The Siren and Selected Writings

Although best known as the author of a singular masterpiece, The Leopard, the Prince of Lampedusa left other writings which display the same verbal grace and sense of melancholy irony. The best and most representative of them are collected in this volume. 'Places of my Infancy', a childhood memory of the Lampedusa palace in Palermo at the end of the nineteenth century, provides a fascinating background to the princely setting of The Leopard. The story of 'The Professor and the Siren', a delicious example of Lampedusa's fantasy and 'The Blind Kitten' (the first chapter of an unfinished novel) are also included here, together with a charming, comic and bitter-sweet story, 'Joy and the Law'. The book, which is introduced and set in context by Lampedusa's biographer David Gilmour, also contains rigorously critical yet entertaining writings on Stendhal, and essays on English writers from Bede to Aldous Huxley.