Towards 2021: 2021: hopefulmonster, or the monster’s new life
The year 2021 for hopefulmonster, which has been active in the publishing sector for 35 years, is an important one: the date that marks the start of a new life. This is the year in which the historic brand presents itself anew to readers with a strong tradition but with a new corporate form, new cultural projects and new series that combine different literary genres, offering a space for dialogue between authors and texts that are very different to each other.
“The guiding thread of the publishing house’s production has been and will continue to be the desire to study, know and interpret the contemporary scene through the publication of philosophical, scientific and historical and political essays, always with an eye to artistic and literary expression,” declares Beatrice Merz, president of hopefulmonster.
In preparation for 2021, the publishing house has already completed several new projects or has them ready in the pipeline. Starting from the planning of a new series, through participation in the production of the De Serio brothers’ film Spaccapietre, and the complete overhaul of the website, planned as a versatile space for presenting and sharing texts, images and multimedia content.
The publishing house is adopting an international approach with the ambition of enriching the European publishing scene with a voice that currently does not exist.
A voice that will be modulated through 5 series, one of which is new: La stanza del mondo (The room of the world) that is to include books seeking to open the door of the mind by offering a space for the intelligences necessary to interpret the contemporary world. Without distinction of writing genres, the series will contain essays, novels, short stories, experimental languages, polemical texts. Because a reflection on reality, an interpretation of the world, scientific observation, poetry sometimes find space in the same person and represent a single thread without wishing to separate and distinguish between science and humanities, non-fiction and works of fiction.
The catalogue also includes the Ultralibri, volumes that go beyond the notion of ‘book’: they are more like artefacts that contain archives, historical materials, narratives, feelings and memories all together in each volume.
They are geographical and historical books, in which meetings and relationships are built around art, an artist, an exhibition, an artistic event. Each ultralibro is a world of its own.
La favola dell’arte (Art Fables) is the historic series built on the encounter between the art of writing and the art of drawing at the service of fun and knowledge, offering children and adults a literally fabulous way to enter the world of art.
The publishing house’s range is rounded by the Monographic Volumes – exhibition catalogues and texts by artists that hopefulmonster has been following since its foundations – and by the Radiceterna series: a microseries of small books produced on the occasion of a cycle of 37 exhibitions hosted at the Botanical Garden of Palermo inspired by the 37 books of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia.
The world is seeing the rethinking of publishing as a sector and hopefulmonster is not shirking the responsibility of being an active part of this process and challenge.