Nocturnes
Short stories in one language at a time, written inside a measured vocabulary. Strange, short, and not written for a textbook.
Every story stays, for the most part, inside the most frequent words of spoken speech in that language, counted against a corpus of film and television subtitles rather than estimated. Everything outside that is in the word list at the end of the story, in the order the words appear.
Three levels, one city. A lift that stops at a floor that does not exist, a shop that sells silence, a tram that turns left, a hotel room where it rains. The people from the first book turn up in the background of the second, and in the third they all meet.
The first three volumes are in Italian and are being published now. When they are out, they appear here and at the bottom of each language page.
Word frequency is counted over the OpenSubtitles corpus, the same source used for the archive on this site. Nothing in the books is machine translated, and every untranslatable word carries a pronunciation and a note on what it actually does in the language it comes from.