What is the point of saving such “even” artistically misbegotten works? Because one hopes that these fragments will somehow combine to form from my whole, some court of appeals upon whose breast I shall be able to throw myself when I am in need?
—Franz Kafka to Max Brod [Prague, end of December 1917]
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Andrea Bajani is an award-winning Italian novelist and poet. His novel If You Kept a Record of Sins, translated by Elizabeth Harris and published in the United States by Archipelago Books, won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize, and the Lo Straniero Prize. His latest novel, Il libro delle case (The Book of Homes), was a finalist for the Strega Prize and the Campiello Prize, and is being published in more than seventeen countries, including in the United States by Deep Vellum. He is currently the distinguished writer in residence at Rice University in Houston.
