Buzzati is one of the great Italian writers of the twentieth century, renowned for a touch that is as lyrical as it is light, as well as for his fantastical imagination. The Stronghold, previously translated as The Tartar Steppe, is his most celebrated work, a book that has been read as a veiled attack on Mussolini's fascist militarism, a prophetic allegory of the Cold War, and as an existentialist fable. Lawrence Venuti's new translation reverts to the title that Buzzati originally intended to give his book, and seeks to bring out the human and the historical dimensions of a story of proven power and poignance.