From Murgia to Atwood, the new releases in the bookstore

Here is a selection of new releases in bookstores, including novels, essays, investigative books and reports, presented this week by AdnKronos.

'Anna of the Rain' by Michela Murgia

Almost two years after her death on August 10, 2023, Einaudi is publishing ' Anna della pioggia ', a thoughtful selection of rediscovered stories, along with some more well-known ones, by the Sardinian writer. Anna runs only when it rains, and while running she thinks about dishwashers, ornaments, dolls: everything, just to avoid directly confronting what she is really running away from. Along with her, the overflowing catalog of characters that animate this collection of stories includes graduate shepherds and night porters, barefoot runners and children who recite in Sardinian while the allies bomb Cagliari, terrorists, poachers, financiers, octopus fishermen and even plants, capable of undermining the certainties of defiant men. There are powerful women's voices who speak out for the first time: not only Morgana, but also Helen of Troy, Beatrice Cenci who rejects the authority of an abusive father and Odabella who challenges that of Attila, king of the Huns. And of course there is Michela, who tells of when she used to crush grapes in the harvests of her rural childhood, or how her prayers resurrected one of the moths she raised with her brother, or why anyone born on an island ends up with a shattered identity. These stories, scattered like gems in a pirate treasure chest without a chest, have never been collected in a book before.

Because Michela Murgia read them aloud in occupied schools and theaters, told them to those who went to listen to her at festivals, published them in school diaries, exhibition catalogs, even in the program of an opera. Others appeared on her blog, were broadcast on the radio or were published in local newspapers. Still others circulated only among Michela Murgia's friends, like private literary spells. 'Anna della pioggia' offers a reasoned selection of these rediscovered stories, along with some more well-known ones.

The curation – in every sense that can be given to the term – is by Alessandro Giammei, who worked philologically on the digital archive left to him by Michela Murgia. The result is a brand new, surprising book, which revolves with dizzying vitality around the themes that have always been dear to the author: the Sardinia of myths and colonial politics, the power of women, work, queer identities, illness, miracles and fears of our century. Because Michela Murgia has never stopped being tenaciously passionate about the world and the ways we choose to inhabit it, understand it, fight it and tell it: this is also demonstrated by the variety of registers, tones and styles that move underground story after story. Allowing readers to rediscover first of all the prodigious literary talent of the author of 'Accabadora'.

'Rotten Blood' by Antonio Manzini

Back in bookstores from June 24 with Piemme 'Sangue marcio', the narrative debut of Antonio Manzini, twenty years after its first publication. Pietro and Massimo are two privileged children. Theirs is a wealthy family and they have everything one could wish for: a villa with a swimming pool, a private tennis court, the first video games. A happy childhood, suspended in a bourgeois dream. Until, one autumn day in 1976, the world collapses. The police burst into the house and the father is arrested. The newspapers, a few days later, will rename him "the monster of the Cinque Terre". Almost thirty years later, the two brothers could not be more different. Pietro grew up in an institution in Turin and became a crime reporter. Massimo, entrusted to an uncle, is a police commissioner.

What unites them again is a trail of crimes, signed by a ruthless serial killer. Time has changed them. Massimo, an impulsive boy who put everyone in line with his motto 'Go hide in Tibet' is now an empty man, with too many shadows and too many Martinis in his body. Pietro has an introverted character, incapable of letting others approach him. But the past is not forgotten. And so, while the killer continues to strike, the two brothers get closer again, so much so that they find themselves facing a showdown, back to the day the world collapsed. Rotten Blood is a magnetic novel that delves into the psychology of the characters, forcing the reader to confront the dark side of the human being.

'The Barman of the Ritz' by Philippe Collin

'The Ritz Barman' has just arrived in bookstores with Rizzoli. With a well-groomed moustache, a white jacket and a black tie, he has just turned fifty-six. Frank Meier is the renowned barman at the Ritz in Paris, the most sought-after salon for the cultural and political elite of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century; but starting in June 1940, with the entry of the Germans into the city, the new customers at the bar are the men of the Gestapo. Adapting, now, is a question of survival. A Jew of humble origins, always accompanied by an insatiable thirst for redemption, a lover of beauty and capable of becoming the confidant of extraordinary personalities such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Meier is the fire of this novel, the hub around which a varied court of characters, both historical and otherwise, moves. At the Ritz, an enchanted place where the time of war seems to be suspended, a microcosm that becomes a mirror of the Nazi occupation of Paris, the story of men and women grappling with a new power and the simplest spirit of self-preservation unfolds.

