work is at once a mixture of subtlety and melodrama, of psychological perception, primitive emotion, and raw physical need, as his plain subjects, yearning for connection and love, forever grasp at the unattainable.

Author Biography: Federigo Tozzi (1883-1920), a follower of Gabriele D'Annunzio and Giovanni Verga, was encouraged by Luigi Pirandello and was himself a major influence on Alberto Moravia, who held him in the highest regard. In his short but prolific writing life, during the second decade of the twentieth century, he produced one hundred and twenty stories, five novels, two books of poetry, as well as plays, essays, and piles of drafts, notes, and letters. Yet after his initial success, he was virtually ignored in the fifty years following his death and only belatedly recognized as a supreme stylist and master of Italian realism.