Italian Literature

After more than twenty years, the legendary Bar Sport and its magnificent heroes have undergone the transformations of time: the proverbial Luisona pasta has disappeared, in the Bar Veramente Fico they now display brioches invisible to the naked eye; among the customers no one has a natural color anymore, and you can admire the apricot or vitel tonné tans of men rather than the biscuit colors of blushers and Caribbean women; new elements, among which the infamous cell phone operators stand out, very skilled at answering the trill in the most difficult situations. And then the evolutions of the perennial bar creatures: the invisible man who spends hours in front of the counter trying to get a coffee, the pissed off bar guy, the old ladies in the corner (translated; Goodreads).

The definitive edition of Calvino's cosmicomics, bringing together all of these enchanting stories—including some never before translated—in one volume for the first time. In Italo Calvino's cosmicomics, primordial beings cavort on the nearby surface of the moon, play marbles with atoms, and bear ecstatic witness to Earth's first dawn. Exploring natural phenomena and the origins of the universe, these beloved tales relate complex scientific concepts to our common sensory, emotional, and human world. Now, The Complete Cosmicomics brings together all cosmicomic stories for the first time.

A planet colonized only by women fleeing Earth; a space station that shows signs of life that are too human; a passionate and perverse artificial intelligence; aliens a little too naive to face Earthlings; a world of fiction and control that no one escapes, just like ours. Is this the future we are heading towards? Nine of the best Italian genre writers (among them, Nicoletta Vallorani, Alda Teodorani, Mariangela Cerrino, Elisabetta Vernier and the young Egle Rizzo) offer the reader the opportunity to look towards the near future thanks to their characters, worlds and social structures that, although close in time, hint at surprising twists (translated).

Presents a selection of gothic tales, including "The Legends of the Black Castle," "A Spirit in a Raspberry," "A Dead Man's Bone," "The Elixir of Immortality," and "The Fated."

In 1964, with the stories of Gogol's Wife, New Directions introduced English language readers to the indelibly strange Italian master Tommaso Landolfi. Each tale is more astonishing than the next (what with a sacrilegious ape and an inflatable wife), though the stories are all delivered in a smooth and oddly decorous way. Casting its spell, this combination of the outré and the well-mannered unnerves the reader. The stories' duality is the stuff of nightmares, though the author's real nightmare, according to his champion Italo Calvino, is 'that nothingness does not exist.'

A small village in Friuli, a native land and a home, and above all in the center of the forest. The Fountain of Lorraine is the novel of three women: the protagonist Eva, her sister Astrid, her daughter Giulia; while men flee, flee, end badly, inexorably. A self-taught and talented painter, Eva will meet the creatures of her destiny in the woods: the woodsman Goran, who has come to give her courage and love, and a great painter. It will be he with his art that will allow Eva to keep her forest intact and show her the primary source of life, the fountain that brings uncontaminated water from the forest to the whole town. With this novel which has the rhythm of ancient medieval chronicles and the flavor of a story full of myths and symbols, Sgorlon reaches the pinnacle of his narrative experience (translated; Mondadori Store).

The labyrinth is a legendary place: it participates in myth, religion, magic. Herodotus reports that when going up the Nile to Louqsor, he saw the most prodigious of labyrinths: three thousand underground corridors would have surrounded two large temples and many sanctuaries! At the heart of this dark intertwining of tortuous paths, sometimes without a way out, was the secret chamber with the tombs of the pharaohs and the mummies of the sacred crocodiles. But Herodotus did not see the most famous labyrinth of antiquity, the one that Daedalus invented to shelter and hide the Minotaur given birth by Queen Pasiphae, the wife of Minos. At the palace of Knossos he had imagined a secret home where the bull-headed monster was waiting for its victims to eat themselves from their flesh (translated).

Martin Padway was a smart enough young man, with a scientific education, but no universal genius. He had the misfortune to be dropped back suddenly into a former time, and a very alarming time at that—sixth-century Rome, when the Goths ruled Italy and civilization in the West was collapsing. To make a living, and to try to shore up civilization, Padway undertook to introduce inventions...Some worked and some didn't...

Man of Smoke, Aldo Palazzeschi's experimental anti-novel, was first published in 1911 as part of the Italian Futurist movement. It is now recognized as one of the most original creations of early twentieth-century fiction. Quite literally a "man of smoke," Perelà appears one day to delight, inspire, and alarm the men and women of the City. His popular rise and disgraceful fall—marked by a series of encounters with every type of modern citizen—make for an often hilarious and sometimes nightmarish social satire. The Man of Smoke becomes the pivotal metaphor around whom the author weaves his tragicomic play between lightness and heaviness. Palazzeschi offers an existential vision of human life that stands besides the best works of Pirandello, Svevo, Calvino, or Musil.

A selection of the best noir and fantasy stories of the Italian nineteenth century. From Carlo Dossi to Giovanni Verga, from Ippolito Nievo to Arrigo Boito. The most representative writers of our romantic, realist and decadent literature allowed themselves to be seduced by the mysterious charm of ghosts and alchemists, and gave life, with their skilful narrative art, to disturbing atmospheres and breathtaking stories (translated; Google Books).

A selection of fourteen unique stories by author and artist Dino Buzzati (1906–1972).