The fate of Meier, his assistant and the irresistible Blanche Auzello keeps the reader in suspense, and the attitude of the barman, always on the edge between resistance and collaboration, makes him a half-hero, a human being full of nuances and infinite doubts. Behind the dark wooden bar, Frank Meier must save himself and those he loves. In opening the doors of the Ritz to us, Philippe Collin demonstrates a passionate attention to detail that has made this place a symbol, a treasure chest ineluctably wide open on History.

'Negotiating with Shadows' by Margaret Atwood

Orientation, Duplicity, Dedication, Temptation, Communion, Descent: these are the intriguing titles of the six lessons held in Cambridge by Margaret Atwood on the art of writing, and transcribed by her and collected in the volume 'Negotiating with Shadows: On Writing and Writing' published by Ponte alle Grazie.

After thirty years of writing fiction and poetry, Margaret Atwood addresses the major questions at the heart of her work: what a writer is, and how one becomes one; the Jekyll and Hyde split that characterizes those who write; the delicate balance between social responsibility and artistic integrity; the eternal triangle writer-book-reader; writing as a descent into hell, to renegotiate our relationship with death.

As will have happened to those who have listened to them in person, reading these lessons one is enchanted by the brilliance of the theses proposed, by the surprising variety of references cited - which indicate new paths even to the most experienced reader -, by the colloquial and often ferociously ironic tone of the author. An essential text, which forcefully inserts itself into the twentieth-century tradition of classic writings on literature by Nabokov, Auden, Valéry, Bachmann, Calvino. And what's more, a unique opportunity to get to know one of the greatest voices of modern literature.

'All this happiness' by Roberto Emanuelli

Roberto Emanuelli's 'Tutta questa felicità' is out in bookstores with Feltrinelli. Can we still believe in love after our hearts have been broken? Gabriele is forty years old, has a young daughter named Alba, and a job as a teacher that he has always lived as a vocation. Now, after a stint in a high school in the center that coincided with a relationship that ended badly, he has returned to teach in the Roman suburbs where he was born and raised, with a hint of melancholy and disenchantment. The tormented love story, culminating in a betrayal, has left him with deep scars because it is Alba's mother. Gabriele now has a daughter to raise alone, a faded enthusiasm for teaching, and a distrust of love that prevents him from fully experiencing new relationships: like the one with Marta, who grew up in the same neighborhood and is Alba's dance teacher, for whom the little girl is crazy.

Noemi, on the other hand, is a twenty-year-old who still believes in love. She was born in the northern part of the city, a context that is anything but humble, even if at times there is nothing that makes her feel more uncomfortable than that environment: between the suffocating expectations of her parents, the judgmental attitudes of her friends and a boyfriend, Edoardo, who sometimes seems to fill her with fake attentions without ever truly understanding her. Luckily there is Christian, the boy from the suburbs with whom Noemi has struck up a secret friendship. Apparently light years away from her world, Christian is perhaps the only one capable of understanding her. What brings them together is their passion for writing, a fire that they carry inside as an expressive urgency and search for happiness.

Gabriele and Noemi, two lives that run parallel, touching each other in an imperceptible but not negligible way. It happens often, in that subtle and continuous game between our choices and destiny: infinite and apparently insignificant doors that slide, that close, that open, that open worlds, and close others... Right on this magical and invisible thread - made of coincidences that do not seem like coincidences, of signs that arrive when we are ready to see them - the lives of Gabriele and Noemi will end up crossing in an extraordinary way. An encounter that will represent the opportunity to find ourselves again. To love again. To be happy.

'The Duce's Head' by Beppe Boni

Beppe Boni's 'La testa del duce' will be available in bookstores on June 18th with the publisher Minerva. Who stole the head of the equestrian statue of Benito Mussolini that dominated the Littoriale stadium in Bologna? Where is the 'Testone' today? And why, even today, does its fate continue to raise questions, passions, and divisions? Beppe Boni, former co-director and now editorialist of QN - il Resto del Carlino, tries to answer these and many other questions in the true-to-life novel 'La testa del Duce', published by Edizioni Minerva.

