Current Projects... Forthcoming and In Progress
DIVORARE IL CIELO by Paolo Giordano
Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, In progress
(Einaudi, 2018)
Giordano’s latest novel is a book that will not leave anyone indifferent. On the
contrary.
Here too, as in his earlier works, the author has given us sensitively and
compassionately
drawn characters, “imperfect people in extreme situations” as one reviewer once
said
about his work. All in all, another haunting, moving work that will surely
engage readers.
SOLITARY by Maurizio Torchio
Forthcoming from
Seagull Books,
December 15, 2018
(Cattivi, Einaudi, 2015)
From the dark pit of an isolation cell a voice wells up. It is that of a
prisoner serving a life sentence
for kidnapping: a cruel play of mirrors that replicates perpetrators and
victims, imprisonment and freedom,
in a kaleidoscopic effect. What takes place in solitary confinement is pure
time, devoid of events.
So much so that it makes the world outside seem even more evanescent, more
unreal than the past,
more illusory than dreams. A coincidence of loneliness unites and equalizes
prisoners and jailers.
Solitary is a novel of suppressed words and feelings, distorted by the
internment that restricts them,
as well as a story of survival in extreme conditions. Critic Goffredo Fofi
wrote: “One of the best books
about the condition of captivity or, by extension, about the human condition.”
SNAPSHOTS by Claudio Magris
Forthcoming from
Yale University Press,
February 2019
(Istantanee, La Nave di Teseo, 2016)
A collection of quick takes whose dates range from 1999 to 2013, most of
the pieces are very brief, offering glimpses of life and culture as captured
through the author’s very personal lens. The panoramic nature of the
vignettes is broad in scope, encompassing a variety of subjects rendered
in quick, decisive brushstrokes and always engaging.
A DEVIL COMES TO TOWN by Paolo Maurensig
Forthcoming from
World Editions, May 2019
(Il diavolo nel cassetto, Einaudi, 2018)
A story within a story within a story, a manuscript found in the drawer of an
aspiring writer,
and a cleric’s tale about events that took place in the Swiss
village of Dichtersruhe (“poet’s repose”),
where Goethe is said to have once spent a night, and
which is now populated with closet writers.
A tale about rabid foxes, the devil
who appears in flesh and blood professing to be a publisher,
the collective
hysteria of the villagers, etc. An absorbing mystery on one level, the book may
also
be read as a wry apologue on vanity and conceit, as well as a fable about
popular superstitions,
such as the atavistic fear inspired by the fox. Like a
rabid fox that exhibits strange behavior,
approaching humans rather than fleeing
from them, the devil, too, plays tricks to get close
to his intended victim.
