Gherardo Bortolotti is both a refined and a dodgy writer. He manages to create extraordinary hypothetical worlds in this geometrically perfect and sentimentally deep composition. These novels are just drafted, they are digressions that instantly hit. Bortolotti here takes from Calvino and Perec, allowing him to bring the astonishment and tremor of our fragile, at times useless, lives to the page. We face yet another proof of this author’s humble and great talent. 

Gherardo Bortolotti was born in Brescia in 1972. Visionary and experimental, he has published Tecniche di basso livello (Laveri, 2009), Oltre il pubblico: la letteratura e il passaggio alla rete (Nuova prosa, 2014), Le storie del pavimento (Tic Edizioni, 2018), Low. Una trilogia (Tic Edizioni, 2020), Romanzetto estivo (Tic Edizioni, 2021).

This autobiographical short story accompanies us throughout half a century of a devouring passion, born by buying a small bamboo fishing pole in a stationary store. It takes the protagonist to the final line of fly fishing, the only technique with a culture and tradition, even literary, that dates back centuries. A personal and spiritual evolution is described with a transporting intensity, but always with politeness and irony, giving the reader unthought of images, absolute ethical questions, extraordinary narrative pictures. Moreover, it opens up a lost horizon: that even today life among nature might be possible after all. 

Raul Montanari was born in 1959 in Bergamo; he lives and works in Milan, where he has been holding creative writing courses since ’99. His most famous works are his novels, La perfezione (Feltrinelli, 1994; Baldini & Castoldi, 2019), Il regno degli amici (Einaudi, 2015) e, sempre per Baldini & Castoldi, Che cosa hai fatto, Chiudi gli occhi, La prima notte, Strane cose domani (Premio Strega Giovani, 2010), La vita finora (2018), Il vizio della solitudine (2021). With Aldo Nove and Tiziano Scarpa he has written Nelle galassie oggi come oggi (Einaudi, 2001), unusual poetry bestseller. He has published the essay l Cristo zen (Indiana, 2011; Baldini & Castoldi, 2022), among plays, screenplays, translations of classical and modern authors. 

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".

Art and politics are fields that are strongly connected, they attract and repel each other, draw continuity, and cause ruptures. The essays collected in this volume are subject to the tension between these two forces. They are reflections on the contemporary condition, on the artistic practice, on the limits and potential of the museum: each text is located in time and space and reflects the intellectual path of Manuel Borja-Villel, head of important museum institutions, and some of his curatorial concerns, as responsible for numerous exhibitions and public events over the last thirty years. A supporter of hybridization and sharing of knowledge, in front of the inaccessible compartmentalization of knowledge, this book is committed to interdisciplinary research and the interrelation of multiple fields. And it is, above all, an invitation to reflect on art, its organizations, and its actors.

Manuel Borja-Villel, was born in Burriana (Spain) in 1957. He has been director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, director of the Museu d'Art Contemporani in Barcelona, and previously of the Fondació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. He holds a BA in Art History from the University of Valencia, Spain, and a PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Curator of XXXV Bienal de São Paulo, he currently lives in Madrid.

Something’s happened, an event shrouded in mystery: around midnight, a night like any other night, all Palestinians have disappeared, vanished into thin air. Nobody knows where drivers, farm labourer, doctors, nurses, elderly and young people have gone. What if there were no more Palestinians? What could happen to the Israelis? What could happen in everyone’s life if there was no more the enemy, the scapegoat, the alibi? The Palestinian writer Ibtisam Azem presents one of the most groundbreaking novels of the Arab literary scene.

Ibtisam Azem, a Palestinian journalist and writer, has published two novels in Arabic: Sariq al-Nawm (The Sleeping Thief, 2011) and Sifr al-Ikhtifaa (The Book of Disappearance, 2014), both for Dar al-Jamal (Beirut, Baghdad and Freiberg am Neckar). The Book of Disappearance finally arrives in the Italian version. Born and raised in Taybeh, in the north of Jaffa, Ibtisam Azem has studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later at the University of Freiburg in Germany. She works as a journalist in New York for the Arabic newspaper “al-Araby al-Jadeed” and as co-editor in chief of the “ezine Jadaliyya”.

A mystery novel loved in Algeria and already praised by French critics finally arrives in Italian. On a “national night”, men and boys move circumspectly, like shadows in search of salvation, certain, however, that they cannot survive a tragic destiny, made up of gunshots, executions, murderers. It is the night that Algeria has lived through all the nineties, overwhelmed by one of the bloodiest of civil wars. In an Algiers loved and described in great detail, Adlène Meddi breathes life into the youngsters, the alter egos of his generation, the protagonists of 1994, the Algerian writer’s latest detective story.

Adlène Meddi, born in 1975 in El Harrach, a suburb east of Algiers, is a French-speaking Algerian journalist, reporter and writer. He studied journalism and media sociology at the University of Algiers and EHESS in Marseille. Since 2009 he has been editor-in-chief of the weekly El Watan. He also collaborates with Le Point magazine and the Middle East Eye website. In 2002 he published his first thriller, Le casse tête turc with Barzakh. In 2008 he released La prière du maure, also through Barkakh, while in 2016 together with Mélanie Matarese he wrote Jours tranquilles à Alger, published by Riveneuve. His third polar, 1994, released in the original language in 2017 again through Barzakh, won the Transfuge Prize 2018 as best French-language thriller.