Belma Goralija left suddenly. I didn't have time to meet her in her house or at the café, as I had thought. Nor did I have time to return to Sarajevo, where she lived. Accessory was the pandemic that cancelled the plane ticket I had bought two years ago. Now I regret this lost time and I am shocked at the voracious time of human nature in which our days flow. We will not be able to meet, talk, listen. I will no longer be able to write what I should have written. Then I and anyone else may ask: what to do with the time that remains? Just that time, our time that we have left to live. Before it was the time to run, to write, every day. Of telling others what life daily life disclosed. Today it seems to me the time to grasp the memories of those we have met, because they have something or perhaps a lot to teach. This verb seems beautiful. "The time that remains" pass through their faces, their stories, by what they have taught us. The index of the book will be the letters of their names.

Filippo Landi was born in Rome in 1954. He graduated in Political Science at the University La Sapienza in Rome. In 1978 he participated in the founding of the weekly "Il Sabato". He joined RAI in 1987. Correspondent in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait during the First Gulf War, then in former Yugoslavia and Sarajevo, during the years of the siege, in Kosovo and Albania. In 2001 he returned to the Middle East, as RAI correspondent in Cairo and from 2003 in Jerusalem, where he remained until 2014. On his experience in Kosovo he wrote Un treno per Blace (La Meridiana, 1999).

Since her recent literary debut, this author's stylistic maturity and ability to structure the narrative in time has attracted literary attention. Francesca Zupin constructs a limpid tale in perfect balance between pain and grace. Recomposing in a kaleidoscopic sequence a forty-year period of lives, Zupin draws up a story of undercurrent loves, almost friendships, silent deaths, disenchanted relationships. However, the enchantment is actually all profound and it is made up of powerful feelings and disillusions which move beneath the characters' lives like distant, invincible magnets. The fulcrum lies in the character of Nina, a figure who will remain in the considerations she causes in readers and in their hearts. Zupin elegantly sketches the places that host these small and intimately grand affairs, the seaside town, its gentle and poignant meeting places, two balconies, a pastry shop, certain steps. With equal finesse she conjures up distant places - the United States, Germany - with departures, returns, a sailing ship, arriving letters. The confident tone of this writer's voice, a singular blend of sumptuousness and sobriety, is a new and beautiful presence in our Italian literature.

Francesca Zupin was born in Trieste. She graduated from Milan's Bocconi University and completed a master's degree at the Holden School. She works in an international scientific university in the Middle East. Her first novel Salvamento (Bollati Boringhieri Editore) was published in 2022.

Bodo lives with his mother near the Lorettoberg. Bodo and Mom work in their workshop: washing, ironing. Bodo likes ironing very much. Whenever possible, before going to sleep, he looks out of the window and the breeze coming down from the Lorettoberg comforts him. Bodo falls asleep melancholy and serene. He is simple-hearted, but has sometimes unsettling enthusiasms, kept calm pharmacologically. Bodo loves Mom. Bodo falls in love with a customer. When she and her family return to her country just over the border, Bodo's love takes over.

Franco Stelzer's mastery gives us a marvellous character, a presence that is not to be forgotten. The text, with Central European veins, is inlaid with a profoundly Italian language, as beautiful as a snow crystal. A tale whose precise and measured dose of enchantment makes the prose and its rhythm capable of painting such a creature, Bodo, adhering to her delicate dementia with all the complexity and intelligence of the voice that narrates it. His empathy towards the figure he is inventing is total, with a hint of cruel harshness that concerns Bodo, but above all, exemplarily through him, all of us. This love story is a powerful whisper. The absolute pain that runs through it, however, only comes in second, because the winner, on a knife's edge, is instead a mysterious and inalienable happiness.

Franco Stelzer was born in 1956 in Trento, where he returned to live in 2002, after long stays in Bologna and Germany. He worked for many years as a teacher of Literature at a linguistic high scool. He was a translator from German (Perutz, Ungar, Tumler, Gruenbein), he writed the volumes of short stories Ano di volpi argentate (2000), Il nostro primo, solenne, stranissimo Natale senza di lei (2003), published by Einaudi, and the novel Matematici nel sole (2009), published by Edizioni Il Maestrale. In 2018, Einuadi published his last novel Cosa diremo agli angeli.

Namir, a young Iraqi scholar with a PhD from Harvard, is hired by filmmakers to document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. On an excursion to Baghdad, Namir ventures into al-Mutanabbi Street, famous for its bookshops, where he meets Wadud, an eccentric librarian who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by the war: from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna to human beings. Namir becomes obsessed with Wadud's archive and, looking back on his life in New York, discovers how deeply intertwined it is with fragments of his land's past and present. Almost a stylistically ambitious "landscape exercise" between the wreckage of war and the power of memory.

Sinan Antoon, born and raised in Baghdad, is a poet, novelist, translator and academic. He received a doctorate in Arabic Literature in the United States in 2006. His poems and essays have appeared in several journals, in English and Arabic. His published novels include 2010's Wahdaha Shajarat al-Rumman ("Only the Pomegranate"), winner of the Best Arab Book Award in 2014. He is currently an associate professor at New York University's Gallatin School and co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya magazine.

This small book/catalogue brings together the biographies of the artists and musicians who were finalists in the Fourth Edition of the international prize that the Fondazione Merz dedicates to the figure and work of Mario Merz, to whom it is named. The Mario Merz Prize, created in 2013, was created with the desire to launch a new project projected towards the future of art and to identify and highlight personalities in the field of art and allow young composers to propose themselves for an innovative contemporary music project.

The two sections of the Prize, music and visual arts, saw for this edition the participation of artists Yto Barrada, Paolo Cirio, Christina Forrer, Anne Hardy, He Xiangyu and Koo Jeong A. The finalists were Katherine Balch, William Dougherty, Farzia Fallah, Füsun Köksal and Claudia Jane Scroccaro. The book is completed by images of the works that are part of the finalists' exhibition, held at the Fondazione Merz in Turin from 9 June to 25 September 2022.

There is the ocean. There is the sycamore, and the jujube too. There is the war. There are mothers, daughters. And there is the habaryar, the little mother. There are Mogadishu, Rome, the Europe of hers and the Europe from the African history. Ubah Cristina Ali Farah's world unravels in a complex and clearly contemporary space, marked by profound references to an ancient wisdom and an often, but not always, dreamlike dimension. The first collection of short stories published in Italy includes the entire literary journey of Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, as well as a series of poems and an unpublished play. The refinement of her language emerges powerfully, showing the international stature of one of the most interesting Italian writers on our artistic scene.

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is a Somali and Italian writer and poet. Winner of the Lingua Madre Prize (2006) and Vittorini Prize (2008), she's the author of three novels: Madre piccola (Frassinelli, 2007; 66thand2nd, 2022), Il comandante del fiume (66thand2nd, 2014; 2022), Le stazioni della luna (66thand2nd, 2021) and the ekphrasis La danza dell'orice (Juxta Press, 2020) inspired by a work by Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu. In 2018 he worked on the rewriting of Antigone directed in Palermo by Giuseppe Massa and the libretto of the community opera Silent City for Matera 2019, directed by James Bonas with music composed by Nigel Osborne. He is a consultant for UNDP Somalia on the Oral History Histography for Peacebuilding project.