As the collection's title suggests, time's passage is the fil rouge of these stories. All of Tabucchi's characters struggle to find routes of escape from a present that is hard to bear, and from places in which political events have had deeply personal ramifications for their own lives. Each of the nine stories in Time Ages in a Hurry is an imaginative inquiry into something hidden or disguised, which can be uncovered not by reason but only by feeling and intuition, by what isn't said. Disquieted and disoriented yet utterly human in their loves and fears, the characters in these vibrant and often playful stories suffer from what Tabucchi once referred to as a "corrupted relationship with history." Each protagonist must confront phantoms from the past, misguided or false beliefs, and the deepest puzzles of identity--and each in his or her own way ends up experiencing "an infinite sense of liberation, as when finally we understand something we'd known all along and didn't want to know."

As the collection's title suggests, time's passage is the fil rouge of these stories. All of Tabucchi's characters struggle to find routes of escape from a present that is hard to bear, and from places in which political events have had deeply personal ramifications for their own lives. Each of the nine stories in Time Ages in a Hurry is an imaginative inquiry into something hidden or disguised, which can be uncovered not by reason but only by feeling and intuition, by what isn't said. Disquieted and disoriented yet utterly human in their loves and fears, the characters in these vibrant and often playful stories suffer from what Tabucchi once referred to as a "corrupted relationship with history." Each protagonist must confront phantoms from the past, misguided or false beliefs, and the deepest puzzles of identity--and each in his or her own way ends up experiencing "an infinite sense of liberation, as when finally we understand something we'd known all along and didn't want to know."

This new, expanded collection of Antonio Tabucchi's stories collects the best short fiction from the Italian author recognized as one of the masters of the form. Message From the Shadows is a new collection featuring Antonio Tabucchi's finest short stories, spanning the breadth of his career. These playful tales explore Tabucchi's signature themes, from his inventive, lyrical meditations on language, art, and philosophy, to his fascination with the passage of time, and the mystery of storytelling.

It is a sultry August at the very end of the twentieth century, and Tristano is dying. A hero of the Italian Resistance, Tristano has called a writer to his bedside to listen to his life story, though, really, “you don’t tell a life…you live a life, and while you’re living it, it’s already lost, has slipped away.” Tristano Dies, one of Antonio Tabucchi’s major novels, is a vibrant consideration of love, war, devotion, betrayal, and the instability of the past, of storytelling, and what it means to be a hero.

A masterful collection about intimacy, loneliness, and time, each inspired by different works of art, spanning the entirety of the great Italian writer's career. In Stories with Pictures, Antonio Tabucchi responds to photographs, drawings, and paintings from his dual homelands of Italy and Portugal, among other European countries. The stories in this collection spring forth from the shadows of Tabucchi's imagination, as he steps into worlds just hidden from view. From inscrutable masks of pre-Columbian gods, stamps of bright parrots and postcars of yellow cities, portraits of devilish Portuguese nuns, the way to these remote landscapes appear like a "train emerging from a thick curtain of heat." As we peer through the curtain, what we find on the other side rings distinctly human, a world charged with melancholic longing for time gone by. "Sight, hearing, voice, word" Tabucchi writes, "this flow isn't in one direction, the current is back and forth." Reading these stories, one feels the pendulum current, and the desire in this remarkable author to hold the real in the surreal.

A busy boy and his dog learn to slow down and enjoy life together in this lyrical, rhyming picture book perfect for hurried families everywhere. For one busy boy, life is all hurry up, hurry down, hurry round and round and round! That is until he takes a big breath...and a big break...and slows down to see all the wonderful things in the world around him. From celebrated picture book creators Kate Dopirak and Christopher Silas Neal, this playful yet powerful picture book reminds us to be present, to be mindful, and to appreciate each moment.

By Antonio Tabucchi, one of the most renowned voices in European literature and the foremost Italian writer of his generation, The Woman of Porto Pim is made up of enchanting, hallucinatory fragments that take place on the Azores Islands off the coast of Portugal. Told by a visiting Italian writer unearthing legends, relics and histories of the inhabitants, the tales shed light on a local restaurant proprietress's impossible love with an Azorean fisherman during WWII, a dazzling whaling expedition of eras past, shipwrecks both metaphorical and real, and a playful look at humankind from the perspective of a whale.