Melancholic, nostalgic, human, tied to the semantics of the earth: Cesare Pavese is one of the voices of the Italian 20th Century.

In his style, we find solitude, the pain of unrequited love, and contemplation of a non-industrialized Italian suburb.

Linked to Turin and the Langhe region, he was an author of prose and poetry. An enthusiast of American literature, he has translated many American writers, including Melville with Moby Dick.

The first and only Italian woman to have won the Nobel Prize for literature, Grazia Deledda continues to remain too often and unfairly in the shadow of Italian literature.

Her writing style is difficult to put inside a category. Her works have more of an international feeling rather than a local one. She was a very determined woman who followed her aspirations and worked hard for her results.

Her writing is passionate, involved, emotional, and deeply tied to Sardinia. A land that she loved and of which she has never stopped writing about, portraying it as a place rich in traditions, magical, almost mystical.

In Alter Echo, we look for voices of literature that can still speak strongly today, and we feel that Grazia Deledda's voice deserves to be heard.

Franz Kafka lived a short and painful life. He felt haunted by a strong feeling of inadequacy and the incapacity to feel love or be loved by anyone.

Kafka could create immersive and paranoid stories marked by a sense of oppression and helplessness towards a frightening power: that of a state seen as a tyrant.
Tyrant as his father. A man who was never able to love, understand and accept him.

Without Kafka's works, 20th Century literature would not be the same.
When we use the adjective Kafkaesque, we speak of that sense of anguish towards a world we don't understand, and driven by our insecurities, we feel small, lost, useless, and out of place.

Kafka gives us empathetic, complex, and three-dimensional characters moved by an oppressive conflict.
In very few words, he creates immersive and powerful stories like his short story The Neighbor. 

A single page is enough for us to understand the unease of this man who sees one of his competitors renting the office next door.
The protagonist feels tormented by his paranoia, and the fear of losing all his clients convinces him that his new neighbor can steal all his clients by listening to all his conversations.

The conflict is clear, practical, and perfectly contextualized. An excellent starting point to expand the story with an adaptation.