Guido Morselli (1912–1973) was a novelist and essayist. After serving in the Italian Army, he began writing reportages and short stories while living abroad. He wrote several works of fiction, among them Past Conditional, Divertimento 1889, and Roman senza papa (Rome Without the Pope), though none were published during his lifetime. NYRB Classics published his novel The Communist in 2017.
Frederika Randall (1948–2020) was a writer, reporter, and translator. Among her translations are Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of an Italian, and for NYRB, Guido Morselli’s The Communist. She received the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Translation and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and with Sergio Luzzatto, the Cundill Prize. She finished her translation of Dissipatio H.G. shortly before her death in Rome in 2020.
