Natural Histories / Primo Levi, trans. by Jenny McPhee, 174 pp.

Short stories and sketches all themed on science and technology run amok with amusing and chilling results. There are chickens trained as government censors, a beautiful, frozen woman who is thawed annually as a sort of party trick, and a centaur who falls in love with a woman. Most effective are the connected stories of Mr. Simpson, a sales rep in Italy for the American company NATCA. The company are manufacturers of the Versifier, an elaborate machine which composes poems on demand, and a variety of other wizard-like gadgets, many of them startlingly prescient: the Minibrain, which fits in your pocket and will tell you "...how many among all the suicides throughout the world..were both left-handed and blond..." or the calometer, which snaps human faces and quantifies their beauty on a 100-point scale. Grim fun that reminded me a bit of Vonnegut.