Le attitudini is a historical-archival romance about two marginal young people caught in the fever of late-eighteenth-century Europe: Bruno Röder, a sickly German youth drawn toward Jena Romanticism, and Marianna “Nenna” Di Dio, a Salentine orphan educated in Naples under the dazzling shadow of Emma Hamilton. It wants to be a novel about youth, revolution, […]
Prologo Durastanti opens with an animal fable about writing essays. A Stork decides to abandon fiction for essays, but first meets other literary animals: a novelist tired of narrative traps, a peacock-like public confessor looking for new pain to display, hens fighting over whether egg-laying is biology or philosophy, ants excavating forgotten female ancestors, and […]
Liberi tutti is a school-gate melodrama disguised as a confession, and its biggest problem is that it thinks its own frantic moral cleverness is enough to carry a plot. The narrator is Titti, a first-grade teacher at the Rocco Carbone primary school, speaking to investigators after an incident involving her class. She insists she can […]
La persona peggiore is a shapeless autofictional midlife-crisis novel about Raffaella, a newly married woman who flees Rome for Bali because marriage, adulthood, work, friendship, family, class, aging, fathers, men, yoga, sex, feminism, capitalism, Milan, Rome, and her own life all make her feel trapped. The book wants to be ruthless, funny, feminist, self-lacerating, and […]
Cigni selvaggi is a grim, familiar, and often sloppily written trauma novel about Teresa, a young trans woman from Palermo who moves north to study, fails to survive economically, enters the night-club world, is exploited repeatedly, and eventually becomes a successful comics artist. The book wants to be a fairy-tale descent, a memoir-like coming-of-age story, […]
Mauro Colarieti’s Crunco follows Enea Cruncotti, nicknamed Crunco, a twenty-two-year-old gay man trapped in the fictional provincial town of Lezzago in the Bergamo lowlands, where he works in his father’s butcher shop after abandoning university and watches his former ambitions rot alongside the carcasses he cuts up every day. The novel begins with Enea and […]
Claudio Calò’s Tobia Tillerman fuori stagione is the story of Tobia Tillerman, an Italian-British man approaching forty who has built a glamorous international career in fashion while privately struggling with grief, memory, failed love and the suspicion that he has spent most of his adult life turning emotional pain into polished anecdotes. Tobia works as […]
This is a historical novel that blends real figures, fictional narration, myth, and memory to tell the story of the small Mallorcan village of Deià and the extraordinary group of artists who transformed it during the twentieth century. The novel is not only about Robert Graves and Laura Riding, the famous poet couple who settled […]
The novel opens in 1930 with Adelasia Martinelli (born into a poorer Modena family) on her wedding day. The story immediately establishes that this is not a conventional romance but a tale about inherited suffering, women’s anger, memory, and the ways trauma travels through generations. The narrator explains that Adelasia’s life changed not because of […]
Le belle ossa is a coming-of-age novel, a grief novel, and a strange almost-fantasy about childhood, friendship, mourning, and the danger of living too long inside a wound. The narrator is Bruno Gramaglia, who looks back on the death of his mother Veronica and on the secret brotherhood that forms around one stolen bone. The […]