Italy
-
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Martin Seay
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Martin Seay about his debut novel The Mirror Thief, the Great Work of alchemy, researching optical prosthetics, and keeping plot lines straight in a 600-page novel.
-
Dressed to Kill
Italy has always provided the cutting edge in fashion. Now, the cutting edge is providing the fashion. Italian women in prison are now producing top-of-the-line fashion items that are pretty amazing: Here, women inmates at several nearby prisons have turned…
-
Countries, Languages, and Writing
But what about those writers who move to another country and do not change language, who continue to write in their mother tongue many years after it has ceased to be the language of daily conversation? Do the words they…
-
Dance, Write, Love
Before this semester in Italy, I had enjoyed writing for school, but now for the first time I was driven to write for myself. I began to need to write like I had needed to dance. Was I replacing one…
-
This Week in Indie Bookstores
A bookstore in mafia-controlled Sicily refuses to stock a book by the son of a jailed mafia “boss of bosses,” Totò Riina. P.S.Bookshop, a used bookstore in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood, is finally closing after a year-long struggle with higher rent.…
-
One Hundred Thousand Miles
No one cares, of course, if you’re still capable at forty-four of being bad, or if you think you’ve got to be bad sometimes just to know you’re alive.
-
A Neapolitan Adventure
As I discovered during a visit in September, the series of books offered a unique view of this complicated city, leading me away from popular tourist sites and helping to explain the city’s social, economic and geographic divisions. To view…
-
Glass Cases
What more do we remember of a story, of a life, really, than a gesture, a face, an expression frozen on the page?
-
Proof of Passage
The scrutiny left me angry and exposed. We know; we are not whole. The unraveling was so slow; we were each undone, stitch by stitch.
-
This Week in Indie Bookstores
Lohvinau House of Literature in Belarus will be one of the few shops one can buy Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s books in her native country. Her books are hard to find because Alexievich has been critical of the authoritarian government. Books…
-
The Light and Shadows of Truth
The true identity of Italian novelist Elena Ferrante invites much speculation, especially in light of her recent nomination for Italy’s most prestigious literary award. But for Ferrante, the decision to write in the shadows may be a liberating one. The…
-
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,’…