This important work offers to the students of Italian culture a new approach to literary texts and a variety of exercises that exemplify and reinforce strategies of reading. It consists of a selection of prose taken from the major writers of modern Italian literature and is designed for students who have already acquired the backbone of the Italian language at the intermediate level. This versatile text may be used in a conversation class, in an introductory literature class, or in a language class aimed at the stylistic analysis of the text with a review of major syntactical and grammatical points of language.