The works of Dino Buzzati have remained as enigmatic, elusive, and open to interpretation as the author himself. With his sense of irony, his refusal to align himself with the political or literary forces of his time, his adoption of the fantastic--a genre that was quite at odds with either the disengaged hermeticism dominant in his youth or the political materialism of the postwar period--Buzzati produced a body of work outside the canon of traditional literary tradition. A novelist, short-story writer, poet, and dramatist as well as a journalist and painter, Buzzati will never be tied to a specific social or historical movement. He explores an anguished sense of anxiety, an ineradicable unease that is existential and moral as well as erotic, in stories that can be interpreted as allegories or parables of states of mind. His fantastic tales encapsulate not Promethean heroics but small moments of trauma...