This Is the Garden

"I read Giulio Mozzi's first book with real enthusiasm. What struck me most was his everyday language. Even when his subjects rely on metaphor, his words are plain, and so turn mysterious."—Federico Fellini

Giulio Mozzi's first book, This Is the Garden (winner of the 1993 Premio Mondello), astonished the Italian literary world for its commanding vision and the beauty of its prose. In the eight stories of this collection, we see a steady reworking of the idea of the world as a fallen Eden. Here, in Mozzi's garden, quasi-allegorical characters seek knowledge of something beyond their shaken realities: they have all lost something and react by escaping, retreating from reality into a world, as Mozzi says, that is "fantastic, mystical, absurd." A purse-snatcher mails his victim's letters back to her, including a letter of his own. An apprentice longs to be a real person, a worker, in an anonymous business where Kafkaesque machines cut nondescript pieces from an unnamed raw material. A man finds, in his endless activity of picking up broken glass in his garden, a metaphor for gathering the pieces of his soul. Intensely imagistic, mystical, mysterious, This Is the Garden is a complicated, unsentimental—yet also heartfelt—exploration of spirituality, love, and the act of creation by a master of the short-story form.

Giulio Mozzi has published twenty-six books—as fiction writer, poet, and editor. He is primarily known for his story collections, especially This Is the Garden, which won the Premio Mondello. His work has appeared in numerous American journals and in Best European Ficiton 2010.

Elizabeth Harris's translations have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. She is also the translator of Mario Rigoni Stern's Giacomo's Seasons and Antonio Tabucchi's Tristano Is Dying. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Dakota.