Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1934, Pirandello was a global phenomenon: he traveled the world staging plays; his works have been widely translated and published in European languages but also far beyond; and his famous critical essay On Humor has become a mainstay of the theoretical imagination of modernism. But in addition to all this, throughout his career Pirandello was engaged in writing short stories, aiming to craft one for every day of the year. They span a wide range of themes, addressing issues like the socioeconomic disparities in Sicily and the European south, gender roles, sexuality and sexual mores, the restraints of social convention, and typical modernist questions of identity, relativity, and the existential quandaries of modern life. These stories have engaged readers across continents and time periods and given rise to numerous creative responses, including multiple film adaptations, such as the Taviani brothers’ award-winning masterpiece, Kaos. Thus, while the author’s death cut his project short of its initial goal of writing 365 tales, one for each day of the year, his corpus of stories has nevertheless been a source of fascination and inspiration ever since.

Today, the time is ripe for a long-overdue project to provide a complete translation and scholarly edition of Pirandello’s Stories for a Year, bringing them to an English-language audience as Pirandello intended them to be available to his own readers. Since he began compiling his collected short stories in the early 1900s, various partial translations have appeared in English. These have sometimes circulated as individual stories in journals or anthologies (including several in PSA, the Journal of the Pirandello Society of America), but most have been published in a few notable volumes of selected short stories printed at various moments throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And yet in total only 134 of Pirandello’s prolific 244 short stories have been translated into English, with most of these long since out of print and, in many cases, almost impossible to find. All the same, as indicated by the recent release of Virginia Jewiss’ selection of stories, Stories for the Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), interest in these stories has not diminished. In fact, in Italy the major publisher Mondadori has undertaken a vast project to reissue Pirandello’s complete writings with new scholarly editions, and simultaneously the University of Catania’s Centro di Informatica Umanistica is constructing a National Digital Edition of Pirandello’s complete works in Italian.

Our digital project will add to this resurgence by making Stories for a Year available in English, online, for free. Working with a team of translators, we will publish the complete collection of 244 stories, grouped as Pirandello arranged them into “Collections” (“Raccolte”). In addition, the volume includes a scholarly “Introduction” by the editors and a critical apparatus of notes accompanying each translation, highlighting issues of translation as well as historical context and other important connections. In this way, English-language readers will finally have access to what readers in other European languages have had for some decades now: a complete, scholarly edition suitable for both lovers of Italian fiction and the short story as well as students, instructors, and academics.

The project is ongoing, but some stories are already available online. You can find them in two ways: either by navigating through the Collections (each of which contains approximately 15 short stories, arranged as they were by Pirandello and his editors after his death), or by looking at the complete Index of all 244 stories. In addition, Pirandello and his publishers wrote a series of three Notes (Avvertenze) that were included as mini prefaces to different editions of the stories. These can be useful in guiding readers as they approach the stories, and they are included in our digital edition, as well.

Guidance for how to cite this edition is provided on each specific page of the site, and information about our team of editors, translators, and webmaster is available here.

The copyright for all material on the site belongs to the editors and translators. Permission from the editors to republish any materials should be sought in writing.

If you are interested in participating in the translation project, please see our Call for Translations and contact the editors.

We wish you happy reading, and we welcome you to come back often as new stories will be added as they become available.