This is the enchanting story of a friendship between an adult and a child that begins with a shared love of comic books (Asterix, Alan Ford, Tex Willer). The adult is the author, the child is Bill Clinton, i.e. his first name is Bill Clinton (surname is another).

The story told here already in itself attracts the reader's sympathy: it is curious, original in its quiet everydayness, simultaneously and inseparably funny and serious. But since (we always tend to forget) no story exists if it is not told, it is especially important to say that it is Ugo Cornia's way of narrating that generates the enchantment. His voice, inimitable, sounds in every sentence, in every juxtaposition, in every concealed burst of intelligence. His writing, in all his texts, is a kind of song that resonates with discretion but infinite precision in our literature. It is made up of such personal timbres, melodies, prosodic trends and rhythms that this author is more identifiable than his fingerprints. It grabs you without you realising it, lulls you, leads you, bamboozles you.

Writing and voice are one and the same in Cornia, the same breath, and always when read at the same time heard. With an absolute degree of subtlety and purity, an indefinable humour little by little, unhurriedly, even wistfully, he offers us a further lens through which to observe life and experience, as if it were the precious gift of a gentle hypnotist.

Ugo Cornia was born in Carpi and lives in Modena. A graduate in philosophy from Bologna, he has taught in various high schools and has taught Italian for many years at I.I.S. Venturi in Modena. His debut novel Sulla felicità a oltranza, published in 1999 with Sellerio, placed him among the most interesting contemporary Italian narrators. His works include: Modena è piccolissima, illustrated by Giuliano Della Casa (EDT, 2009); Autobiografia della mia infanzia (Topipittori, 2010); Il professionale. Avventure scolastiche (Feltrinelli, 2012); Sono sociavole fino all'eccesso. Vita di Montaigne (Marcos y Marcos, 2015); La vita in ordine alfabetico (La Nave di Teseo, 2021) and Le storie di mia zia (Quodlibet, 2023).

Approximately where the 44th parallel North intersects the 8th meridian East, there is a place of memory that Marco Drago brings to life on the page with masterly skill. Drago summons his human beings into a kind of living nativity scene that has a Brewery instead of the Child. As much as this author's writing has an immediate grasp on the reader, skimming in its snappy journeys, concrete to the point of being decoded first by bodies and only later by minds, the outcome of each of his texts contains a compressed and compact worldview and a vision of life that is painful but amused, desolate but sumptuous, sarcastic but passionate - desperate and mystical.

Drago (like all those with a pure talent for writing) is inimitable in many ways. In particular, he has a mysterious ability that allows him to totally overturn the relationship between what we mean by ‘person’ and what we mean by ‘character’, i.e. between his pages live and meet people who everything suggests were in real life (beautiful) characters. Each one with a tic, or a fantasy, or an unmentionable disappointment, or a weakness, or a stigma, or an identity adherence to transient social roles, or an invincible drive, an artistic talent to dissipate, a falling in love.

In his nativity scene, people of beautiful interiority coexist with the more drifting outcasts. All in the bowl of life and time shredder. All loved and mocked in a single gesture by the author. We readers also converge around the brewery, because we feel that there is a buried pulsation there and perceive that only a writer like Marco Drago can make it so immediate.

Dry, poignant, definitive is the finale of this small and universal Bohème.

Marco Drago is a writer, translator and radio presenter. He has published: L'amico del pazzo e altri racconti (Feltrinelli, 1998), Cronache da chissà dove (Minimum Fax, 2000), Domenica sera (Feltrinelli, 2001), Zolle (Feltrinelli, 2005), La vita moderna è rumenta (Feltrinelli, 2012), La prigione grande quanto un paese (Barbera Editore, 2013), Baladin, la birra artigianale è tutta colpa di Teo, with Teo Musso (Feltrinelli, 2013), Sesso calcio e rock and roll (Feltrinelli, 2014) and Innamorato (Bollati Boringhieri, 2023). He has translated many books from English for major Italian publishers. Between 2000 and 2025 he wrote and hosted radio programmes with Gaetano Cappa for RadioRai, Radio24 and RSI. He is part of the artistic factory Istituto Barlumen.

The Pharaoh Amasi, XXVI dynasty, was a man of power whose models were neither the ‘golpe’ nor the ‘lion’, animals whose characteristics a prince should manifest, according to Niccolò Machiavelli's famous metaphor, to govern well. Amasi's model was another animal, according to the happy intuition of Giovanni Mariotti: the eel. Shifty, elusive, shifty, non-linear, cautious, slippery, elusive, the Pharaoh Amasi interpreted the role of the powerful in a decidedly unconventional manner, drawing on his own background as a grave robber. Even in death, Amasi remained as elusive as he had been in life. Instead, Mariotti manages to grasp him with this delightful, exquisite narration. In Amasi's interpretation of power and in the exercise he made of it, Mariotti sees a way, however fragile and imperfect, to keep the civilised life of his subjects within the realm of possible happiness: those who lived in Egypt under Pharaoh Amasi were able to experience la douceur de vivre. A power that was not aggressive, exercised more behind the scenes with intelligence than in the limelight with proclamations, anti-expansionist and attentive to the expansionist drifts of others, quiet in time: a breeze of spring blows from this period, recounted by Mariotti as a cast from Herodotus. And it is, mysteriously, the same fragrant breeze that passes through the perfect sentences of this prose that breathes, oxygenates, produces lightness and well-being in the reader.

Giovanni Mariotti was born in Versilia in 1936 and lives in Milan. He worked for many years at various publishing houses. He has translated works by Itard, Gobineau, Schwob, Denon and Nerval. Furthermore, he has collaborated with several newspapers such as L'Espresso, Corriere della Sera and with the art magazine FMR. His works include with Adeplhi Storia di Matilde (2003) and Piccoli addii (2021), with Franco Maria Ricci La carpa del sogno (2017) and La gatta, Borges e il foxterrier (2020) and with La Nave di Teseo the recent I manoscritti dei morti viventi (2023).

Different animals stand out in the world created by Santangelo, a raw, violent world. A wild panther struggles against the submissiveness and carelessness of men, a family of tuna seek revenge before fierce hands that crush, two dogs fight clandestinely without meaning to, a boy still searches for 'tomorrow', together with his grandfather and his hen, his eyes full of hope and wonder as he admires the flying rocket still on the ground. One strolls between past and present, through ancient Rome, in the arena of the Colosseum, among fishing boats overlooking a sea full of blood, amidst floating cages and a sky full of stars.

Story titles: 'The Panther Who Lived Three Times'; 'The Pit'; 'Revenge of the Tuna'; 'The Promise of Return'.

Essay: 'Why write fairy tales today'.

Evelina Santangelo is a writer, editor and teacher of Storytelling Techniques. For Einaudi she published the short stories "L'occhio cieco del mondo" (The Blind Eye of the World) and several novels, among them: "Il giorno degli orsi volanti" (The Day of the Flying Bears, 2005), "Senzaterra" (Landless, 2008) and "Da un altro mondo" (From Another World, 2018; Book of the year 2018 Fahrenheit, Rai Radio 3; Premio Feudo di Maida 17th edition; Superpremio Sciascia-Racalmare 30th edition; Premio Pozzale Luigi Russo 67th edition). His latest book was published by Einaudi in 2023 "Il sentimento del mare" (The feeling of the sea; Costa Smeralda Prize). Again for Einaudi, he edited Terra matta by Vincenzo Rabito, translated "Firmino" by Sam Savage and "Rock 'n' Roll" by Tom Stoppard. His articles have appeared in national newspapers, blogs and weeklies. He collaborates with the weekly L'Espresso.

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.