This short story first appeared in La Freccia and is Spaziani’s personal revisiting of Marcel Proust’s The Melancholy Story of Madame de Breyves.

Born in Turin in 1923, Spaziani founded a literary journal at the age of 19, and worked with major writers of the time.  Virginia Woolf even sent a chapter of her novel The Waves to Spaziani with a dedication that read To the young editor. Spaziani was muse to poet Montale, who based the figure of la Volpe on her. Their correspondence was published in 1995. Spaziani was an accomplished poet, translator, and scholar, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times.

Southern Humanities Review is a quarterly literary journal published by Auburn University.