GIORGIO DE MARIA (1924-2009) was an Italian novelist, musician, critic and playwright. Devoting himself to fiction after an illness cut short his career as a pianist, he wrote four novels (two of which are included in this volume), two plays for stage and television, and several short stories. A second tragedy curtailed his literary career in the 1980s and he spent the final thirty years of his life struggling with mental illness and writing no significant works. Out of print for decades, De Maria was, until recently, better remembered as a songwriter than for his weird fiction. This situation changed in 2017 when Liveright released an English translation of his last novel, The Twenty Days of Turin (1977). Republished in Italy and hailed as the "one true cursed Italian novel," it has led to an ongoing rediscovery of De Maria as both a weird fiction master and a lost pillar of Italian modernism.

RAMON GLAZOV is a translator, fiction author, reviewer and doctoral student based in Melbourne, Australia. His writing has appeared in Overland, Jacobin, The Monthly, Tincture Journal and The Saturday Paper. He has also translated Giorgio De Maria's The Twenty Days of Turin (Liveright, 2017).