Heart Conditions (Kazabo Publishing): Sentimental Adventures in Turn-of-the-Century Italy

Matilda Serao was a giant of early 20th century Italian literature as well as a pioneer. She was a journalist -- she ran her own newspaper for several years -- and an accomplished novelist and short story writer who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature six times.

She was also a genuine character. Edith Wharton described her like this, "With her strident dress and intonation, she seemed an incongruous figure in that drawing-room where everything was in half-shades and semi-tones, but when she began to speak we had found our master."

In these stories, Serao writes of love and romance as if she were Barbara Cartland's older, crankier -- and often much funnier -- sister. She turns many of the standard romantic cliches upside down with sometimes tragic, sometimes comic, but always unexpected, results. After an evening with Matilde Serao, you will never look at romance quite the same way! In this edition, these stories appear in English for the first time.