One evening in Rome, in the kitchen of the Italian writer Caterina Bonvicini, I expressed a desire to assemble a collection of Italian short stories translated into English. It was March of 2016, during a brief trip back to Italy. Six months before, my family and I had returned to the United States after living for three years in Rome.

My life as a reader had, by that time, taken an unexpected turn; since 2012, shortly before moving to Rome, I had chosen to read only Italian literature, mostly from the twentieth century, and to read those works exclusively in Italian, a language I had diligently studied for many years but had yet to master. I was forty-five years old, and I believed, even before this new phase began, that I was already fully formed as a reader and writer. And yet I surrendered to an inexplicable urge to distance myself, to immerse myself, and to acquire a second literary formation.

It was one thing to read only Italian when living in Italy, where the winds were favorable, where my state of voluntary literary exile made sense. I read with an adolescent’s zeal, transported to another dimension, standing before a new group of gods. I had an Italian teacher who came to my home twice a week and, at the start, brought me chapters and excerpts equipped with footnotes for elementary readers. I befriended Italians who mentioned authors I had never heard of before. I began frequenting bookstores, especially those that sold secondhand volumes, combing the shelves for their works. I purchased them and read them, and copied down sentences by hand, taping them over my desk for inspiration. I realized that, for the first time in decades, I was reading to satisfy only myself. I was no longer influenced by the expectations and broader cultural consensus that dictate what one should be reading—such frames of reference had fallen away. The more people remarked on my new inclination—But don’t you miss English?—the more I clung to my newfound freedom, not wanting it to end. Read More

In her Art of Fiction interview in our new Fall issue, Alice McDermott reveals that she is currently at work on a very short novel. The format has long intrigued her, and she has taught a class on the subject to her M.F.A. students at Johns Hopkins University. “I divide the reading list into three loose categories: A Day in the Life, An Inciting Incident, and A Life. We read three novels in each category, and then the students begin their own short novels, using these somewhat fungible categories as structural guides,” she says. “The wonderful thing about teaching the short novel is that structure is everything, and often more apparent than in a long and winding five-hundred-pager.” We asked her to share a few of her favorite short novels below.

A Day in the Life

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

This is a novel that careens to a foregone conclusion (page 2: “Today he was afraid. He was aware that his routine was about to break up and he sensed that a huge trouble long presaged but til now formless was due”) without ever losing its protagonist’s—the slovenly, whiny, disappointed, exhausted, endearing Tommy Wilhelm’s—own desperate, caffeinated, ever-flickering sense of hope. It’s all in the language: hardly a sentence in this novel, hardly a detail, that does not, wryly, keenly, make your heart ache.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A novel that proves plodding doesn’t have to be a pejorative. Ivan Denisovich Shukov’s icy plod through this long, cold, routine day in a Siberian labor camp magnifies an excruciating drama: the struggle to find food, to work, to stay out of trouble, to stay human in the most inhuman of circumstances. Less celebrated than it once was, this novel is more than a historical artifact or political tract, it’s a chilling (literally) work of art.

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