• Message from the Shadows
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Archipelago Books

Message from the Shadows

Message from the Shadows

by Antonio Tabucchi, translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel, Antonio Romani, Elizabeth Harris, Frances Frenaye, Janice M. Thresher, Martha Cooley, and Tim Parks

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The twenty-four timeless stories in Message from the Shadows sift through Antonio Tabucchi’s shadow world. Here, characters step into new dreams with ease, open their mouths to swallow the sky, and idle whales ponder the fragile state of mankind. At times, Tabucchi’s world spins toward a single fate: a young boy’s lament is said to gather eels to the shore, or a woman in a cotton dress sings, “I was left with a handful of air” and a young man follows her curious echo. In crackling, tender prose, Tabucchi illuminates the small joys and laments of ordinary people. In these stories, time staggers, straddling the narrow gap between dream and reality. With each brilliant glimpse, we find ourselves examining trees, evening shadows, train journeys, and wrinkled faces of a shared world with fresh eyes.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781939810151
Pages: 300
Publication Date:

Praise

A surprising tranquility pervades the stories, and it's to Tabucchi's great credit that they never feel muted...The melancholy tunes that fill the pages of Message from the Shadows are enigmas of longing, signals woven in the air that fade and disappear and leave only hunger in their wake...Tabucchi's generally incantatory prose here assumes a heightened air of ritual; the power of inexpressible sorrow becomes a dark vortex, vaguely barbaric in its strength.
—Bailey Trela, The Threepenny Review

Tabucchi's stories — translated from Italian by Martha Cooley, Frances Frenaye, Elizabeth Harris, Tim Parks, Antonio Romani, and Janice M. Thresher, and published posthumously — drip with longing and, too, with a dreamlike quality that is tempting to characterize as magical realism. In these stories, the world as we know it and its author's "shadow world" are often indistinguishable — to the reader's great benefit.
—Thrillist, Best Books of 2019

One could call him a great literary defender of the oppressed and marginalized (political prisoners or revolutionaries are among his stock figures), but he does not so much defend them, in the moralistic, paternalistic sense, as allow them a voice... Tabucchi delights in the metatheatricality of writing: more often than not the narrators in this collection are conscious of their role as storytellers, and are writing or speaking as if to a silent companion – a position that is filled by the reader. As a result, even the tamer stories feel on the verges of reality...
—Samuel Graydon, The Times Literary Supplement

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