This blog is not dead.
I’vebeen simply away on vacation.
More news soo.
The Doctor is In
Next story on the drawing board – Il Motore di Mario.
Mario’s Engine.
The author is Alessandro Defilippi – writer, psychoanalyst.
The real thing – he even has a short entry on Wikipedia.
Mario’s Engine is a long story, 16 pages.
It is set in Turin, and soaked with jazz music.
Miles Davies, Duke Ellington.
Coltrane.
As it deals with an engine one would expect a science fiction number, maybe a hard science fiction number, but there’s something softer and darker underlying it all, that makes the story had to classify.
Is this truly the New Italian Weird?
Maybe.
But we don’t need no stinking badges at this moment.
The text is thick on the page and deceptively plain – sounds like a monologue, like a confession.
Like a sitting with your favorite shrink.
It will be a long job.
It will be a learning experience.
Growing (up) in public
First post.
Better explain what’s happening here.
It is now five years that Turin-based small-press publisher CoopStudi publishes Alia, an international anthology of imaginative fiction – collecting Italian, English-American and Japanese authors between the same covers.
It has been a slow burn, but now the anthology is well established and respected.
Low sales figures, but great press and a dedicated audience.
In the past five years, we often discussed the opportunity of doing a book in English, translating the best Italian authors in our catalog, for all those readers that can’t just pick up the Italian books.
This is the time.
We have a set of ten writers, each represented by a story – his best story, according to readers polls and his or her own opinion.
Wide-ranging in theme and genre, each of them represents a new way of approaching the imaginative tale in Italy.
From this small pool of stories and ideas, we’ll try to build a book.
We still need a cover, and a title.
We need notes and introduction.
We need a preface.
And the actual translations of the stories are still long in the coming.
I’ll translate the stories, and in the meantime will jot down my impressions here.
To keep up to date anyone out there interested in the project.
To force myself to keep a certain pace and rhythm.
To force the book into being.
