Once upon a time, there was a journalist with “a weakness for the literature of the supernatural, magic, ghost stories, mysteries.” So begins a short story by 20th-century Italian journalist and writer Dino Buzzati, about a man who could very well be Buzzati himself. The character, who has “an abominable passion”—journalism—finds a booklet at a junk dealer’s containing a magic formula: If read aloud, it grants “a superhuman power.” That journalist may be a thing of fiction—he’s from Buzzati’s 1962 story “The Ubiquitous”—but the impulse behind him clearly is not. Buzzati, now considered a major figure in modern Italian literature, was for decades a reporter and special correspondent for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, where he was known for his entertaining dispatches and his stubborn belief that reality was no less uncanny than fantasy. To him, journalism and storytelling were two sides of the same coin, each a way of brushing up against the extraordinary.
This eclectic approach was not without its critics, both in Italy and abroad. As one of his English-language translators, Lawrence Venuti, has noted, Buzzati’s fiction was already being dismissed in 1958 for triggering nothing more than a brivido borghese in his Italian readers. The charge came from Paolo Milano, writing for the magazine L’Espresso. This “bourgeois shudder,” Milano claimed, only offered a fleeting moment of unsettling recognition, when “even the life of a right-thinking [bourgeois] is … visited by a few ghosts.” But these ghosts, he argued, are quickly and “sagely exorcised” by Buzzati, “a writer who shares” the same “sense of caution” as the middle-class consumers of his stories. His “horror museum,” after all, is carefully curated, displaying only “risk-free emotions.”
But is that really the case? What if we entertained the shudder—took it seriously, on its own terms? And how are we to do so, especially today?
These questions feel even more pressing in the Anglophone world, where Buzzati’s fame has long been as elusive as the meaning of his tales. The stark contrast between his relative neglect in English and his popularity across Europe—and eventually in his native Italy—was first noted by Venuti in the introduction to Restless Nights: Selected Stories of Dino Buzzati (1983), where “The Ubiquitous” first appeared. That imbalance has now begun to shift. Since 2023, NYRB Classics has launched a translation campaign, reintroducing Buzzati’s fantastical fiction to English-speaking readers. The project includes a reissue of Joseph Green’s translation of Un amore (A Love Affair, 2023); Venuti’s new translation of Buzzati’s masterpiece Il deserto dei Tartari (The Stronghold, 2023); Anne Milano Appel’s 2024 translation of the sci-fi novella Il grande ritratto (The Singularity); and the 2025 publication of an expanded corpus of fifty stories (including “The Ubiquitous”), once again selected and translated by Venuti: The Bewitched Bourgeois.
This new translation project doesn’t just revive Buzzati—it reframes him. In the 1980s, when Venuti first approached Buzzati’s short fiction in English, the goal was to import a productive strangeness—what he calls a “foreignizing” flavor—into the Anglophone literary tradition. In 20th-century Italian literature, Venuti explains in his classic The Translator’s Invisibility, the genre of the fantastic had firmly taken root through writers like Massimo Bontempelli, Italo Calvino, and Tommaso Landolfi. But it remained marginal in the British and American canons, where realism continued to dominate. Buzzati’s stories, by contrast, blend everyday settings with phantoms, spells, and surreal incidents narrated with deadpan precision. In English, they offered an avenue for unsettling the expectations of Anglophone readers and expanding the boundaries of realist writing.
Meanwhile, in 2025, as a broader range of Buzzati’s short stories becomes available in English, a new kind of strangeness is being imported. The renewed target of this “foreignizing” mission seems to be middle-class or bourgeois lifestyles and tastes—along with their “shudders,” as Milano might put it—and especially the cultural machinery that upholds them: the middlebrow.
The very title of the collection The Bewitched Bourgeois offers a clue. For Venuti’s choice of the French borrowing bourgeois—“a very difficult word to use in English,” as Raymond Williams once described it—to translate the Italian “borghese” is, itself, a foreignizing move. As it invokes the French sociological tradition, where “the petit-bourgeois relation to culture” has been defined by its “capacity to make ‘middle-brow’ whatever it touches,” this borrowed term also gestures toward the ambivalence—and resistance—that the “middlebrow” itself displays toward translation. “The English word,” as Diana Holmes writes, “with all its derogatory connotations, is … unmatched in any other language hence never quite translatable.” And yet its hybridity and slipperiness, and the largely shared conditions of its rise across Europe, the United States, and beyond, make the “middlebrow” quite amenable to transnational migration.
