The Return of Clara Sanchez and the Minds of Nazzi's Serial Killers: New Releases

Here's a selection of new releases in bookstores, including novels, essays, investigative books, and reports presented this week at Adnkronos.

Ten years after "The Lesson Hour," Massimo Recalcati returns to the broad theme of school and the practice of teaching with " The Light and the Wave: What Does It Mean to Teach? ", published by Einaudi . Every teacher is both a light and a wave: a light because it broadens the horizons of our world, pushing us toward the necessary subjectivization of knowledge; a wave because it embodies the student's impact with something that resists, with a difference that cannot be matched and which, precisely for this reason, forces us to find our own unique style: what has been learned through schooling must be revisited in a unique way, reopened, reinvented. If these two movements of the teacher are not active, knowledge becomes devitalized.

Then there is the important issue of school, to which this book devotes much attention. How is it possible to preserve the grace of light and wave within its institutional framework? How is it possible not to reduce its action to that of a technical transmission of more or less specialized knowledge, but instead to safeguard its broader formative role, which is to contribute decisively to shaping our children's lives in a unique way? These are the questions Recalcati poses and asks himself.

'The House That Awaits the Night,' Clara Sanchez's new novel

A faint sun peeks out from between the rooftops of the Calle de Velázquez neighborhood. A light that's enough to create a play of colors on the door of number 39. It's the place where Alicia, a young twenty-year-old student unsure of what to do with her life, finds herself. She has only one certainty: every afternoon she stops in front of a large building. It's not her decision. Leading her there is Rafael, the child she babysits. Clara Sanchez is back. The Spanish writer returns to bookstores, published by Garzanti , with " The House That Awaits the Night ," and promises to once again keep her readers glued to the pages.

In the novel by the author of "The Scent of Lemon Leaves," Rafael, just one year old, has eyes that see more clearly than Alicia's and seem unclouded by the uncertainties of the future. The child, in fact, points her toward the building's entrance with words and gestures; she refuses to believe him, until, after his insistence and tantrums, she decides to put aside her skepticism. When he enters, Rafael points to a fifth-floor apartment where a tragedy has occurred. Some time earlier, a boy named Hugo left home and never returned. No one knows anything about that mystery. Yet, Rafael is asking her, in his own way, to delve into that disappearance. To not stop at appearances. Alicia feels she must listen to him. Because sometimes strangers can be united by fate. And the only way to find direction is to abandon the light and choose the night, letting ourselves be guided by our deepest instincts.

In "Predators," Stefano Nazzi recounts America's most ruthless serial killers and those who tried to stop them.

There were years in America when evil seemed to lurk everywhere. The FBI called it the epidemic, the golden age of serial killers, of which nearly two thousand existed between the 1960s and 1990s. They killed silently, methodically, with imagination, and often with a reassuring face. With his intense and compelling prose, Stefano Nazzi, in "Predators," published by Mondadori , retraces those dark decades, taking us into the minds of some of America's most terrifying serial killers. Like John Wayne Gacy, who dressed as a clown at children's parties and buried teenagers outside their homes. Edmund Kemper, the gentle giant who argued with Shakespeare's agents and then returned to dissect corpses. David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, who claimed to be acting on the orders of a demon-possessed Labrador. And then there's Dennis Rader, a family man and security technician, who signed himself BTK 'Bind, Torture, Kill'; and Aileen Wuornos, who claimed to kill in self-defense, but actually did so six times, in cold blood. And like Ted Bundy, cultured, brilliant, magnetic, "a typical American boy who kills typical American girls."

Alongside them are the stories of the women and men who pursued, studied, and catalogued them. In the basements of Quantico, two FBI agents, Robert Ressler and John Douglas, began analyzing the profiles of serial killers and then talking to them. Together with psychologist Ann Burgess, they visited maximum-security prisons and interviewed thirty-six serial killers. From those conversations, profiling was born, the idea that behind apparent chaos lay a method and that unpredictable actions could therefore be predicted. It was Ressler who coined the term "serial killer," Douglas who outlined the first typologies. They looked for patterns, models, and recurring themes. They were the first mindhunters. This book is the story of that era. A journey into the minds of America's most ruthless predators and those who tried to stop them.

Matteo Nucci talks about "Plato: A Love Story"

This is the story of an "athlete of the soul." A thinker who challenged every cliché, to give posterity the chance to constantly challenge life, the order of things. This is the story of "Plato. A Love Story," as the title of Matteo Nucci's new book, now available from Feltrinelli , suggests. It's a novel of truth, the one you hold in your hands—as we read on the back cover—a novel that for the first time retraces the life of the greatest philosopher of all time. Initially a shy and easily angered child, Plato was grieving the premature death of his father, dominated by an omnipresent mother, and cared for by a sister who accompanies him through the world without letting it show. The boy scrutinizes the events of his time with omnivorous eyes and witnesses, astonished, Athens' defeat by Sparta. His uncles invite him to participate in a bloody political operation, but he resists. He met Socrates, the strangest man in Athens, and with him he devoted himself to philosophy. But philosophy wasn't enough; Socrates was sentenced to death. Plato then set out for Cyrene and Egypt to find his path. It would be a path both straight and tortuous. What marked her, however, was eros, the sensual love experienced with lascivious boys and brilliant men, and all-encompassing love, sublime passion, the most powerful engine of the human soul.

