Through the story of the tarantella, a passionate and ancient dance of celebration, courtship and healing, Gilda Policastro engages in a pressing exploration and reflection on her own evolution, a cultural, sentimental, sexual and existential evolution. In La ragnatela, each sentence encapsulates and demonstrates the writer's skill and intelligent mastery. Because it is the way it is written (the rhythm, the astonishing mixture of lexicons derived from spheres that are in themselves distant, which in her hands collide and flourish in the same paragraph, the essentiality of the writing) that makes the text astonishing: how the author managed to find an unexpected USB port in our cerebral circumvolutions is unknown, but the fact remains that the download we manage to make of so many third-contents is as quick as a spider bite.

Gilda Policastro has published, among others, the novels Il farmaco (Fandango, 2010), Cella (Marsilio, 2015), La parte di Malvasia (La Nave di Teseo, 2021) and the poetry books Non come vita (Aragno, 2013), Inattuali (Transeuropa, 2016) and La distinzione (Giulio Perrone, 2023). A lecturer in Italian Literature, he collaborates with the Molly Bloom Academy of Creative Writing in Rome and the cultural websites Le parole e le cose. Literature and Reality and Snaporaz. He has published essays on contemporary authors, including L'ultima poesia: scritture anomale e mutazioni di genere dal secondo Novecento a oggi (Mimesis, 2021).

In order to finally solve the chronic adversity of Italian train delays on the scheduled timetable, an ingenious solution is found: timetables are abolished by law!
With a weakened, seemingly benevolent writing style, Andrea Vitali sets up a situation with fabulous tones that seems suspended in time. The apologue flows amusingly, with a grain of madness, dislocated from factual reality with millimetric precision, just enough (not a step too far) to welcome the reader into a pastime of blissful escapism.
Storia di treni, ministri e minestrine encloses a core of merciless, radical, bitter satire on our country in an operation of refined realism. Only by fully mastering the art of storytelling is it possible to hang an entire story from an initial paradox that continually generates others, until a mocking, circular closure. This dystopian but backwards-looking Italy (trains, yes, but with a 19th-century flavour, one might say) is the contraption that Vitali gives us to sing along with him this small, devastating, surrendered, light-hearted taunting about our country. He does so with skill, amusement and cruelty.

Andrea Vitali was born in Bellano, on Lake Como, in 1956, where he has always lived, practising as a doctor until 2013 and then devoting himself solely to writing. His debut novel was Il procuratore (Camunia Editore) in 1990. His most recent titles are Genitori cercasi (Einaudi, 2024) and Sua eccellenza perde un pezzo (Garzanti, 2024). He currently collaborates with Il Fatto Quotidiano.

It can be said that Margherita Loy's mother tongue is directly literary Italian. In these three new short stories, the main elements are the writing's ability to be simple yet open up sudden complexities, the play of references between past and present, the tension between the narrated scene and the one seen that liquefies in the experience of the word, the rarefaction that is evoked with clear and precise terms, the reverberations of infinite readings that have always been inhabited, Bassan reflexes, the thought that plays with words. And above all, the presence of the emblematic object that catalyses lost stories towards itself and makes their narration available.
We have three jewels in this collection. Each encloses a world, preserves relationships and affections, unrepeatable lives. But their essence as jewels reverberates on worlds, relationships, affections and lives with the value of their stones, gold, pearls.
Margherita Loy is a narrator who has a personal respect for the stories she tells. This is a character trait that permeates her prose and embellishes it, although the writer carefully keeps her razor sharp and her burin sharp in the face of pain and suffering.

Margherita Loy was born in Rome in 1959 and has lived in the Lucca countryside for many years. She has conducted programmes on books for the broadcaster Videomusic, cultural programmes on Rai Radio Tre, translated books for Astrolabio-Ubaldini Editore and published short stories in the magazine 'Paragone Letteratura' and in the anthology Parole apparecchiate (2011) published by Trasciatti Editore. He has created art books for children for Gallucci Editore: La cameretta di van Gogh (2015, 2023); Magritte. This is not a book (2021); Pop al pomodoro (2021). For Zona Franca Edizioni he published the collection of short stories V.O.L.A., Vino, olio, latte e acqua (2013), for Atlantide Edizioni the novels Una storia ungherese (2018), La dinastia dei dolori (2020) and Dio a me ha dato la collina (2022), while for the publisher Barta the novel Delia o mattino di giugno (2023) was published. He currently maintains a literature and art blog on Il Fatto Quotidiano.

"The house," writes Ernesto Aloia quoting Gaston Bachelard, "is one of the most powerful integrating elements for human thoughts, memories and dreams". The house is the family home, built in stone in 1930, a village house. The family branches out into the past, gradually losing sharpness, fading 'into great forgetfulness'. Aloia's lofty writing moves between the dark chambers of the house and people's lives, presenting the reader with a fluid series of images that move like a dancer on a tightrope in a shrewd balancing act. The outcome of such a unique touch is writing that is as powerfully evocative as it is seemingly rough.