A gripping book, written as a detective story but based on a rigorous historical investigation, which delves into the lesser-known aspects of the twenty-year period and the city of Bologna, telling how and why fascism wanted to link its personality cult not only to propaganda and repression, but also to architecture and sport. And how, over time, those symbols were torn down, hidden, removed – or perhaps just moved silently, leaving an enigma behind. It all begins on July 26, 1943, the day after the fall of the regime. In Bologna, a celebrating crowd enters the Littoriale stadium – now Dall'Ara – and knocks down the equestrian statue of the Duce, located under the Maratona Tower. The bronze colossus, symbol of an era, breaks into several pieces: the bust is dragged around the city, the head comes off and... disappears. Thus begins the “Testone mystery,” a story that spans decades, wars, reconstructions, economic booms and historical revisions. Boni's novel follows the trail of that marble head, and at the same time reconstructs the epic of the Littoriale stadium, a project desired by Leandro Arpinati - an anomalous fascist, a convinced athlete, friend and then enemy of Mussolini - as a symbol of a modern and powerful Italy, united under the banner of football and propaganda. 'La testa del Duce' is not only the story of the fate of a statue, but also a reflection on collective memory and the symbolic power of images. The book, with a preface by Italo Cucci, interweaves documented facts, anecdotes, interviews and historical reconstructions with a compelling and accessible narrative style. It starts in the 1920s, with the rise of fascism and Mussolini's interest in football as a tool for consensus, and arrives up to the present day, between attempts at removal and sudden reappearances of the 'Big Head'.

In the middle, the life and death of Arpinati, the man who wanted the stadium and was murdered by communist partisans in 1945; the architectural and symbolic history of the Littoriale; the construction of the equestrian statue entrusted to Giuseppe Graziosi, who used bronze melted from Austrian cannons to model the face of the Duce; and the attack on Anteo Zamboni, the fifteen-year-old from Bologna accused of shooting Mussolini on the day of the stadium's inauguration. In times when we are discussing cancel culture, symbols removed or reclaimed, revisionisms and rewritings of history - explains the publishing house - "'La testa del Duce' inserts itself with intelligence and irony into the debate, offering ideas for understanding how memory is always a construction - often contested, never neutral".

'It was the son' by Roberto Alajmo

One of Roberto Alajmo's most beloved novels, 'It Was the Son', is back in bookstores with Sellerio. The Ciraulo family lives in one of the poorest neighborhoods of the city, yet in front of their door they keep a black Volvo in full view, purchased with the money obtained following the death of their daughter: a compensation intended for the victims of the mafia. The arrival of this flaming car is a sort of neighborhood miracle, it seems to open the doors to a new existence full of possibilities for the whole family: for the father Nicola, undisputed patriarch, a professional of precarious work at the limits of legality; for the mother Loredana, modest, compliant, yet hidden director of unpredictable strategies; for the grandmother Rosa, a talkative master of reticence; for the grandfather Fonzio, always elusive as a matter of principle. And finally for the son, Tancredi, with his sudden melancholy, indecipherable to his relatives and the neighborhood, a paradoxical counterpart of his enterprising namesake in The Leopard. When Tancredi, during an evening out with his girlfriend, carelessly scratches the side of the car, the storm breaks out: there is an argument, father and son face each other with brutal violence, until a gunshot is fired.

'It Was the Son' is an anthropological noir, a heretical mystery that seems to begin provocatively from the end and page after page reshuffles the cards on the table. The gun with which the shots were fired is missing. Doubts and uncertainties emerge, the initial evidence seems to crumble. Each chapter of the novel adds new details to the entire story and at the same time seems to digress, forcing the reader to deal with a city that is at times comical and grotesque, but always on the brink of social disaster.

The Ciraulos' adventures flow backwards in time, first accelerating and then slowing down to the point of freezing, always supported by funny, surreal and cruel dialogues. With this novel with an apparently bare language and sulphurous comedy, somewhere between Raymond Carver and Alan Bennett, Roberto Alajmo deconstructs the detective genre, starting from Greek tragedy but having fun transforming it into the most cutting of human comedies.

