Interior with Figures

Set between the faded memories of provincial Italy and the vivid contrasts of the Levant, Interior with Figures brings together the most significant short stories by Fausta Cialente. Written primarily during her years in Egypt, these stories explore the most intimate and universal themes of her work: the enchantment of childhood, the pretensions of a bourgeoisie both “careless and culpable,” colonialism, family tensions, belonging, and uprootedness.

With luminous prose and exquisite sensitivity, Cialente portrays domestic spaces that shelter either still, silent lives or ones filled with unexpected adventure. She tells of mischievous, even cruel children probing the hidden dynamics of adult life; of women who are bold and fearless or shy and elusive, grappling with feelings of alienation; of disoriented men projecting their desires and anxieties onto the world around them.

First published in 1976, this collection is both a reckoning and a witness to Cialente’s perspective of the “increasingly poisonous and increasingly ferocious” times she so perceptively observed and interpreted.

Interior with Figures weaves together fairy tale and stark reality, imagination and memory, irony and social critique, affirming Cialente as a writer of extraordinary talent and insight.