With his unmistakable style, Matteo Nucci delivers a timeless novel, the fruit of years of study and healthy obsession, which allows us to once again transcend the shadowy line of literature, transforming our reading experience into an epic, erotic, and enlightening chapter of life. In Plato, we discover a man constantly striving to achieve justice and happiness, an "athlete of the soul." Following his pains, failures, and loves, at the end of this captivating read, we will find ourselves changed: profoundly changed by a philosophical writer capable of challenging every cliché in order to give us the opportunity to constantly reconsider our way of living the time we are given.

Emanuele Trevi talks about 'My Grandmother and the Count'

"Like certain girls so shy and retiring they seem anonymous, who reveal their charms at the right moment, in the space of a summer, at sixteen or eighteen, beginning to shine like stars newly discovered in the sky, my grandmother became beautiful after eighty." She is a grandmother with the features of an archaic goddess, Peppinella, the protagonist of ' My Grandmother and the Count' by Emanuele Trevi, in bookstores from Solferino , a peremptory Calabrian matriarch who, like a queen, lives revered by two ladies-in-waiting—Delia and Carmelina—but who, like any common woman, watches 'The Bold and the Beautiful' in the afternoons. In her garden dominated by the imposing cibbia, her grandson Emanuele spends—immersed in books—the endless summers of his childhood and youth. And it is in this hortus conclusus that one fine day Peppinella sees a Count appear before her, also in his eighties and a scholar of Bourbon history, who offers her a bunch of flowers and asks permission to cross his property, to shorten the route from home to the village.

Step by step, an unexpected, belated affection blossoms between Peppinella and the Count, free of anxiety and pretension, and unselfish. "As if trapped in a crystal ball, they guarded an inaccessible secret, the formula for a spell of which both, unknowingly, possessed the half necessary to complete the other," writes Emanuele Trevi, who was a close witness to his grandmother's love story. And in these pages, full of intimacy and wit, he restores and transfigures a family narrative suspended between the everyday and the eternal, woven with a poignant sense of time.

'The immense distraction' by Marcello Fois

"Ettore Manfredini, even though he had just died, had the distinct sensation of waking up on the morning of February 21, 2017." Thus begins Marcello Fois 's new book, which returns to the great family novel, this time in a mythical and very real Emilia, made up of fields, farms, industries, and endless plains. For a moment spanning almost three hundred pages, Ettore retraces the decisive moments, the great joys and great sorrows of his lineage. And finally he sees everyone as they really were. The Manfredinis transformed a simple slaughterhouse into an empire, with the determination of those who know poverty and the cunning of those who have understood how to escape it. But everything about them, their relentless interplay of emotions, alliances, silences, and power, is based on deception. This is what the Manfredinis are: ruthless, very human. Come and meet them.

It's a dawn like all the others, only slightly longer, when Ettore Manfredini wakes up freshly dead in the house next to the slaughterhouse that was the center of his life, and whose every groan, every creak he knows. Born too poor to afford a regular education, employed as a boy in the kosher slaughterhouse he will take over after the racial laws, Ettore is a man destined for success: he will become one of the greatest entrepreneurs in Emilia, balancing big business with rural traditions. And on this livid dawn of February 21, 2017, as he faces the final reckoning, Ettore realizes he must retrace his memories to the very end. This is where the whirlwind story of the Manfredini family begins. Which is first and foremost the story of Ettore, but also of his mother, Elda, on whose unscrupulous opacity their entire fortune rests, and of his wife, Marida, saved from deportation but at a very high price, and of Carlo, the eldest, a son never fully understood, and of Enrica, the true mastermind behind the company's growth, and of Elio, his beloved grandson, and of Ester, who becomes entangled in the armed struggle, of Edvige, of Lucia... Marcello Fois's new novel is an extraordinary machine of memory, in which the grand design of history blends with small, crucial details: the taste of a donut eaten eighty years earlier, the perpetually broken shutter in the family home, two old armchairs on which the destinies of all of them were decided. And then the photo of twins in Auschwitz found by chance in an encyclopedia. Painting a fresco of a twentieth-century dynasty founded on flesh and lies, Marcello Fois offers us a simply majestic novel. Because living, perhaps, is nothing more than an immense distraction from dying.

Giuseppina Torregrossa recounts mother-daughter relationships in "Short is the Memory of the Heart."

How can relationships between mothers and daughters be symbiotic or conflictual? And why do these extreme feelings flourish especially between females? Stories often provide more persuasive answers than psychoanalysis, and Giuseppina Torregrossa, in her latest novel , "Corta è la memoria del cuore," published by Mondadori , writes a century-long tale of the women of the Accoto family, a magical story of silences and words passed down through blood, generation after generation.

