Stories with Pictures

So Long
And who would get postcards? Thinking about it, he wondered if he should make a list,
because once you reach your destination, you always forget. He found a sheet of paper in the
desk, sat down, and started coming up with names and addresses. He lit a cigarette. He d write
down a name, think it over, take a drag of his cigarette, and write down another. After he
finished, he copied the names into his datebook and tore up the paper. He set the datebook on
top of his shirts, in his open suitcase. He looked around, studying the room, like he was trying
to remember what he might ve forgotten it was going to be a long trip. Then he remembered
the postcards he d bought in an art gallery and left on the bookshelf. He started sorting through
them, to see if they might work for this upcoming trip. Not really, he told himself, they don t
really work, what s a postcard of the Marches got to do with South America? But then he also
thought how nice the stamps would look; in Peru, for instance, he d buy stamps with parrots,
there had to be stamps with parrots in Peru, plus stamps with faces of pre-Columbian gods,
smiling, inscrutable masks, masks of gold or glazed enamel he d seen an exhibit once at
Palazzo Reale there had to be stamps of those places, too. Actually, he liked the idea, because
typical tourist postcards were so ugly, the colors always too bright, fake colors, and all the cards
alike, whether they came from Mexico or Germany. So this was far more original: a postcard
with from Ascoli written on it when it came from Oaxaca or Yucatán or Chapultepec (was
that it?) these names of places where he d go.
Where he should have gone with Isabel, if she were still here. But she wasn t, she was
gone before they could. For fifteen years, they thought about that trip, but it wasn t a trip you
could take just like that, especially for two people in their profession. It took time, availability,
money all things that weren t

Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa in 1943 and died in Lisbon in 2012. A master of short fiction, he won the Prix Médicis Étranger for Indian Nocturne, the Italian PEN Prize for Requiem: A Hallucination, the Aristeion European Literature Prize for Pereira Declares, and was named a Cheavlier des Artes et des Lettres by the French Government. Together with his wife, Maria José de Lancastre, Tabucchi translated much of the work of Fernando Pessoa into Italian. Tabucchi's works include The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico (Archipelago), The Woman of Porto Pim (Archipelago), Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, Letter from Casablanca, and The Edge of the Horizon (all from New Directions). About the Translator: Elizabeth Harris translates contemporary Italian fiction. Her translated books include mario Rigoni Stern's novel Giacomo's Seasons, Giulio Mozzi's story collection This is the Garden, and Antonio Tabucchi's novels Tristiano Dies and For Isabel: A Mandala (both Archipelago books). For her various translations of Tabucchi, she has won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, The Italian Prose in Translation Award, an NEA Translation Fellowship, and the National Translation Award.

"Stories With Pictures blazes with a love of color, light and the ineffable glory of the visible world . . . Each short item, translated with a glowing verbal palette of her own by Elizabeth Harris, responds to a single artwork via different forms . . . [Tabucchi] rejects the idea that we must choose between illusion and reality. Art, though his lens, escapes the binary universe to which Nature compels us. . . . If Tabucchi s terrace looks out into art s wide blue yonder, it also frames a mirror to the soul." - Boyd Tonkin, The Wall Street Journal

"Tabucchi's stories...drip with longing and too, with a dreamlike quality that is tempting to characterize as magical realism. In these stories, the world as we know it and its author's "shadow world" are often indistinguishable - to the reader's great benefit." - Thrillist, Best Books of 2019
 
"Tabucchi is a master of the form in imagination, beauty, scope, and scale even at the tiniest calibration." - Kerri Arsenault, Lit Hub

"Harris s translation skillfully renders into English Tabucchi s lyricism . . . . These frequently hypothesizing, fantastical works explore questions that remain urgently relevant, including ones about borders, national identity, and access to knowledge." -Saskia Ziolkowski, Reading in Translation

"[Tabucchi's] prose creates a deep, near-profound and sometimes heart-wrenching nostalgia and constantly evokes the pain of recognizing the speed of life's passing which everyone knows but few have the strength to accept...Wonderfully thought provoking and beautiful." - Alan Cheuse, NPR's All Things Considered

"There is in Tabucchi's stories the touch of the true magician, who astonishes us by never trying too hard for his subtle, elusive, and remarkable effects." - The San Francisco Examiner

"[Tabucchi] has written a masterpiece collection . . . Stories with Pictures is a book for