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 Alejand...

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.