Giorgio Manganelli is remarkable for the rich variety, marked eccentricity, and absolute originality of his contributions to letters. He is celebrated for the depth of his creative and critical talents, his journalistic flare, his multilingual translating abilities, and his abiding expansion of the boundaries of contemporary Italian literature. A man whose writing has often been called bizarre and esoteric, the inimitable Manganelli is a genuine man of letters who dedicated his life to the written word.

It is inaccurate to label Manganelli a novelist in the usual sense, for his creative writings go beyond even the most experimental or avant-garde conceptions of this genre--he is an antinovelist par excellence. In 1986 critic Pietro Citati wrote in his "Ritratto di Manganelli" (Portrait of Manganelli) that "tra gli scrittori italiani di oggi, Manganelli è l'unico che possieda una vocazione metafisica" (among today's Italian writers, Manganelli is the only one who possesses...