The Refusal and Other Stories

Eight short stories, often built on dialog, to tell about some aspects of life in today's world, its contradictions and, above all, the difficult search for new values.
The tale "The Refusal", which gives the title to this short collection, was written in the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers: the episode is present in watermark, it could be any other situation of war and violence to which, unfortunately, we are too accustomed nowadays, but that people cannot accept, because the normality are not death, violence or massacre, that make people lose their reference points, as it is also stated in the tale "War". In an absurd world where the only parameter for the evaluation is the high efficiency in our job (as it is ironically stated in "The Zoo" and "The new Managind Director" ), perhaps all is not lost: there are still stories of love and jealousy ("Annalisa"), the natural instinct arrives yet to prevail on our rationality ("The Jump"), the people try to build new relationships, to find new formulas to love each other and live together: see for example the stories told in "The Foreigner", which presents the difficulties, but also the beauty of a relationship between people of different nationalities and cultures so distant as Italian and Somali, or even "On the edge of the bed", which describes the formation of a family quite different from the pattern we are accustomed to consider, with the common life of a husband, a wife, the husband’s lover and the two children that the man has had with the two women.