Fario: 74 books

Italo Svevo's "The Mother" is a brief and cruel fable in which farmyard chicks hatched in an incubator find themselves longing for a mother. So Curra, a bold and vain cockerel, driven above all by the desire to find a creature to admire him, sets out in search of this creature: the mother.Genre: fableWords: 1,700

"Life is this way: first you have to beg for things and then you have to growl to keep them." Argos's master has been sent to the mountains for his health. Bored, he resolves to teach his hunting dog to talk. The experiment fails, but he himself--the more advanced animal--manages to learn...

"By and large," the straying wife of Frank Wedekind's classic erotic tale says to her young lover, "husbands are jealous only so long as they have no reason to be. As soon as there really is a reason for them to be jealous, it’s as if they were stricken with terminal blindness.”Genre: short storyLength: 1,800 wordsTranslated from German by Juan LePuen

"Her gaze was not absent, as it had been shortly before; instead, it was fixed on the flowers on the wallpaper that lined the room. She noticed, for the first time, that the flowers were daisies. And she shifted her gaze from one to the next, to see if the pattern was the same, and she found...

"The Back Room" is an English translation of "La rebotiga," Catalan journalist Robert Robert's gently ironic account of a desultory evening gathering in the room in back of an apothecary's. Josep Pla, in his diary, calls it the finest piece of writing in Catalan from the so-called Renaixença.Genre:...

When the standoffish head of his department summons him to her office, "Professor" John Newhouse is sure it is to let him know that he has been given the annual award for the teacher who most clearly embodies the ideals of the department's illustrious founder, Dr. Edward Nortick. Genre: short story Words: 1,731

It is generally agreed that the sources of Heinrich von Kleist's bloody tales are European, but Juan LePuen argues that, for those interested in the genesis of "Michael Kohlhaas" or "The Earthquake in Chile," such colonial American documents as Hernán Cortés's letters to Charles V make...

"There was the raven, dusty and moth-eaten now, that was supposed to have inspired one of the writer’s most celebrated works. Busloads of tourists and prospective students came throughout the year to look through the glass into that room and at its lifeless objects. No matter that the writer studied...

Barely four years removed from graduation, three friends from high school, now more interested in drink than in each other, recall the evening one of their number emerged suddenly sobered from the stranger's apartment he had disappeared into shortly before.Genre: short storyWords: 1,825

In this short tale by the German playwright Frank Wedekind, the narrator recounts the travails he goes through in an attempt to seduce a lovely young cousin. Translated by Juan LePuen. Genre: short story Length: 2,200 words Date of English translation: 2012

"The Sponge Diver" features the young Romanian vagabond Adrien Zograffi, this time in Greece, as he listens to the harrowing tale of a fellow Romanian drifter's season of forced labor aboard a small ship plying the Eastern Mediterranean in search of rich sponge beds. Panait Istrati (1884-1935) was once among the most popular writers in Europe.

For years, the aging civil servant Abel had been saving, for just the right occasion, two bottles of a precious liquor made by the monks of a Benedictine abbey. But in a cruel irony one of the bottles is uncorked by his friend Joaquín (known as Cain) in circumstances altogether different from those...

Between prayers, as she says the rosary ("forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us"), an old woman refuses to pardon her newly widowed and destitute daughter. Genre: short story Length: 3,600 words Translated from Italian (2012) by Juan LePuen

_The Thüringer House_ is the first of a cycle of novels, "Life of Adrien Zograffi," written by the Romanian Panait Istrati in the early 1930's, shortly after his return, bitterly disillusioned, from a long stay in the Soviet Union. Adrien, servant in a bourgeois household headed by rich...