Italian
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Switching Languages
At the Guardian, Jhumpa Lahiri recounts the path that led her to write her latest book in Italian, though she is a non-native speaker: A week after arriving [in Rome], I open my diary to describe our misadventures and I…
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Language and Exile
Over at the New Yorker, writer Jhumpa Lahiri has written a hauntingly beautiful personal essay about learning Italian, leaving English, and finding her voice in linguistic exile: How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn’t mine?…
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Can’t Read Italian? Ask Mom To Translate
After reading the first two books in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, Sara Goldsmith enlisted her mother to translate the third book from Italian so that she didn’t have to wait another year for the English release. Now, for Slate, Goldsmith shares how…
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A Three-Wheeled Library
Retired school teacher Antonio La Cava thought up an innovative way to bring the books he loves to children in remote Italian villages. He bought an Ape motorbike and hand-built a portable library. He travels around southern Italy in his ‘Bibliomotocarro,’…
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The Beautiful Private Life of the Other
Italian photographer Olivier Fermariello’s collection, Je t’aime moi aussi (NSFW)—a striking gallery of the sexual lives of the disabled—gives a glimpse into the private sphere of those who fall outside culture’s narrow standards of beauty. These people were willing to give…
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“Lol My Thesis” Illuminates Academic Achievement
If you had to sum up your undergraduate thesis in one sentence, what would you say? That’s the question posed by the Tumblr Lol My Thesis, and the answers are…pretty amazing. Recent examples include “Italian has 23 mutually unintelligible dialects,…
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What Jhumpa Lahiri is Reading
If certain books are to be termed immigrant fiction, what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn’t agree with me. Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant…
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #33: A Touch of Goth in Old New York’s Little Italy
When your mother-in-law pushes aside Elizabeth Street, the acclaimed novel by Laurie Fabiano, and says “She didn’t get it right,” it’s time to pull up a chair and listen. Christina Randazzo tells great stories that span decades but her most…