Curzio Malaparte, an Italian born with a German heritage, was a journalist, dramatic, novelist and diplomat. In 1941, he was sent to cover the Eastern Front as a correspondent for the Milano daily newspaper, and his dispatches reverberated among readers as painfully real depictions of a landscape at war. Murch first came across Curzio Malaparte's writings in a chance encounter in a French book about cosmology, and was so taken by the strange, utterly captivating imagery he went to find the book from which the story was taken, leading to this body of work never before available to English readers.