Far from obsolete, the middlebrow is still widely consumed and hotly debated within and outside the academy. It carries a certain cultural stigma—think of Franzen snubbing Oprah’s Book Club—while continuing to demand attention as a serious object of study. Though often examined within national traditions—particularly Anglo-American—its defining features are, as Beth Driscoll argues, shared and transcultural:
The middlebrow is middle class: participation requires education, income, and leisure. The middlebrow is aspirational, respectful of culture and keen to connect with it, while at the same time commercially oriented. …. The middlebrow is emotional, enabling cultural activity that is sentimental, empathetic, and therapeutic. The middlebrow is recreational, framed as domestic or entertaining rather than academic, and it is earnest, promoting a sense of social and moral responsibility.
The term originated in 1920s Britain, when the literary magazine Punch mocked “a new type” of BBC listener with goals of self-improvement. Virginia Woolf, too, referred to a type of consumer—the “common reader” of her 1925 essay—who reads for pleasure and “is guided by an instinct to create for himself.” Over time, the label expanded to encompass not only Woolf’s common reader but also the institutions and cultural products designed to serve them—works imitative of “high” culture but stripped of formal experimentation. Buzzati’s own “Panic at La Scala” (1948) skewers these cultural pretensions: The story depicts the Milanese bourgeoisie at the opera, eager to consume a performance “certain of success, not excessively demanding, chosen from the traditional repertory with complete confidence.”
It was this cultural ambivalence at best, and promiscuity at worst—what Woolf in 1942 called “betwixt and between”—that made the middlebrow so detestable to highbrow critics. In the United States, the term gained traction only after World War II. As scholars Cecilia Konchar and Tom Perrin note, “[a]ll of the best-remembered critical discussions of the middlebrow in the US date from the mid-century,” including Russell Lynes’s well-known article “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” (1949) and Dwight Macdonald’s polemical Masscult and Midcult (1960)—republished in 2011 by NYRB Classics, the same series now championing Buzzati (the evergreen paradox of the middlebrow…). This overlap feels more than accidental. Macdonald’s notion of “Midcult”—a hybrid form that blends popular appeal with the trappings of “high” culture—is one Venuti explicitly connects to Buzzati in his introduction to The Bewitched Bourgeois:
His [Buzzati’s] steady output of feuilletons gave him the opportunity to combine elite literary traditions with popular genres, a mix that the leftist cultural critic Dwight Macdonald would have called “Midcult.” … In his stories, Poe and Kafka meet Rod Serling’s television anthology series The Twilight Zone.
But how useful is it to apply an Anglo-American cultural label to an Italian writer whose literary landscape lacked a direct equivalent? If the middlebrow in English is a well-defined cultural battleground, in Italy it rather resembles one of Buzzati’s phantoms: something we sense but cannot fully grasp. Italian critics preferred terms like “letteratura di consumo” or “d’intrattenimento,” which sidestepped the anxieties “middlebrow” stirred in Anglophone debates. But just because the local intelligentsia didn’t name such anxieties, it doesn’t mean they didn’t feel them. Already in 1929, a few years before Buzzati began writing fiction, the Italian literary critic Raffaello Franchi wrote a polemical pamphlet of limited circulation that looked back on the first three decades of the century, L’europeo sedentario (“The Lazy European”). In it, he implicitly lamented the lack of a respectable middle ground between the “spectacular provincialism” of Giovanni Papini—whose Storia di Cristo (1921), published as Life of Christ (1923) in the US, became a global success—and the “snobbish modernity” of Achille Campanile, known for his surrealist puns. Far from equating this “middleness” with accessibility, however, Franchi blamed the commodified intermingling of “high” and “low” art on the very class Buzzati belonged to and would soon put center stage in his fiction:
Unfortunately, there’s always some bourgeois out there ready to be bewitched [qualche borghese disposto a farsi abbagliare]—and what’s more, paying for it—as is typical in a century that’s become so commercial and difficult.
These anxieties only intensified during Italy’s postwar economic boom. In Apocalittici e integrati (1964), Umberto Eco addressed the Italian culture wars—between the pessimists who rejected mass culture entirely and the conformists so immersed in it that they renounced any serious aesthetic mission—without ever naming the “middlebrow” as their possible solution. Instead, he took some of Macdonald’s concerns seriously: A certain type of Midcult, Eco summarized, “pacifies its consumer by convincing them that they have experienced an encounter with culture, so that they do not entertain any further concerns.” Walter Pedullà took this even further in La letteratura del benessere (1968), condemning Buzzati’s short stories as “sedative tales.” For Pedullà, Buzzati’s short fiction exemplified the “literature of well-being” in vogue in 1960s Italy: one that, while reflecting real progress—economic growth, increased equality, cultural democratization—was ultimately “soporific” in its lack of political engagement.