Contemporary fantastic fiction, particularly that written by women, often challenges traditional literary practice. At the same time the predominantly male-authored canon of fantasy offers a problematic range of gender stereotypes for female authors to 're-write'. Fantastic tropes, of space in particular, enable three important contemporary Italian female writers (Paola Capriolo, b. 1962; Francesca Duranti, b. 1935 and Rossana Ombres, b. 1931) to encounter and counter anxieties about writing from the female subject position. All three writers begin by exploring the hermetic space of enclosure with a critical, or troubled, eye, but eventually opt for wider national, and often international spaces, in which only a trace of the fantastic remains. This shift mirrors their own increasingly confident distance from male-authored literary models and demonstrates the creative input that these writers bring to the literary canon, by redefining its generic boundaries.

This essay explores the history of contemporary Italian science fiction through the work of four authors. The versatility of Lino Aldani's pen, the elegant eco-centrism of the poetess and narrator Gilda Musa, Vittorio Curtoni's balletian experimentation, Vittorio Catani's techno-scientific imagination, all exemplify the lively landscape of science fiction written in Italian between 1960–2010. A large introductory chapter draws on the background of the science fiction genre in Italy: authors, publishing and fandom, high and low market, relationships with other media, insights and distrust of literary criticism.

A history of Italian science fiction through the main periodicals. "I Romanzi di Urania", "I Romanzi del Cosmo", "Oltre il Cielo", "Galaxy" and "Galassia", "Futuro" and "Robot" are the laboratories that, between the 1950s and 1970s, proposed science fiction as a recognizable genre declined in many different ways. These are the places where the translations of Anglo-American science fiction, the first Italian authors, the criticism and the debates around the genre found their place and developed. The study traces the history of these publications and the protagonists who populated their pages, to reconstruct, between space adventures and urban dystopias, reuse and invention, the dawn of science fiction written in Italian (translated).

In Fantastic Echoes in Contemporary Italian Literature, Castagnino argues that contemporary Italian fiction often uses fantastic tropes to address realistic concerns. In doing so, he establishes a connection between the tradition of Gothic and fantastic fiction and societal concerns over topics such as ecocriticism, ecofeminism, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and personal and collective memory. The study of, among others, Nicola Lagioia, Simona Vinci, Alessandro Perissinotto and Michele Mari delivers a powerful rendition of the practical applications that fantastic and Gothic tropes have for an understanding of today's Italian fiction.

Even though the genres of science fiction and horror have only been practiced in Italy for a few decades, the fantastic tradition has ancient roots that date back at least to the "nonsense" (as Cardinal Ippolito d'Este called them) of Ludovico Ariosto. However, excluding the genres preceding the birth of the modern novel, this book deals with writers who have tried their hand with a certain consistency at the various types of imaginative literature, from the marvelous to the strange, from the gothic to the disturbing, from the fantastic tout court to the weird up to the consumer genres of horror fiction, science fiction and fantasy. An excursus that starts from certain Operette morali by Giacomo Leopardi to continue with the Scapigliatura movement and continue with the now classics of twentieth-century fantasy, from Capuana to Verga and Bontempelli up to Buzzati, Calvino, Landolfi and Morselli, finally arriving at Valerio Evangelisti, Danilo Arona, Pierfrancesco Prosperi, Renato Pestriniero, Dario Tonani, Licia Troisi, Barbara Baraldi etc. The volume is structured in alphabetical entries by author and is accompanied by numerous boxes that examine in a more precise manner particular literary currents or editorial phenomena, from Scapigliatura to futurism, from proto-science fiction to fantarchology up to the very recent currents of connectivism and new weird, without neglecting the history of the most significant publications and the important role of curators and critics (translated).

This book explores Italian science fiction from 1861, the year of Italy's unification, to the present day, focusing on how this genre helped shape notions of Otherness and Normalness. In particular, Italian Science Fiction draws upon critical race studies, postcolonial theory, and feminist studies to explore how migration, colonialism, multiculturalism, and racism have been represented in genre film and literature. Topics include the role of science fiction in constructing a national identity; the representation and self-representation of "alien" immigrants in Italy; the creation of internal "Others," such as southerners and Roma; the intersections of gender and race discrimination; and Italian science fiction's transnational dialogue with foreign science fiction. This book reveals that though it is arguably a minor genre in Italy, science fiction offers an innovative interpretive angle for rethinking Italian history and imagining future change in Italian society.

This volume explores Italian science fiction from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, covering literary texts, films, music and visual works by figures as diverse as Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Peter Kolosimo, Primo Levi, Antonio Margheriti, Gilda Musa and Roberto Vacca. It broadens the horizons of both Italian studies and the environmental humanities by addressing a long-neglected genre, and expands our understanding of relations between the ecological, the imaginary and the sociopolitical. The chapters draw on a variety of methodological frameworks, including animal studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, eco-media studies, energy humanities and posthumanism. The reader will gain insights into consequential topics such as anthropocentrism/speciesism, ecomodernist thought, environmental justice struggles at the planetary and regional level, non-human and new materialist ontologies, utopian/dystopian philosophies and prospects for transitioning beyond the crisis of petro-modernity through the construction of post-depletion futures.