“Basically, I’m just so sick and tired of feeling like an imposter every single second of every single day,” writes Salvatore Pane, a University of Pittsburgh MFA alum, in his Autumn House Fiction Prize-winning story collection, “The Neorealist in Winter.”

For the anxious characters who populate these stories, whether dealing with the mistakes of the past or anticipating future dilemmas, few are able to discover either the confidence or the feelings of self-actualization they crave.

In “Take It Out of Me,” Dr. Rinaldi, a professor of Italian languages and literature, decides to visit a “class reimaging facility” in order to have all the working-class images from an impoverished youth erased and replaced with middle- and upper-class images. Gone are “Uncle Mort’s racist Thanksgiving tirade or how you had to wear Salvation Army hand-me-downs to college” to be replaced with an insider’s knowledge of wine and classical music. The remarkable process expresses all the unmanageable memories that shock and trigger a person as physical symptoms: “Hemorrhoids. Broken teeth. Jock itch. Warts.” Horrible, yes, but ridding herself of her past keeps Dr. Rinaldi alight with possibilities.

Not until seeing the ugly parts of her life sealed away in jars as medical waste does she consider what might have been lost. The ending of “Take It Out of Me” hits as both shocking and inevitable, and moments like this one are where Mr. Pane’s writing shines, placing both character and reader in an existential quandary freighted with so much ambivalence that we feel a real charge of appreciation.

In “The Faith Center” an American finds himself working in Rome for three months — a kind of dream come true for this Italian-American. His employer is loosely associated with the Catholic Church, and while as a lapsed Catholic he’s not looking forward to the religious aspects of his duties, he’s been assured that they won’t cause any real inconvenience.

However, a welcome dinner has been organized for him at “The Faith Center” — a religious policy institute that concerns itself with Catholicism in the modern world. An anxious person by nature, he is immediately triggered when he sees so many clergy, dressed in black, their outwardly benign expressions masking, he thinks, a message of intolerance. Quickly, anxiety becomes a full-blown panic attack as he remembers the day when his high school best friend, “a willowy, sweet kid, former altar boy, deeply religious” came out to him and he “did not handle it well.” This last euphemism for his failure to negotiate the gap between Catholic dogma and his own developing opinions — a thing that even now, even in beautiful Rome, he can’t forgive himself for.

In the title story, “The Neorealist in Winter,” 1970s wunderkind director, Jackie Donato, considers the cinematic influences that made his early successes possible. This includes the Italian neorealist Pietro Marciano, whose film “La Penitenza” so powerfully influenced his conception of what films could do, that they “could also hurt you.” The film is about a former fascist who asks a priest to forgive him for what he did during the war. When the priest spits on his shoe, the man climbs a high tower and jumps to his death.

Later, Donato learns that the film was Marciano’s own penance for having worked on propaganda films for Mussolini, saying, “…I would have surrendered anything to become a director. I would have given up so much more.”

Mr. Pane’s characters are, like many professionals with working-class backgrounds, displaced outsiders who feel like imposters regardless of achievement, and who also believe they can never go home again or really reconnect with the roots that made them who they are. It’s a cruel kind of self-knowledge, and like Pietro Marciano’s film, has the ability to both entertain and hurt us. Nevertheless, capturing that combination of pleasure and pain is “The Neorealist in Winter’s,” and Salvatore Pane’s, great accomplishment.

Jeffrey Condran is the author of the story collection “Claire, Wading into the Danube By Night” and is the co-founder/​publisher of the independent literary press, Braddock Avenue Books.

First Published: October 29, 2023, 10:30 a.m.