The work of Gianna Manzini is central to understanding twentieth-century Italian literature. Her novels and short stories, spanning from 1928 to 1973, have established her as an influential and original writer whose art combines the most salient expressions of Italian prose. Receptive to experimentation, she played an important role in both the theory and practice of the novel.

Manzini's narratives are characterized by her loyalty to the prosa d'arte (artistic prose), with its intensely lyric fragmentism and linguistic refinement, and to the rècit, the story itself and its structural organization. The two tendencies, present in many Italian writers between the two world wars, inform Manzini's writings with a strong lyric quality and self-reflectivity. To the younger generation of writers who matured in the postwar years, Manzini represented a writer with a modern conception of the novel and far-reaching linguistic ability.

Although Manzini's novels and stories show a mastery...