Shorts & Authors. The history of Italian shorts 1980-2006

Available in Italian and English versions.

Is the short really a short story? In this comparative literary view of the short story, based on the dual parallel between short film – short story, feature film – novel, as partial as it is rich in suggestions in terms of poetics and short circuits, much expertise and non has been formed. All literary and critical areas such as Borges and Calvino, Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe, Cechov and Carver, have been plundered hand over fist to portray a genre which scarcely resembles it since it fractures and scatters in numerous directions, forms, formats and structures, linguistic micro universes and communicative challenges. An expressive form which escapes every assumption and demands attention not to what it was, but to what it is becoming in our cultural system. In the end, like Hector Bianciotti does for the three entities la nouvelle, le conte, le récit, which unfortunately in Italian come under the term of short story, also as regards the short we could give up on definitions and comparisons and submit to detecting the profound character: the continuous metamorphosis…