New Titles
Amedeo Romeo
DON’T CRY, YOU JERK / Non piangere coglione
novel
192 pages | March 2010
I watched her in the bathroom mirror. I was naked, my chest red, tears in my eyes, I was tired, still tired of living, the same tiredness I had felt in the fog that night. And I knelt before the sink and started to moan and sob. If Lena had touched me I would have died of despair; so she sat on the closed toilet seat and didn’t say a word, she didn’t reach with her hand, but she tilted her head and looked in the distance, and so she was looking at mankind, while with one hand she stroked her womb, which contained mankind. I was sobbing, slobber drooling from the sides of my mouth, I felt cold.
Andrea Morini is terrified of being a father, as much as he would love to be a mother. He is physically attracted to the female body, especially that of a pregnant woman. The very scent of a stretch mark cream arouses a whole erotic universe in him. Yet, at the same time, he wishes he, too, could carry a baby in his womb and bring forth life. This seemingly irreconcilable contradiction will lead him, among other things, to commute between Genua and Milan, to live on a chair, to befriend a slovenly old actor, to kidnap a kid, and most importantly to love Lena, who is pregnant with another man’s child.
Non piangere coglione is the neo-Existentialist novel of 2010. It describes, in a light-hearted and poetical way, the search for happiness of a man like any other. An intelligent and perceptive author, Amedeo Romeo attempts an answer to one of the most compelling questions of our times: what does it mean to want to have a child today?
Amedeo Romeo is an actor, film director, playwright and author of children’s books. He is Head Teacher at Teatri Possibili, Milan.
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Gabriele Reggi
FREE US FROM COPS / Liberaci dagli sbirri
novel
192 pages | January 2010
“It succeeds in being a material and surreal novel at the same time.[...] A tragic, rugged, agonizing western” – EUROPA
“The landscape is reminiscent of Magritte’s paintings, and things happen in a sort of eerie apocalypse. Science-fiction applied to sociology” – REPUBBLICA XL
How could that school have been planned the way I could see it? Underground. Dead, one could say. Pillars supported a flight of stairs that led down to the entrance door, thirty meters lower, as in one of Dante’s circles of hell. I nodded at the mechanic. He did the same. I walked down the stairs. The building had no plaster left on it, it was miraculously planted in the ground, as if it had been dropped from above, as if someone had helped it tumble down to the lowest point in town; something to be ashamed of. There. A school dump.
A substitute teacher at a school in the deep South of Italy, the main character of the novel soon realizes he has landed in a doomed village, reminiscent of a Stephen King book or an Italian B-movie, rather than Ignazio Silone’s or Ernesto De Martino’s novels. This is not just because mafia is so pervasive that everyone, grown-ups and youths alike, pray every day: Free us from Cops. Not just because the gang masters force all the women in the village to work in the fields, guarded by fierce Kapos. It is mainly because there is a tribal ritual that seems to keep the community together: a gory replica of the crucifixion that marks the fate of the village year in, year out. The teacher’s fate, however, is sealed from the very beginning: madly in love with the wrong woman – the Boss’ girlfriend, beaten and battered, he plans a great escape.
Gabriele Reggi was born in Roseto degli Abruzzi, Italy. He graduated from the Accademia delle Belle Arti. He is currently living in Rieti. He was a substitute teacher in a town in Southern Italy in the early Nineties.
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Paolo Caredda
OTHER DAYS, OTHER TREES / Altri giorni, altri alberi.
novel
202 pages | November 2009
A noir, visionary and moving fairytale, in between Nightmare Before Christmas and Brazil.
The most original and moving Christmas Carol ever written!
In a parallel and timeless Genoa, the Christmas Trees engage in fierce battles for the survival of the neighborhoods they represent. The guardian tree of Marassi, Gustavius, suffers from a serious illness which infects humans as well. Will it survive the battle against Mascherafuturo, the ruthless Tree of the rival neighborhood? And will Vinicio, the head doorkeeper, in charge of coaching Gustavius, be able to save Rocco and all the kids of the orphanage run by Mirella, the woman he loves? Other Days, Other Trees is a moving fairytale for grown-ups, rich in pop references and learned quotations: Tiger Mask, Tim Burton, Boris Vian, Jeunet and Caro’s The City of Lost Children, Terry Gilliam, Fist of the North Star and Iain Sinclair.
Paolo Caredda was born in Genoa and he has lived in Bologna, London, Milan. He directed hybrid television formats, mockumentaries on poets from Cogoleto who died at seventeen, sea bishops in communal fountains,
imaginary directors. He also directed real-life documentaries on ecstasy addicts, top-notch thieves, Dominican gangas, the Kazakhstan national football team, and Matthew Smith, the Syd Barrett of videogames. He published «Giorno di paga in via Ferretto» for the anthology Gioventù Cannibale and «La città uccello» for Paesaggi Italiani.
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Emanuele Tonon
THE ENEMY / Il nemico
novel
122 pages | September 2009
“A book that goes between every day life and spiritual invective, a consuming portrait of Northern Italy” – L’UNITÀ
Emanuele Tonon is the winner of Esor-dire Prize (2009).
The Pain of the Coffee-maker, by Emanuele Tonon
Official Jury’s virdict:
A visionary tale. A driving, dexterous rythm, forceful metaphors, an accomplished tale, vibrating in an authentic, painful realism. This is a scary tale, not because it tells scary things, but because while everything suggests horror in it, nothing really happens in the end. The most frightening thing in the world is to live with broken promises.
