Like a flutter of butterfly wings

In the short stories of Like a Flutter of Butterfly Wings, Cosimo La Gioia’s third book, the author’s search for truth, begun in L’ascensore e altri racconti (The Lift and Other Tales) and continued in the eschatological sphere in A scuola di universi (At the School of Universes), continues. In these stories, the reader finds an opportunity to question himself on a variety of existential themes, with universal validity, also thanks to the fantastic and surreal elements that have always characterised the author’s style. Set in Italy and the rest of the world, they range from the story of a famous singer with an outsized ego to the chronicle of a sui generis condominium assembly; from a complicated love affair between a young psychologist and an ambitious trader to a double story based on the so-called butterfly effect in complex systems; and finally two stories set in Abruzzo, one developing a plot weaving between pandemic and witches and the other with Celestine V and Benedict XVI, the two resigning popes, as indirect protagonists.