About the Author
Mia Lecomte is an Italian poet and writer of French origin. Author of many publications, her poems have been translated into several languages and appear in Italy as well as abroad in magazines and collections.
A translator from French, Mia Lecomte is especially known as critic and editor in the field of transnational literature, to which she dedicated essays and anthologies. Among others, she is on the editorial board of the anglo-french poetry festival review La traductière and is a contributor to Italian edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. She is the founder and a member of the Compagnia delle poete (www.compagniadellepoete.com) and of Linguafranca (www.linguafrancaonline.org).
Read some of her translated works.
Read about Mia’s project The Compagnia della poete.
About the Translator
Brenda Porster was born in Philadelphia and completed her studies in the U.S. before moving to Florence, Italy, where she has lived and worked for most of her life. Her poems, written both in English and Italian, appear in numerous literary magazines, poetry anthologies and online literary sites in Italy and abroad, and have been translated into several languages.
For some years now she has been the Italian-English translator for Voyages, the Journal of New York University in Florence, and for the Florentine annual poetry festival. She has co-edited and translated three anthologies of contemporary women’s poetry in English and Italian.
Read some of his translation works.
Johanna Bishop is a translator from Italian with a particular interest in the overlap between literature and the visual arts. She has translated the work of artists such as Alex Cecchetti, Diego Marcon, and Giuseppe Penone, and authors and poets such as Maria Grazia Calandrone, Andrea Inglese, and Anna Maria Ortese. She lives in central Italy.
More about the Book
Chronicles of an Impossibility by acclaimed Italian author Mia Lecomte is a stunning collection of short speculative fiction that challenges conventional boundaries of realism, gender, and identity. Translated into English with lyrical sensitivity by Johanna Bishop and Brenda Porster, these stories unfold like whispered riddles—intimate, surreal, and quietly explosive.
Each story in this collection reveals a fractured reality: a mother witnessing the disintegration of her identity through her daughter’s ageing, a character who considers re-entering life by choice, and authors who vanish into their own inventions. These characters exist in a liminal world where nothing is fixed—not the body, not memory, not even the act of storytelling itself.
Lecomte’s writing is minimalist and poetic, saturated with symbolism and nuance. Her exploration of womanhood, psychological solitude, and the alienation of everyday life resonates across cultures. She invites the reader into a space where logic softens, emotional truths emerge, and identity is fluid and ever-shifting.
A masterful work of translated feminist literature, Chronicles of an Impossibility is a must-read for lovers of experimental fiction, lyrical short stories, and international voices that disrupt the familiar. It is a book that asks not to be understood, but to be felt.
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