'Uri' by Kamel Daoud

'Uri', the book with which the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud won the Prix Goncourt in 2024, is now published in Italy by La Nave di Teseo. Alba is a girl from Oran, Algeria, she has magnificent eyes, she owns a beauty salon, she dresses in jeans and non-traditional clothes, she smokes in public and even dares to show off her tattoos. She is a free, independent and modern young woman who feels increasingly uncomfortable in the reactionary and traditionalist turn of Algerian society. But Alba is also a survivor, having miraculously escaped the massacre of her family when she was only five years old, during the civil war that shook the country in the nineties. On her body, she still bears the traces of that terrible experience: a scar on her neck, a cannula for breathing and completely destroyed vocal cords make her not only mute, but also, in spite of herself, a symbol of that period of violence that Algeria wants to forget at all costs.

Alba has discovered she is pregnant for some time and has already decided to abort, but the creature growing in her womb is the only one who can hear her voice. Who can listen to her inner language and her story, and it is to her that the girl tells it, sharing her fears and her traumas, until she decides to face the past and that tragedy that has marked her life. Crossing a country hostile to women's rights and that has passed specific laws to punish anyone who speaks of civil war, Alba returns to her hometown where it all began, and where the dead, perhaps, will answer her questions. Kamel Daoud gives back to the forgotten, the innocent victims and the survivors of the terrible Algerian civil war the voice that was taken from them with a brave and moving, powerful and lyrical novel.

'The Crime of Thinking' by Paolo Crepet

The new essay by psychiatrist and sociologist Paolo Crepet, 'The Crime of Thinking', will be published by Mondadori on June 17. We live in an era that more than any other celebrates freedom and proclaims it an absolute right. Yet something doesn't add up. A thin, silent fog has crept into our lives: it doesn't prohibit, it doesn't order, it doesn't punish. It seduces. And while it promises tranquility and well-being, it pushes us toward homologation, turning off critical thinking, inhibiting creativity and the courage to be different.

In this new essay, Paolo Crepet focuses on one of the most insidious drifts of our time: the censorship that does not come from above, but infiltrates our daily lives, our gestures, our languages, our choices that we no longer make. It is a gentle, pervasive, invisible conformism that invites us to stay in our comfort zone: the place where we do not make mistakes, but neither do we grow. With his brilliant and provocative writing, Crepet takes us on a journey against the current, to rediscover what truly makes an existence free: doubt, imagination, conflict. Because freedom, he reminds us, is not a slogan, but a tiring and daily exercise, which requires courage, lucidity, disobedience.

A special warning is reserved for the youngest and educators: enough with the obsessive search for perfection and happiness at all costs. We must restore dignity to error, failure, defeat, essential steps for healthy and balanced growth, because "storms can even be salvific and brighten the horizon". Through anecdotes, reflections and touching personal experiences, Crepet challenges us to rediscover the courage of imagination and the strength of authenticity, giving us a true manifesto for those who reject homologation and want to rediscover the power, today revolutionary, of free thought.

'Are you Lando's son?' by Massimiliano Buzzanca

Massimiliano Buzzanca talks about his father Lando, revealing the man behind the actor, in 'Ma che sei il figlio di Lando?' (Baldini + Castoldi). In a festively decorated church, a man cries behind a column. Tall and thin, he is a boy, next to him a little girl seems to console him. He is about to get married, but those tears do not express fear, but rather the fear of not being able to offer his Lucia the marriage she deserves. The fire of acting burns inside him, he wants to go to Rome and try to prove that he can be an actor and be successful, and then come back to get Lucia and the child she is carrying. Throughout his life, Lando Buzzanca has lived this dualism: on one hand, his fury for the set, for the desire to tread the boards, on the other, his passion for the only woman he has ever loved.

Strict in his family, smiling, cheeky, impertinent when he acted. From the audition for Gassman, to the great roles for Germi, De Sica, Festa Campanile and many others, he worked with the Gotha of Italian cinema, often embodying the figure of the Italian male type, super-gifted and boastful. But who was Gerlando – Gigi – Buzzanca really? In this self-contained biography, his son Massimiliano tells the story of the man behind the actor, the father as well as the artist, revealing anecdotes and memories that only those who grew up alongside him and saw his strengths and weaknesses can reveal, also explaining what it meant to be "the son of Lando Buzzanca".