Creative Surgery is Italian author
Clelia Farris‘s debut collection (with translations by Rachel Cordasco and Jennifer Delare), and it’s a great start. The first story, “
A Day to Remember” is an extended meditation on living in a world that feels much smaller when circumscribed by climate change. We follow an artist in a post-flood Italy as she tours her community by boat, bartering for what she needs while altering people’s memories to their preferences. They’re disrupted literally overnight by an extreme freak weather event, and we repeat the tour at speed as we see how everyone we just met has been affected by this new crisis. No one escapes unscathed, but some personal change is positive; nothing is ever an unalloyed negative. My two favorite stories in the collection, “