Ākharīn Ashk: Persian 1404

What if an ATM started talking, knew everything about you and offered you a profitable deal? Stefano Benni knows where reality harbors its monsters - monsters of yesterday, monsters of today and monsters that spy from the future -, he goes looking for them, flushes them out, parades them, finding a story for each one and tying them all to the chariot of victorious imagination. Here, then, in twenty tragicomic stories about today's Italy, vengeful ghosts and capricious tenors, the New Right cruise and the Compulsory Television School, high-audience electronic chairs and hallucinogenic Orpheus... Benni's pyrotechnic prose - increasingly precious and necessary in these times - spares nothing and no one, giving us a chilling laugh, an ironic tear and, last but not least, a stubborn hope in the power of writing and imagination.