A disenchanted narrator, deeply nourished by great literature, gentle by class and not by shyness, Ernesto Aloia sets up an enchanted ambience and does so with the concreteness of stones, he presents us with a vaporous object of ghosts and does so with a keen gaze, he invites us to a lush concert and does so in mute.

Ernesto Aloia is a writer from Turin born in 1965. He published for Minimum Fax the collections Chi si ricorda di Peter Szoke? (2003) and Sacra Fame dell'Oro (2006) followed by the novels I compagni del fuoco (Rizzoli, 2007), Paesaggio con incendio (Minimum Fax, 2011) and La vita riflessa (Bompiani, 2018).

Various satellites are gravitating around Andrea Canobbio's major production, whose greatest achievement was the monumental La traversata notturna (La nave di Teseo, 2022): short, apparently simple texts which delicately touch on autobiographical points, aspects of the author's own character. This 'Portrait' is one of them. Canobbio's writing is probably the clearest and most transparent among those in our language, and this elegant but coy characteristic highlights and conceals at the same time a complexity of composition which is always ironclad and extraordinarily articulate. Beneath the veil of the declared autobiographical value, this 'Ritratto' is above all a game of concealment and discovery conducted on several levels: the author comments on his own diary written in his youth (the management of distance and proximity is exquisite), demolishing it, reconstructing it, fragmenting it and recomposing it. In this operation, Canobbio takes us inside his refined writing workshop and shows us some of his tools: the image, the photograph, the memory, the jigsaw puzzle, the box of precision instruments to apply to the confusion of chaos. This autobiographical satellite (not only 'auto' but also 'bio/graphic') can be described as a 'pearl'.

Andrea Canobbiowas born in 1962 in Turin, where he lives and works in publishing. His books are: the collection of short stories Vasi cinesi (Einaudi, 1989), with which he won the Grinzane opera prima prize and the Mondello opera prima prize; the novels Traslochi (Einaudi, 1992), Padri di padri (Einaudi, 1997), Indivisibili (Rizzoli, 2000), Strega prize finalist, Il naturale disordine delle cose (Einaudi, 2004), Brancati prize, and Tre anni luce (Feltrinelli, 2013), Mondello opera italiana prize; and finally the two short autobiographical texts Presentimento (Nottetempo, 2007) and Mostrarsi (Nottetempo, 2011). In 2022 he published the book La traversata notturna (La nave di Teseo), a finalist for the Strega Prize 2023.

Marta Cai's writing is difficult to frame: one can only be taken aback by the innovation of her style, of her thought, of her approach, and of the relationship between the word and the sense it makes. The unusual mixture of intelligence and sensoriality, the mirroring between syntactic development and perceptive gestures of this author give us these 'Brasilampi'. They are texts reminiscent of the so-called 'chronicles', short compositions without genre, epiphanies of the every day or reflections on the highest systems where everything is allowed, except the obvious, solidly present in Brazilian literature but not so codified in Europe. Marta Cai, who recently moved from Italy to Brazil,  does not tell us about Brazil, she does not force it into categories, into descriptions, into interpretations, but she allows herself to be permeated by it. She thus reaches a fascinating space, as much geographical as interior. She enters (and so we do) into an ancestral glade of non-understanding, of pre-verbal impact with what exists. She registers in its presence, like a highly sensitive seismograph, her own native illuminations, as if they were lullabies (when in fact they are vertiginous lexical and syntactic acrobatics). Thus from Brazil flash unexpected flashes, expertly set up in a hidden but powerful, circular, omnipresent structure. We cannot call them "short stories", although they are peopled by characters caught in peculiar moments; we cannot call them "chapters of a novel", although the author composes them in a unitary narrative arc; we cannot call them "sketches", although the writer also proceeds here, as in her previous works (Enti di ragione, SuiGeneris, 2019 and Centomilioni, Einaudi, 2023), with rapid angles, unexpected divarications, unpredictable coring into the depths. We can call them 'Brasilampi', and so we will.

Marta Cai was born in Canelli in 1980 and has lived for some years in Curitiba, Brazil. Some of her short stories have been published in magazines ("inutile", "il Reportage"), in anthologies (Ti racconto una canzone, Arcana 2022; Overlook loop, Collana Trema Edizioni Arcoiris 2023; Splendere ai margini, Oligo Editore 2023) and in 2019 in the collection Enti di ragione (Edizioni SuiGeneris). For Einaudi, he published Centomilioni (2023), premio Campiello finalist, and for Tetra Edizioni Tipopsicanalisi (2023).