Gogol's Wife

Tommaso Landolfi was a Italian writer and translator. His collection of stories, Gogol’s wife, was cited as a “must read” by Donald Barthelme.

"What we know about Tommaso Landolfi would barely fill the pages of a hotel-lobby brochure. Briefly, he was (a) born in Pico, Italy, in 1908 and died in Rome in 1979; (b) addicted to gambling, and a fastidious dandy; (c) compulsively protective of his own obscurity. A lexicographic genius, beneath whose casually sadistic storytelling lies a lustful fascination with words and the dilemmas they encourage, Landolfi was a master of the insulting anticlimax, and usually managed to undermine the seriousness of his topics with an almost vaudevillian indifference. But, of course, he never liked readers anyway."