Giorgia Tribuiani's luxuriant literary output seems to revolve around a central point that is brought into direct focus here: the author wrote these pages gazing at the eyes of Medusa. But instead of being petrified, she has managed to creatively take us to this perturbing place.  The short and dry chapters of this novel take us ruthlessly into a tragedy with no way out, namely the scene in which the suicidal person awaits impact. The lingering trauma, however, is that of the train driver, who can do nothing against the inescapable approach of the crash, in spite of all the attempts required by the intervention protocol. The lost life of the suicide creeps into the driver's life like an element nested deep within. The stark, linear chapters in which this tragedy unfolds alternate with other chapters in which we see the traumatised man trying to cope with this disruption in his life that has seeped into him.

The author accompanies her text with an excellent interview on post-traumatic stress disorder with Dr. Domenico De Berardis, psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Director of the Giulianova (TE) Mental Health Centre.

Giorgia Tribuiani was born in Alba Adriatica in 1985. She has a degree in Publishing and Journalism and a master's degree in Marketing and Communication. She has collaborated with several newspapers and edited online communication for some multinationals. She currently teaches creative writing and holds literary consultancies. She has published Guasti (Voland, 2018), Blu (Fazi, 2021), Padri (Fazi, 2022), Superstar (Tetra Edizioni, 2022) and has appeared in the anthologies Abruzzesi per sempre (Edizioni della Sera, 2019), Polittico (Caffè Orchidea, 2019) and Nuvole corsare (Caffè Orchidea, 2020). For Audino Editore she is the author of a creative writing manual on the uncanny genre, Writing the Uncanny. Models, Techniques, Strategies (2023).

Turkey is a land torn between East and West, and between its glorious past and a dangerous, unpredictable future. After the violence of an attempted military coup against President Erdogan in 2016, an event which shocked the world, journalist and novelist Kaya Genc travelled around his country on a quest to find the places and people in whom the contrasts of Turkey's rich past meet. As suicide bombers attack Istanbul, and journalists and teachers are imprisoned, he walks the streets of the famous Ottoman neighborhoods, telling the stories of the ordinary Turks who live among the contradictions and conflicts of Anatolia, one of the world's oldest civilizations. The Lion and the Nightingale presents the spellbinding story of a country whose history has been split between East and West, between violence and beauty - between the roar of the lion and the song of the nightingale.
Weaving together a mixture of memoir, interview and his own autobiography, Genc takes the reader on a contemporary journey through the contradictory soul of the Turkish nation.

Kaya Genç is a journalist, novelist, and essayist from Istanbul. He holds a PhD in English Literature and he is the author of four books, The Lion and the Nightingale (I.B. Tauris, 2019), Under the Shadow (I.B. Tauris, 2016), An Istanbul Anthology (American University in Cairo Press, 2015), and Macera (YKY, 2008). He has contributed essays and articles to the world's leading magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and The Financial Times. The Atlantic selected Kaya's writing for the magazine's list of "Best Journalism Works of 2014".

There is no more time: democracy must make an effort of imagination and must reinvent itself if it seeks to respond to the challenges and changes of recent years. John Keane, one of the most innovative political scientists on representative democracy and its global evolution, is convinced of this. The author of numerous texts of international importance, John Keane proposes a radically new interpretation of the destiny of democracy in the twenty-first century. And he has coined a new definition to deal with: monitory democracy.

John Keane, born in Australia in 1949, lives in Sydney. He is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Sydney and at the Research Centre for Social Sciences in Berlin (WZB). Keane is also a member of the Royal Society of Arts, founder of the Research Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD), external adviser to the United Nations and member of the American Institutions of Democracy Commission. His texts include: The Life and Death of Democracy, Global Civil Society?, Vaclav Havel: a political tragedy in Six Acts, the award-winning Tom Paine: a political life e Media and Democracy, which has been translated into more than twenty languages. Potere e Umiltà. Il futuro della monitory democracy is in its first Italian edition.

The book that opens the new Ultralibri series – volumes that are on the borderline between essay, catalogue and artist’s book, going beyond the notion of book itself – represents the sequel to the exhibition of the young Lebanese artist and activist, Zena el Khalil, held in Beirut in 2017. The exhibition, hosted in the emblematic Beit Beirut on the green line in the city centre, expanded to include a large number of people and communities in 40 days of workshops and meetings, projecting the artist’s work onto the entire city, creating an open, inclusive and circular proposal starting from a symbolic place of the Lebanese civil war. The book not only collects that experience but, in the spirit of the artist, widens the discourse and the possible proposals for the care of a city and an entire people, towards a forty-first day. The book contains texts by the artist and Healing Lebanon, a collective author, a true community that is the result of experiences and dialogue.

Zena el Khalil, born in London in 1976, lives in Beirut. A visual artist, writer, performer, cultural activist and yoga instructor, she works with themes focused on creating a culture of peace and reconciliation. www.zenaelkhalil.com

From the evocation of Bronislaw Malinowsky's maiden voyage to Melanesia, to the re-evocation of Joseph Conrad’s ascent into the “Heart of Darkness”, the unfolding and phantasmagoria of the ten essays by Remo Guidieri that make up this volume unfold between the foundation of modern anthropology and the birth of the clash of cultures in the reflection of the consciousness of the West. At the end of the collection, Guidieri himself reconstructs and discusses his own intellectual adventure in conversations with the book’s editor, Andrea Borsari.

Remo Guidieri is a member of the ethnology laboratory at the University of Nanterre (Paris X) where he teaches Anthropology of Beliefs and Aesthetics. He has carried out ethnological missions in the Eastern Pacific (Melanesia) and Western Pacific (Polynesia). Author of "The Way of the Dead" (Adephi, 1988), "Toys. Showcases and Ventures of the Playful Tool' (Medusa Editions, 2000), 'Matisse's Farewell' (Medusa Editions, 2002), 'Shadows. On the Cult of the Dead in Malekula, Eastern Melanesia" (Medusa Editions, 2005).

The book is intended as a survey of some of the most important work of the twentieth century in different disciplines (philosophical, scientific, historical), in order to outline a multiplicity of responses and meanings and a plurality of pronunciations of the term ‘time', which can be very useful for reading many of the manifestations of contemporary art from a different perspective. In particular, the figures and forms of time that result from these readings seem to be intrinsic properties of “artistic objects”, a sort of “theory” of internal time-clocks that manifest themselves according to different grammars and syntaxes: the notions of moment, instant, becoming, interval, event, constitute the elements and reveal how time can be manipulated in a very wide range of ways, of speeds, shifts, rhythms, intervals, retroactions, giving rise to an equally wide variety of figures. All of this is constantly accompanied by attention to the salient aesthetic phenomena of the contemporary world.

Mario Bertoni was born in Modena, graduated in Philosophy from the University of Bologna, researcher in scientific history, journalist, curator of exhibitions and monographs on contemporary artists.