An athlete dies in circumstances that cannot be explained, and reconstructing his life will be his girlfriend Hildi, commissioned by a publishing house to write a mémoire. Hildi thus begins to investigate, trying to shed light on the affair, on her beloved Bálint's colleagues and on the suffocating post-war atmosphere that surrounds them. Against the backdrop of a closed, controlled stadium, much like the Hungarian socialist regime of the time, a group of friends are united by a single, coveted goal: achieving supremacy, in sport and in their own lives, through challenge and self-knowledge. They soon discover that this aspiration will be anything but easy, almost as elusive as truth and death itself.
Finished in 1961, La morte dell’atleta only came out in Hungary in 1966 after having been published in French by Editions du Seuil (1965) and shortly before it was published in German by Hanser Verlag in Munich (1966), which prompted the Hungarian censorship to allow it to be published in Hungary. Since then it has been translated into almost ten languages.

Miklós Mészöly (Szekszárd, 1921 - Budapest, 2001) is one of the most significant Hungarian writers of the second half of the 20th century.
After graduating in law in 1944, he was sent to the front the same year, falling prisoner in Serbia. He worked as a playwright, from 1958 he collaborated with the literary magazine Jelenkor, co-founded the Széchenyi Academy of Arts and Literature, and was among the spokesmen of the Demokratikus Charta. Translated into many languages, he is considered the master of some of the greatest exponents of contemporary Hungarian literature (Nádas, Esterházy, Krasznahorkai). Among his best known works - for reasons of political censorship not many have been published - Magasiskola (1957), Saulus (1966), Pontos történetek, útközben (1970), Film (1976), Megbocsátás (1984), Otthon és világ (1994).

It is a carpet of stories woven on the ground, in Palestine and beyond the borders of identity. Esausti in croce ("Exhausted on the cross"), one of Najwan Darwish's most important collections of poetry, goes into the depths of the recent chronicle, and at the same time inserts it, like the embroidery that is typical of the Palestinian tradition, on a much longer history. It is a real journey in time and space, as well as in the relationships between souls. A physical journey, made up of stages, of reflections on places and cities. Poetry thus becomes the instrument to give substance – finally – to Palestinian invisibility. Invisibility of thought, of life, of women and men, of trees. It is poetry that is precise, sharp, political storytelling.

Najwan Darwish (Jerusalem, 1978) is one of the most important poets in the Arabic language. Palestinian, author of numerous collections of poetry, translated and published worldwide in over twenty languages, Darwish dedicates verses of rare depth and sharpness to his land and the people who are inextricably linked to it. A public intellectual and one of the best-known cultural journalists in the regional press, Darwish represents one of the highest peaks of poetry, not only Arabic, as Raúl Zurita also testified in his preface.

In his Materiali onirici di un somarello marino ("Dream Materials of a Seahorse"), the author gives us what is so far his most mysterious book, an unexpected underwater tale. With fairytale-like movements, aquatic beings meet and turn away: a blue goldfish, a Pippocampo hippocampus, sponges, crabs, prawns such as Lucio, and an enigmatic seahorse named Italia. These beings move through scenery of abandoned wrecks, seabeds, tuffaceous stones, corroded metal railings mixed with molluscs, and corals. However, the tale has a painful soul, every character swim in a nightmare full of dangers (including us humans with our nets and aquariums), and nobody is master of his own direction. This is an important text to penetrate the writing of this narrator of ours, a Ligurian of hinterland and steep stones who here descends directly below the surface of the sea and shows us in the form of an apologue what moves beneath the earth's crust of stories.

Marino Magliani was born in a Ligurian valley and has spent most of his life outside Italy. Today he lives between Liguria and the Dutch coast, where he writes and translates. Writer, translator, comic book scriptwriter, his latest novel is Il bambino e le isole (66thand2nd, 2023), while his latest translation is Islario fantastico argentino (TARKA editions, 2023). Perhaps, he would never have written "The Speech of a Hippocampus" if he had not called himself Marino.

