Everything that is recounted in these escapes is seen and lost sight of through the mists of history, it is a flap of burning existential truth caught up in the never-to-be-specified web of collective events: the agony of Italy's colonial adventure through the warped lens of a ‘family history’; the trial of Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's director, reconstructed in the form of an audition for a play; the rambling confession of the first dissociated terrorist of the German revolutionary left in the 1970s; Russian imperialism repeated in farce in the exploits of an actor called to replace Vladimir Putin on official occasions; the May of ‘68 concentrated and dissolved in the claustrophobic “chamber drama” of a Parisian police station.
In a continuous confusion between background and figure, the individual continues to be, as Georg Büchner said, ‘just foam on the waves’ and the anachronism of the theatre the only place where his scream can still echo.

Attilio Scarpellini, critic, writer and, dramaturg. One of the founders of the Lettera 22 association of journalists and one of the main supporters of the Independent Theatre movement, he has written on the pages of Diario and the online weekly La differenza. He edited the magazine Quaderni del teatro di Roma and collaborated on the theatre column of doppiozero. A dramaturgy tutor at Elvira Frosini and Daniele Timpano's ‘Corpo scritto’ workshop, he has taught at the University of Rome La Sapienza and at the Da.re school of advanced dance training. His writings include L'angelo rovesciato. Quattro saggi sull'11 settembre e la scomparsa della realtà (Idea, 2008), La fortezza vuota. Discorso sulla perdita di senso del teatro (with Massimiliano Civica, Edizioni dell'asino, 2014), Il tempo sospeso delle immagini (Mimesis, 2020) and Figlio di cane (Mimesis, 2024). He talks about images and books at the microphones of Rai Radio 3.

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 (1968), 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.

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).

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.

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.