Associating Buzzati with the Anglo-American category of middlebrow certainly makes sense in this light. After all, he was a member of the middle class, writing about and for the middle class. His prose, mixing the “high” with the “low,” is spare and linear, much like Hemingway’s—whom Macdonald considered the epitome of Midcult and whom Venuti took as a stylistic model for The Stronghold. Even Buzzati’s experiences as a reader leaned toward entertainment over experimentation: As he once told Yves Panafieu in an interview, he respected “the authors of detective novels far more than certain authors who have won the Goncourt Prize”—because literature shouldn’t bore.
Still, there’s something about Buzzati’s middlebrow that does not quite fit the Anglophone caricature. His fiction is neither comfortable nor sentimental—it is eerie. Far from sensationalizing or distorting the real world for effect—a “Midcult” trope which Macdonald called “parajournalism” (“a bastard form, … exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction”)—Buzzati uses the fantastic to illuminate deeper existential and societal anxieties. Take, for example, his story “Elephantiasis” (1967). Written partly as a popularizing scientific pamphlet, partly as a news piece, it addresses a familiar obsession, recounting surreal incidents that “had a vast echo in the press, radio, and TV”—the very vehicles of middlebrow culture—as plastic-made cars, infrastructures, and even children’s toys begin to grow uncontrollably in Italy, America, Japan, and Tanzania in a not too remote 2042.
Buzzati’s middlebrow is not simply “betwixt,” as Woolf would call it, but bewitched. Less a diluted compromise between “high” and “low” than a threshold between reality and nightmare, his middlebrow offers a space for enchantment and estrangement. Instead of celebrating traditional bourgeois values such as earnestness or self-improvement, Buzzati’s stories provoke existential bewilderment, as his characters become trapped in looping fables. Giuseppe Gaspari, the “bewitched bourgeois” of the homonymous 1942 story that also gives the title to the collection, epitomizes this condition. Whilst vacationing with his family, Gaspari comes across a group of boys playing war games and, out of nostalgia for a bygone childhood, decides to join them. Yet he participates with such intensity that the game suddenly becomes real, and an arrow strikes him down. “This is not absurd,” Buzzati ominously told Panafieu.
Buzzati’s middlebrow doesn’t aim to reassure so much as to disorient. His stories hinge on a rupture—an uncanny vision, an unexpected visitor, a strange discovery—that suddenly reshuffles the mundane. These moments jolt characters out of their routines, breaking into what he calls the “solid bourgeois world” in “The Scandal on Via Sesostri” (1965). It’s a realm populated by “esteemed professionals” and their “irreproachable wives,” who are momentarily forced to reconsider their prerogatives—to imagine, if only for a second, alternative ways of living. That story chronicles, with the precision of investigative reportage, the unmasking of Enzo Siliri, a dead doctor and Nazi collaborator who had lived under the false identity of respected doctor Tullio Larosi.
In this bewitching landscape, Buzzati probes a perplexing postwar reality, in which real-life “esteemed professionals” were being exposed as complicit in the crimes of the Axis powers. And he does so much as the fictional “Dino Buzzati” would do in the story “The Ubiquitous”: by mixing journalism with storytelling, reality with fantasy. It’s what his translator Venuti would celebrate in the 1980s as Buzzati’s “Fantastic Journalism.”
Reframed as a “bewitched middlebrow,” Buzzati’s fiction re-enters literary history not as a comforting escape, but as a sharp tool for existential inquiry across geographical borders. “Appointment with Einstein” (1950), for instance, channels mid-century American racial anxieties through an Italian lens. In the story, the physicist has a surreal, disquieting encounter with a gas station attendant in Princeton—bearing “African features” and cast through the troubling stereotype of the “black devil”—who holds Einstein accountable for the moral implications of his theories, which ultimately contributed to the creation of the atomic bomb. In translation, the story gains an added layer of estrangement, forcing both Italian and American readers to reckon with history from a defamiliarized, foreignized perspective.
Buzzati’s treatment of technology—the engine of mass culture—is where his fiction most powerfully unsettles traditional middlebrow sensibilities. In The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel, Roger Bellin compares the use of “borrowed science-fictional elements and topoi” in contemporary novels like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Spike Jonze’s Her to “an earlier form of upper mass-market literary borrowing—the middlebrow.” Yet Buzzati’s version of “techno-anxiety” is often stranger and more disruptive than this “new middlebrow,” which turns “low-postmodern pastiche” into a more palatable and heterogeneous type of commodity.
In “The Time Machine” (1952), a scientist creates a device that slows down time, allowing the wealthy to age at about half the normal rate. A district called Diacosia is built around the machine—but life there soon becomes dull, insular, and disconnected from the world, until the machine malfunctions and the experiment ends in grotesque disaster. Time—simply a means to an end for the bourgeois, an end that is money—is exposed as a lost cause, belatedly recognized as irretrievable.
