For most of my life, happiness meant satisfying the hunger for life’s mysteries, discover   love, pain, or understand social justice through an astonishing amount of reading.  As a lonely and rather peculiar child, I was engulfed in books most of my free time.       Born in the same town the roman poet Ovid lived his last years and died I came to be inspired by the written word and its power.  Ovid’s Metamorphosis were always on my desk even if for a couple of years they made little to no sense to me.       I  also devoured Russian, British, and French literature and I did my best to read it in its original language.  I did the same with Dante’s Divine Comedy as I was convinced, and I still am to a certain degree that translation loses some of the subtleties the writer intended.       So when it comes to my own writing, the influences are very transparent.  Chekhov and Pushkin felt like always guiding my quill while Zola and Flaubert helped me choose my subjects without being concerned if a beautiful or ugly one.  The perfect use of the word, an honest and well-established rhythm, as well as a good structure was what I absorbed from the masters and tried my best to implement in my stories.  When crafting my stories I always tried to combine the dispassionate attitude of a scientist with the sensitivity and psychological understanding of an artist.