Among the numerous Italian writers who were active in the second half of the nineteenth century, Luigi Gualdo (1844-1898), the somewhat obscure and forgotten author of the stories in the present volume, is surely one of the most deserving of rehabilitation. His work, highly refined, eccentric, and full of both sentiment and pessimism, though often categorized with the Italian Scapigliatura school, also shares many of the tendencies of the French Decadent movement, with which Gualdo was well familiar.
The three tales here presented, all appearing for the first time in English, superbly translated by Brendan and Anna Connell, include two of the great classics of Italian fantastic fiction, "Narcisa" and "A Song by Weber," as well as one of Gualdo's more bizarre pieces, "A Bet."