The middle-class Buzzati firmly rejected revolutionary politics. And yet, his fiction still captures the spectral logic of a system where even time is taken for granted, devalued or commodified: a “bewitched world of capital,” as Giacomo Marramao might call it.
What does it mean, then, to reintroduce Buzzati’s “foreignizing” fiction to English-speaking readers now? This isn’t just a question about genre—realism versus the fantastic—but about how and why we read. The growing availability of Buzzati’s “bewitched brows” in English brings with it an invitation to consider alternative modes of reading beyond the one that, as of 2025, still dominates Anglo-American literary criticism: close reading. This practice “persists in published criticism” and “remains a staple in the classroom,” as Rita Felski argues; it distinguishes the “tribe” of literary scholars from allegedly less alert reading communities, by a capacity “to disenchant, to mercilessly direct laser-sharp beams of critique at every imaginable object.”
Enchantment—and its more disturbing kin, bewitchment—have long been left off the critical agenda, dismissed as “bad magic.” The stakes of this exclusion, Felski notes, seem even higher for cultural historians, who hold fast to the “sacred tenet that the popular consumer is an alert and critical consumer”—never a gullible one.
That Buzzati himself has faced such criticism—blamed for “sedating” readers, as Pedullà put it—may help explain his long marginalization in literary studies. His fiction doubtless invites us to read for pleasure, to look at the world as “an enchanting place,” as the narrator tells a Martian diplomat in “Why” (1985). So does Felski, who compares enchantment to “a shuddering change of gear,” the jolt of returning to reality after full immersion in art (in a phrase that recasts, with a nod of optimism and irony, Milano’s earlier critique of the “bourgeois shudder”). Modern readers, Felski writes, are “bewitched but not beguiled,” aware that their experience is fictional, yet still moved by it.
But in Buzzati’s world, the shift between fiction and reality is rarely this clean. It is suspension of belief that brings Giuseppe Gaspari, the bourgeois of “bewitched” fame, to death—“the price for his arduous enchantment,” the narrator comments. The twist is made even more disturbing by the story’s basis in a real event Buzzati covered as a naval correspondent in 1942. Like Gaspari, Buzzati was also watching kids playing in the woods when suddenly a loud rumble made them halt—and made him realize that perhaps, “beyond the last visible waters,” a real war was unfolding.
Buzzati is acutely aware that narratives are not harmless. In “Stories in Tandem” (1970), he portrays an old doctor and the narrator taking turns inventing a story to pass the time, each picking up where the other leaves off—until they witness a real plane crash and begin blaming each other for the fictional conversations that foretold the catastrophe. Storytelling here is shown as eerie, prophetic, and never entirely innocent. He similarly plays with his readers’ expectations—and their presumed superficiality—in “The Prohibited Word” (1956), where the narrator’s friend Hieronimo refuses to utter a forbidden word, never spelled out in the story itself. “And what about my readers?” the narrator/Buzzati wonders. “Won’t they notice if they read this dialogue?” “They’ll simply see an empty space,” answers Hieronimo. “And they’ll simply think: ‘How careless. They left out a word.’” In both stories, Buzzati confronts the reader with the limits of their interpretive habits. He uses these moments to expose the consequences of our complacency—to suggest that stories, far from offering comfort, might implicate us in what we fail or refuse to notice.
What do we do with the fantastic today, when so much of what once seemed unimaginable—artificial intelligence, mass surveillance, climate breakdown—is now woven into the fabric of everyday life? If the “civil world” was “eager to exterminate” the few surviving fantasies of 60 years ago, as the narrator of “The Bogeyman” (1967) warns, what can we say of our own increasingly “uncivil” world, where the boundary between fiction and reality—and journalism itself—is constantly manipulated?
Buzzati wrote about ghosts, talking machines, and surreal bureaucracies. In his world, plastic grew like cancer, and stories could kill. These tales weren’t meant to comfort the middle classes; they were meant to shake them. And today, they shake us too—like a shudder. They remind us that the middlebrow, so often dismissed as safe or sentimental, can carry a sharp edge. It can unsettle, question, and estrange.
Calling Buzzati’s fiction “bewitched middlebrow” is one way of reclaiming this space: not as a bland middle ground, but as a threshold where ordinary life slips into the uncanny. Reading Buzzati now matters not just because his stories are strange—and help make the canon strange again—but because they speak to the stories we still tell ourselves. His middlebrow doesn’t offer reassurance or easy answers. It demands that we keep looking.
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