Series: New York Review Books Classics.
Introduction by Marina Warner

In the last two years of his life, the Sicilian aristocrat Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote not only the internationally celebrated novel The Leopard but also three shorter pieces of fiction, brought together here in a new translation. “The Professor and the Siren,” like The Leopard, meditates on the past and the passage of time, and also on the relationship between erotic love and learning. Professor La Ciura is one of the world’s most distinguished Hellenists; his knowledge, however, came at the cost of a loss that has haunted him for his entire life. This Lampedusa’s final masterpiece, is accompanied here by the parable “Joy and the Law” and “The Blind Kittens,” a story originally conceived as the first chapter of a followup to The Leopard.

“[Lampedusa] comes so marvellously close to the people and scenes he describes because he conveys, in the manner of classical artists, the hard gleam of inaccessibility that makes human beings and nature itself seem final and alone.” —V. S. Pritchett

"After a long and thoughtful accumulation of time and passions, skirting the straits of history and politics, [Lampedusa] recreated an entire epoch, filling his pages with tapestries of crystalline and lasting beauty.” —Edna O’Brien, Financial Times