Novelle per un Anno, vol. 13: Candelora

This volume gathers Luigi Pirandello's short stories written during a pivotal creative period (1911-1917), showcasing the Italian master's gift for exposing the fractures between how we present ourselves and how we truly are. The stories collected here embody Pirandello's relentless investigation of identity's fluidity, the masks we wear, and the uncomfortable truth that objective reality may not exist at all. In these pages, ordinary Italians navigate love, loss, and social expectation, only to discover that the selves they believe in are as unstable as quicksand. Pirandello's dark humor and psychological precision transform quiet domestic dramas into existential investigations. His characters struggle against the cruelty of being seen clearly, of having one's carefully constructed selfhood dismantled by the merciless gaze of another. These stories hurt because they reveal how much of our lives is performance, and how terrifying it is to be caught without our masks.