One of World Literature Today's 75 Notable Translations of 2024.

"The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan romanticizes death, elevates the mystifying allure of love, and absorbs the wondrous nature of language and literature. It is an exquisitely realized memory novel that should not be missed." Robert Papinchak, World Literature Today, September 2024

"The narrator of this wonderfully off-kilter novel, an elderly man, recalls his doting grandmother and his boyhood infatuation with a girl who danced on the balcony opposite his family’s apartment, in Naples. Starnone’s prose captures the feverishness and weird juxtapositions of a child’s inner life. “Coherence doesn’t belong to the world of children, it’s an illness we contract later on, growing up,” he writes, and indeed, as a boy, the narrator spent a season searching for a “pit of the dead” evoked by his nonna. Now he tries to cement his experiences in words: “The problem, if there is one, is that the pleasure of writing is fragile, it has a hard time making it up the slippery slope of real life.” The New Yorker, November 25, 2024

“This slim novel represents Starnone at his best, and I don’t mean to mislead—his books are too complex to be reduced to any one theme… Starnone’s relative lack of fame in the Anglophone world is a striking underappreciation of a major author.” Brianna Di Monda, Los Angeles Review of Books, November 3, 2024

An excerpt from and a brief introduction to the book is available on Electric Literature website.