What we know about Tommaso Landolfi would barely fill the pages of a hotel-lobby brochure. Briefly, he was (a) born in Pico, Italy, in 1908 and died in Rome in 1979; (b) addicted to gambling, and a fastidious dandy; (c) compulsively protective of his own obscurity. A lexicographic genius, beneath whose casually sadistic storytelling lies a lustful fascination with words and the dilemmas they encourage, Landolfi was a master of the insulting anticlimax, and usually managed to undermine the seriousness of his topics with an almost vaudevillian indifference. But, of course, he never liked readers anyway.–Michael Peck "The Believer"