In this bipartite novel, Emanuele Tonon creates a memorable family epic, displaying a consummate mastery of style. Relentlessly alternating between high and low style, literary and coarse language, prayer and profanity, Tonon turns writing into a complex esoteric ritual to denounce the unbearable unfairness of existence. Factory life, wine, a dilapidated Benelli motorcycle, Internet and the voices of the dead: it all adds up to making this book a powerful, macabre, magnificent heresy. The enemy is blasphemy, the fierce accusation of a man towards god: an absolute and deceptive god, who would, if he existed, be liable for the hateful crime of sanctioning pain, death and betrayal.
Emanuele Tonon is born in 1970 in Napoli and now lives in Gorizia as a factory worker. The Enemy is his first novel.
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Domenico Rea
JESUS, SHINE A LIGHT / Gesù, fate luce
short stories
160 pages | February 2010
First published in 1950 by Mondadori / Viareggio Prize 1951
Afterword by Domenico Scarpa
“Arguably, no other Italian writer today has this introspecting ability” – ALBERTO ASOR ROSA
“Meaty, ruddy, baroque, glamorous and flashy.[...] A piece of “magnesiumflash” writing, a Caravaggesque illumination of the eternal city of Naples. Lights, shadows, loss, ecstasy, violence and perdition” – IL MATTINO
Nofi, Naples and its surroundings, in the time between Fascism and the departure of the Allies from Southern Italy: this is the backdrop for the twelve stories included in this collection. First published in 1950, these stories describe grieving and weary characters in their everyday lives: a couple fighting in an unseemly way, a fake cripple who scrapes a living under the Fascists, a beggar who steals from a convent’s cellar to feed his family, a peasant’s wild and wanton passion for a girl his age.
In his coarse but anxious writing, Domenico Rea focuses alternatively on the look of a man, the tension in a feeling, the voices in a courtyard. Every one of his stories straddles the fine line between tragic and comic.
Domenico Rea (Naples, 1921 – 1994) was a factory worker, a stenographer, a proofreader. He later worked for some newspapers, including La Repubblica and Il Mattino, as well as the Italian public broadcasting company Rai.
Previous foreign editions of this book:
Jésus, fais la lumière, Actes Sud, 1989 (France).
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Renzo Rosso
THE HARD THORN / La dura spina
novel
352 pages | January 2010
Afterword by Anco Marzio Mutterle
“Renzo Rosso can capture the essence of a man or a situation with just a few words, using no artifices, in a conspicuous style” – TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
“A perceptive and refined narrator, the author looks into human contradictions with millions of eyes taking a 360-degree look at the world” – ITALO CALVINO
“Its story proves the author’s umbilical relationship with Italo Svevo’s characters and atmospheres” – IL PICCOLO
“My heart bleeds / as any other heart. / The hard thorn that love inflicted to me / I carry it everywhere…” A poem by Umberto Saba gave the title to this novel by his fellow townsman Renzo Rosso. A famed pianist in his sixties, Ermanno Cornelis is back in Triest for a concert. But what he finds is a city in disarray, so rough and concrete that he cannot deny the decline of his artistic and physical performance much longer: the sex with young Giuliana is no exception.
La dura spina is a private and intimate story about the somber and unpleasant realization of aging. It is told in an eagerly matter-of-factly and perceptive way, and its consummate precision is reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s bourgeois interiors.
Renzo Rosso (Trieste, 1926 – Tivoli 2009) pursued musical studies from his childhood, following his mother’s wish. With a diploma in violin performance under his belt, he graduated in Philosophy. In 1951 he moved to Rome, where he has lived since, to work for RAI, the public Italian broadcaster. He also worked as a playwright. A pivotal encounter with Gadda started his career as a writer.
Previous foreign editions of this book:
The Hard Thorn, Alan Ross LTD, 1966 (UK)
La Dura Spinae, Nanteuil, 1965 (France)
La Dura Espina, Seix barral, 1967 (Spain)
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Matteo Sartori
THE MOTIONLESS / Gli inerti
192 pages | Aprile 2010
novel
Manuscript Available
Offended and confused, Pietro Keller, aged eleven, had stepped onto the stairs, with freezing hands and a panting chest. The ceilings of the old house in the woods had become dark behind his veiled eyes, and the mansion La Betulla had seemed to sink a few centimeters deeper into the wet earth under the weight of injustice, its windows and doors shaken by the painful vibration that departed from his tiny heart.
Meet the Kellers: well-to-do and restless, progressive and immobile. The Motionless is an engrossing family saga, told by Matteo Sartori from an innovative and modern point of view. Two moments (1973 and 1978) in Italian history are watched through the eyes of young Pietro, nicknamed The archivist, the last son of a sophisticated and unforgettable family, which typifies yesterday’s and today’s Italy. On the background, youthful loves and confusions, vitalism and impasse, betrayals and beatings, nostalgia and Formula 1 tragedies.
Gli inerti is a fine and moving novel, fraught with lost memories: the portrait of a world that has become corrupted with too much love, in spite of all good intentions.
Matteo Sartori was born in Milan in 1972. He works for a movie production company. In 1997, he published the novel Il magro Rio e la minoranza silenziosa (Frassinelli).
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