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.

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