Through the story of the tarantella, a passionate and ancient dance of celebration, courtship and healing, Gilda Policastro engages in a pressing exploration and reflection on her own evolution, a cultural, sentimental, sexual and existential evolution. In La ragnatela, each sentence encapsulates and demonstrates the writer's skill and intelligent mastery. Because it is the way it is written (the rhythm, the astonishing mixture of lexicons derived from spheres that are in themselves distant, which in her hands collide and flourish in the same paragraph, the essentiality of the writing) that makes the text astonishing: how the author managed to find an unexpected USB port in our cerebral circumvolutions is unknown, but the fact remains that the download we manage to make of so many third-contents is as quick as a spider bite.

Gilda Policastro has published, among others, the novels Il farmaco (Fandango, 2010), Cella (Marsilio, 2015), La parte di Malvasia (La Nave di Teseo, 2021) and the poetry books Non come vita (Aragno, 2013), Inattuali (Transeuropa, 2016) and La distinzione (Giulio Perrone, 2023). A lecturer in Italian Literature, he collaborates with the Molly Bloom Academy of Creative Writing in Rome and the cultural websites Le parole e le cose. Literature and Reality and Snaporaz. He has published essays on contemporary authors, including L'ultima poesia: scritture anomale e mutazioni di genere dal secondo Novecento a oggi (Mimesis, 2021).

In order to finally solve the chronic adversity of Italian train delays on the scheduled timetable, an ingenious solution is found: timetables are abolished by law!
With a weakened, seemingly benevolent writing style, Andrea Vitali sets up a situation with fabulous tones that seems suspended in time. The apologue flows amusingly, with a grain of madness, dislocated from factual reality with millimetric precision, just enough (not a step too far) to welcome the reader into a pastime of blissful escapism.
Storia di treni, ministri e minestrine encloses a core of merciless, radical, bitter satire on our country in an operation of refined realism. Only by fully mastering the art of storytelling is it possible to hang an entire story from an initial paradox that continually generates others, until a mocking, circular closure. This dystopian but backwards-looking Italy (trains, yes, but with a 19th-century flavour, one might say) is the contraption that Vitali gives us to sing along with him this small, devastating, surrendered, light-hearted taunting about our country. He does so with skill, amusement and cruelty.

Andrea Vitali was born in Bellano, on Lake Como, in 1956, where he has always lived, practising as a doctor until 2013 and then devoting himself solely to writing. His debut novel was Il procuratore (Camunia Editore) in 1990. His most recent titles are Genitori cercasi (Einaudi, 2024) and Sua eccellenza perde un pezzo (Garzanti, 2024). He currently collaborates with Il Fatto Quotidiano.

In Turin, for the first time, Khalil Rabah's Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind takes the form of an archaeological site, in which the visitor is invited to immerse himself in a historical narrative rendered through testimonies and clues. In the spaces of the Fondazione Merz, the artist challenges the role of the museum as a mere container and focuses on art as a tool for the interpretation and correction of history. Khalil Rabah's artistic practice ranges between painting, sculpture and installation to construct a lucid and careful analysis of history and its interpretations, questioning their narrative modes and the perception they generate. Fundamental themes such as change, memory and identity intersect in his work, creating new ways of representing communities and relationships. ways of representing communities and the relationships that make them up.

The catalogue accompanies the project conceived by Khalil Rabah for the Fondazione Merz and was created as an extension of the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (PMNHH). Developed as a nomadic museum institution that the artist inaugurated in 2003, Rabah's museum, which includes departments such as geology, botany and palaeontology, has seen several iterations around the world and is identified as a project in constant evolution.

Khalil Rabah is a Palestinian conceptual artist born in Jerusalem in 1961. He studied Architecture and Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Arlington and has resided in the United States for over a decade. His most recent solo exhibitions include Casa Árabe, Madrid (2016); Kunsthaus Hamburg (2015); e-flux, New York (2013); and Beirut Art Center (2012). As well as major group exhibitions, including Manifesta 12 Palermo (2018); Sharjah Biennial (2017); Marrakech Biennial (2016); Kochi-Muziris Biennial (2014); Thessaloniki Biennial (2013); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012); Mathaf, Doha (2010); and Venice Biennale (2009). Rabah is the initiator and artistic director of the Riwaq Biennale and a co-founder of the Al Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem. From 2011 to 2015 he served on the curricular committee of Ashkal Alwan's Home Workspace programme in Beirut, Lebanon.