Mazhar ul Islam was born the 4th of August 1949 in Punjab, two years after the foundation of Pakistan. After the retirement of his father, he moved with his family to Wazirabad and later, in 1967, to Islamabad, where he spent most of his life at the service of the government, working for the State Television, the Ministry of Education and the National Institute for the Folkloristic Heritage. He has been also appointed as General Director of Literary Academy, while now is the President of National Book Foundation.
In this volume of short stories entitled The Season of Love, Bitter Almond and Delayed Rains, which is the first work of Mazhar ul Islam translated into Italian, there are 35 chosen stories written in 13 years and published in the following collections: The Man Alone in the City of Horses (1989), The Girl Drenched in the Deluge of Words (1987), Look at the City through the Doll’s Eye 1988, The Afternoon Posted in a Letter (1991).
The short stories published in this volume have in common the style and the theme. The style is that one typical of the prose of Mazhar ul Islam, i.e short stories characterized a surrealistic-realism, while the main subject are the oppressive and hallucinating reality and the unbearable anxiety, which in every story grows as in a climax until it destroys the personal identity and the integrity of the characters.
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