Snow and Guilt — Giorgio Pressburger

This award-winning collection confirms Giorgio Pressburger as a European master of the short story. Each tale is wondrous in its situation and its telling, but each refined truth it contains is hauntingly familiar in its resonance. In the title story, four rabbis on a trip through the mountains offer marvelous interpretations of the similarities between snow and guilt, just before an avalanche, killing three of them, provides the most concrete interpretation of all for the survivor. In other stories, horrors await a scientist who provokes unrequited passion in a young girl; a wheelchair-bound philosopher rails at cosmic injustice; and a man who saves a kitten from death unwittingly changes his life through a random act of kindness. Giorgio Pressburger was born in Budapest in 1937 and later settled in Italy. He is now the Director of the Institute of Italian Culture in Hungary. Among his previous books is The Law of White Spaces.