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Guido Morselli (1912-1973) was a novelist and essayist. After serving in the Italian Army, he began writing reportages and short stories while living abroad. He wrote several works of fiction, including Past Conditional, Divertimento, and Roman senza papa ( Rome without a Pope ) as well as four books of essays. NYRB Classics published his novel The Communist in 2017. Frederika Randall is a writer, reporter, and translator. Among her translations are Ippolito Nievo's Confessions of an Italian, and for NYRB, Guido Morselli's The Communist. She has received NEA and PEN/Heim translation grants, and with Sergio Luzzatto, the Cundill Prize. She lives in Rome.
Just as Morselli, tragically overlooked in his lifetime, was destined to be hailed as one of contemporary Italy's most iconoclastic writers, so was this novel, his last, destined to be translated, at the end of her long and distinguished career, by Frederika Randall. I can think of few works of literature more appropriate for our acutely isolating and endangered times. --Jhumpa Lahiri I recently had a chance to read a wonderful book, Dissipatio H.G., written by an Italian, Guido Morselli, who subsequently killed himself. I think it would make a highly interesting subject for a film, and you would certainly be the ideal director. --Letter from Marcello Mastroianni to Andrei Tarkovsky
