“In Milan everything plays and everyone plays something.” A nice and in its own way captivating idea, that of the author to describe his city, Milan, through the five senses that man has: a clear perception of how the city is felt and envelops each person, even before it can be thought; an observation so true in a city where everyone is passing through life. In fact, as an old adage says, Milan is for...
“They had chased and waited for each other, only to meet again and again.” Let’s go back in time. Catania in the late 1930s, with fascism in power, winds of war ready to become a storm, cowardice and meanness tacitly disguised as nobility of soul and rectitude. Here two boys in their early twenties, Salvatore (known as Sasà) and Michele, meet one night on a beach and fall in love. A difficult love because the...
The Edoardo Kihlgren Opera Prima Award – an initiative of Amici di Edoardo ETS – has awarded three first works by young authors every year since 1997, involving high school students in selecting the winner. The objectives are to promote reading among young people and offer visibility to new authors. With 600 readers per year between schools, Barrio’s jury and honorary jury, the Award has recognized authors such as Roberto Saviano, Silvia Avallone, Marco Missiroli,...
“My family can be said to have never existed as such.” A collection of short stories published posthumously, in which Piero Chiara’s lovers find all the contents of his narrative style: Lake Maggiore, the gossips of the village, the fixed time of provincial life, the lost memory, the cynicism of the human being. Starting from the twenties of the last century, the events reported arrive up to the very early eighties, to ideally identify with...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “Today I’m going to be tough (and I’m crying while writing these lines).” Wandering through the shelves of bookstores these days you will find the latest reprint of the literary debut of Édouard Louis. A student of Didier Eribon, to whom the work is dedicated, he follows in his footsteps with the impulsive unscrupulousness that comes from being a few years younger than his master. Being able to do so, we read this...
“I’m working on a new problem: finding the value of n such that n plus everything else in life makes you feel happy.” Reading Cameron is an experience that everyone should have at least once in their life. In his writings he manages to describe the void that accumulates inside man, like the rings of a tree. A void that cannot be filled in any way, a solitude for which we are always alone in...
“He looked at his watch, trying to hurry up, to find the strength to get up. It was no use. Useless.” Giorgio Bassani returns to dig into the well of memories, in an ideal continuation of his past works, with the themes and places dearest to him: Ferrara and its surroundings, the racial laws, the character of the Italians, his high social position in a changing world with the potential danger of communists ready to...
“I know well that the weaker we are, the more we do harm ourself.” Open this book with its aggressive cover, with a black and white gaze, that stares at you and you glimpse a little the insolence of an unkind and unsolicited judgment, against you, the reader. Here, then you start reading and you understand that all that can be wrong is perhaps human judgment. Someone would say “and if this means stealing, only...
“It is not clear why, but as soon as the word “moral” comes into play, the clarity of thought becomes cloudy.” A book that could be deceiving in size (if someone were to think of being able to read it in a couple of hours) and title (American hallucinations have such a broad meaning!), but not in quality, which is high with peaks that are not very easy to scale; but after all, how could...
“He loved his mother deeply, but he was ashamed to show it. That’s why he was rebellious and disobedient.” We took a risk: deciding to read a book based on the cover, of which we had a superficial knowledge of the author. When we then saw that it was a book of short stories, not our favorite genre, we understood that the risk was complete. Yet, as often happens with texts with which we start...
