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In his introduction to this issue, Kevin Brockmeier, winner of three O. Henry Prizes and the Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award, calls Dino Buzzati "one of the great literary practitioners of the dark marvelous."In "The Time Machine" a city reduces time to half its speed and doubles the lifespans of its inhabitants. Brockmeier calls it one of Buzzati's most "emblematic stories." "I admire it for the jolt of human feeling Buzzati brings to what is, at its core, a work of hard science fiction," he writes.About Recommended Reading:Great authors inspire us. But what about the stories that inspire them? Recommended Reading, the latest project from Electric Literature, publishes one story every week, each chosen by a great author or editor. In this age of distraction, we uncover writing that's worth slowing down and spending some time with. And in doing so, we help give great writers, literary magazines, and independent presses the recognition (and readership) they deserve.About the Author:Dino Buzzati (1906-72) was born in Belluno in Northern Italy and spent most of his life in Milan. By vocation he was an editor and correspondent for the Corriere della Sera. His novels, stories, plays, and paintings, all strongly marked by the fantastic, made him a major figure in twentieth-century Italian culture. Currently available in English are two book-length narratives: The Tartar Steppe and Poem Strip.About the Guest Editor:Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia; the children's novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery; and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. Recently he was named one of Granta magazine's Best Young American Novelists. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.About the Guest Translator:Lawrence Venuti is a translation theorist and historian as well as a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan. He is the author of The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference, and Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice, as well as the editor of The Translation Studies Reader. His translations include the anthology Italy: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, Massimo Carlotto’s crime novel The Goodbye Kiss, and Ernest Farrés’s Edward Hopper: Poems, for which he won the Robert Fagles Translation Prize.