In "Cellists", the final, exquisite story in Kazuo Ishiguro's new collection, an American woman pretends to be a world-famous cellist and agrees to tutor a promising young Hungarian in her hotel room in an unnamed Italian city. It soon emerges that she cannot play the cello at all: she merely believes she has the potential to be a great cellist. "You have to understand, I am a virtuoso," she tells him. "But I'm one who's yet to be unwrapped." For her, and for many other characters in the book, music represents an ideal self that has little to do with reality…This is, perhaps, what most binds these stories: the conflict between what music promises and what life delivers…Nocturnes is Ishiguro's first collection of short stories, after six novels. He has said in interviews that he conceived the book holistically, almost as a piece of music in five movements. Like a cycle, the collection begins and ends in the same place – Italy – and it contains modulations of tone that would be awkward within a single narrative…The bittersweet memories that such music evokes make it suited to Ishiguro's style, but the air of stillness and regret, and the sense of missed opportunities, are tempered now and then by moments of farce or surrealism. Each of these stories is heartbreaking in its own way, but some have moments of great comedy, and they all require a level of attention that, typically, Ishiguro's writing rewards. – Reviewed in The Guardian

When I tell you that Louise Glück's "A Village Life" is a book of poems set in a quietly dying agricultural community, probably in Italy, probably some time between the 1950s and today, and that its plots -- for it works very much like a collection of linked short stories -- revolve around sexual awakening, farm work and old men gossiping in cafes, you will no doubt think: wistful, polite, conservative, the poetic equivalent of a landscape done in watercolor. But that would be dead wrong, as a poem titled "Pastoral" makes clear. Though it opens with an image, gentle enough, of the sun coming up over a mountain on a misty morning, "Pastoral" swiftly turns severe: "The sun burns its way through, / like the mind defeating stupidity." Then, as the meadow we expect from the title is revealed, the speaker of the poem declares, "No one really understands / the savagery of this place, / the way it kills people for no reason, / just to keep in practice." …Glück is a master, finely calibrating the shocks and their intervals. This collection, her 11th, is frightening the way a living statue would be frightening if it were to smile at you. – Reviewed in L.A. Times