A green thread links the cherry blossoms in Japan to the gum trees of Malaysia, the botanical gardens of Singapore and the destroyed Perfect Brightness - a green thread that defines the anthropocene and the way nature is plundered, for its immediate utility and to create symbolism in step with current ideologies.
In this volume we look at the stories of our times, seen through the petals of flowers chosen to represent a nation, with the desire to bend a small fragrant corolla to ideologies useful to those in government at the time. They are also the stories of how our poetic images clash against our inability to live without destroying what surrounds us. Through the symbolism of flowers and gardens we talk about politics and history, colonialism and ecology, nationalism and authoritarianism, in an anthropocene short-circuit.

Ilaria Maria Sala is a writer, journalist, poet and ceramist, and has lived in Asia since 1988. She completed her studies in Beijing and London, then moved to Tokyo, and later based in Hong Kong - meanwhile spending long periods in Shanghai, Kathmandu and Dakar. She is the author of four books: the first, Il Dio dell'Asia, religione e politica in Oriente (Il Saggiatore, 2006) won the Brice Chatwin Prize for travel literature; Lettere dalla Cina (Una Città, 2011); Beijing 1989 (Una Città, 2019); L'Eclissi di Hong Kong, topografia di una città in tumulto (ADD Editore, 2022). He contributes to numerous newspapers, both Italian and international, including Il Domani, Internazionale, Il Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The South China Morning Post, and many others, and is a member of the Lettera 22 association of journalists.

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).

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".

Fifty years ago, the first Italian movement for the liberation of homosexuals was born in Turin: FUORI!. At the same time, the magazine of the same name came out, the voice and the organizational tool of a "community" that is slowly expanding throughout Italy. To retrace the genesis, developments and legacies of an experience that marks the physiognomy of the current Italian LGBTQ + movement, the Diffused Museum of the Resistance together with the Polo del '900 and the Sandro Penna Foundation - OUT! present the exhibition “FUORI! 1971 - 2021. 50 years from the foundation of the first homosexual movement in Italy ”, which takes place from 24 September to 24 October 2021, of which this book is a theoretical and historical-critical restitution and integration.

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 second book in the Ultralibri series, Stanze in a certain way narrates eight years in the creative evolution of the duo of artists and directors Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio, who recently presented SPACCAPIETRE, the only Italian title in competition in Venice Days at the Venice Film Festival 2020.

The book offers an experience full of theatrical, poetic and cinematographic projects dedicated to the Somali lands and to the critique of Italy’s colonial past, linking old and new subjugations. The volume includes, among others, a contribution by Andrea Del Boca and historical essays by Luca Ciabarri and Gabriele Proglio.

Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio were born in Turin in 1978. They have worked together since 1999 as visual artists, screenwriters and film directors. Over the years they have directed short films, documentaries and produced installations that have participated in the most important national and international film festivals and various exhibitions.