It all begins with Teresa, born at the beginning of the 20th century. She is intelligent and tenacious, loves reading, and graduates. It is at law school that she meets her future husband, Luigi, who courts her with passionate letters, which she counters with restraint and dignity, and a certain austere irony that will always be hers. What lies behind Teresa's silence? What mystery? Could it be her strange gift, "a heavy eye," capable of peering into the souls of others and reaching out to the future? Elena, Teresa's eldest daughter and the novel's protagonist, has been tormented by this torment since she was a child. Ever since she longed for a sweet word or a caress that never came, she continues to ask herself this question even as, having become a mother herself, she tries to keep her daughter as close as possible and never let her voice go. Only today, when Teresa is approaching her hundredth birthday and Elena finds herself the grandmother of two granddaughters with clear, free voices, does the protagonist feel that the mothers and daughters of the Accoto family have finally found a common language, a thread that can hold them together and perhaps save them.

'Youssef's Seven Fairies' in 1990s Palermo, narrated by Linda Scaffidi

Linda Scaffidi's "The Seven Fairies of Youssef" is now available in bookstores, according to Fazi. Set in Palermo in the 1990s, the novel centers on Youssef, a young boy enchanted by the world when he and his family move to the courtyard of the seven fairies in Ballarò. His father, Ali, born in Morocco, is a strict man, faithful to tradition and deeply attached to his hometown, where he hopes to return with his family sooner or later. His mother, Taslima, born in Italy, desires a future for herself and her children in the Palermo where she now feels he belongs. For this reason, she insists on sending her son to high school, where, despite the mistrust and ridicule of his classmates, Youssef stands out as a model student, developing a passion for literature.

Youssef, who calls himself Peppe in his desire to fit in, spends his adolescence reading one book after another, trying to make friends with his peers, and falling in love with Teresa. His dream is to go to university and continue his studies without having to follow his family to Morocco. Opportunity seems to present itself in the respectable and generous figure of the Commendatore, an elderly gentleman who is struck by the boy's sensitivity and his love of poetry and who will try to help him make the most difficult decision of his life.

Alessandro Aresu talks about 'China has won'

While the West is lost in illusions and false prophecies, China is conquering the future. What is the historical lesson of its victory? What could it mean? These and other questions are answered by Alessandro Aresu, one of the most lucid voices in the Italian geopolitical debate, in his book "China Has Won," published by Feltrinelli's Scintille series . Aresu reinterprets the Chinese challenge not as an ideological clash between democracy and authoritarianism, but as a systemic conflict between models of power. "China Has Won" is not a rhetorical statement, it is a methodical provocation: to understand where we are going, the author believes, we must decipher Chinese strategic thinking, its historical origins, its industrial logic, its instruments of global influence, and its contradictions.

Alessandro Aresu charts the trajectories of Beijing's technopolitics, clearly describing the changing relationships between the Party, capital, technical knowledge, and global ambitions. From Confucian roots to artificial intelligence, from the enormous advantage in talent to productive superiority, Aresu paints a picture that transcends the dominant narrative of the "empire of control." It is the story of a political power curious about its adversaries and aware of its own strength. In these pages, the reader is challenged to reflect on the kind of world we are preparing to inhabit: one in which the West's victory or defeat will depend not only on China, but also on our ability to understand it, free from illusions and hypocrisy.

From September 10th, "A Russian Story" by Yevhenija Kononenko. How does literature influence us as individuals and as a society? Yevhenija Kononenko plays with her "Russian Story," in bookstores starting September 10th, with plots and quotes, on a journey through books and continents. A profoundly Ukrainian story, ironically despite its title. The protagonist is Yevhen Samars'kyj, who discovers himself and his country, Ukraine, during the years of the fall of the Soviet Union, as a young man, before being forced to emigrate to the United States, where material comforts and some professional satisfaction will not be enough to make him truly happy. But what determines his destiny is something as abstract as it is concrete: Russian literature, with its archetypes and its constraints. In "A Russian Story"—in bookstores published by Edizioni E/O on September 10—written in 2012, two years before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Yevheniya Kononenko reflects with the irony and mastery so typical of her writing on the complexity of every identity, on a largely and long-ignored political and cultural colonialism, and on the power of words and stories. Between choices and fatalism, modernity and roots, kitsch and lyricism, Yevhen wanders between Kyiv, the Ukrainian provinces, and the Midwest in search of himself and a true home, escaping Pushkin and his characters, without truly managing to free himself. How does literature influence us as individuals and as a society, influencing our decisions and guiding us without our knowledge? In a book that simultaneously celebrates writing and desecrates the aura of classics, Kononenko plays with plots and quotations, hybridizing and recomposing them, in a journey through books, eras, and continents that is also an invitation to explore Ukrainian culture and its many facets. A profoundly Ukrainian story, ironically despite its title.