To Kiss the World Through a Veil of Lead is a series of 45 short stories divided in three volumes and written by Gui Machiavelli. The texts try to imagine experiences that are alien to us, experiences that lie at the limit or even beyond what humans can feel and understand. Paraphrasing Thomas Nagel, these stories want to know “what it is like to be a bat”, an octopus, an infection, a planet, an erupting volcano. These stories want to believe in an empathy that is not simply a mirror, that is not painfully restricted to that which is like me.