Thrilling, stylish essays about everything from flying carpets and Doctor Zhivago to God and Shakespeare, by a rediscovered Italian writer.

Cristina Campo was one of the most distinctive European essayists of the twentieth century. Although well known to readers in Italy and abroad--including Alejandra Pizarnik, with whom she had a long correspondence--Campo was a devout perfectionist, disdainful of the literary limelight, and published only two short books of prose in her lifetime: Fairy Tale and Mystery (1962) and The Flute and the Carpet (1971).

The Unforgivable collects both of these books, along with several of her essays on writers (Simone Weil, John Donne, Katherine Mansfield, Shakespeare) and an autobiographical short story--offering readers of English the first full-length portrait of an unforgettable stylist whose interests encompass both the familiar and the outlandish. Her fondness for William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and T. S. Eliot makes her a modernist, but like these American counterparts, she was a modernist preoccupied by the deep past.

Her subjects range from the canonical to the esoteric--from Doctor Zhivago to flying carpets, from the intricacies of sprezzatura to the theophagic history of the Latin liturgy. No matter what her subject, she is as stylish as she is self-effacing--as one might expect of a writer who once said of herself, "I have written little and would like to have written less."
About the Author: Cristina Campo (1923-1977) was born in Bologna and brought up in Florence. A congenital heart malformation kept Campo out of school and social life for much of her childhood, forcing her into a reclusion enlivened by her reading. A bona fide autodidact, she had by her teens begun to read deeply in Italian, French, German, Spanish, and English literature. After World War II, Campo moved to Rome, where she became acquainted with Eugenio Montale, Curzio Malaparte, and Roberto Bazlen, among others. Intensely private, she almost always published under pseudonyms (Cristina Campo being one of them) and translated--Simone Weil, Katherine Mansfield, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf--far more than she wrote. Although she had always been a Catholic, in the 1960s Campo's faith became more fervent; she spent long periods in convents and strongly opposed the Second Vatican Council's relinquishment of the Latin liturgy. Her heart continued to cause her serious trouble throughout her life, and she died in Rome at the age of fifty-three.

Alex Andriesse was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1985. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Granta, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Prodigal, and Literary Imagination. He has translated several works from Italian and French, including Bernardo Zannoni's My Stupid Intentions, available from New York Review Books, and the first two parts of François-René de Chateaubriand's Memoirs from Beyond the Grave. He is an associate editor at New York Review Books.