ICI London is pleased to announce a new collaboration with the publishing house And Other Stories, to help promoting the work of Italian authors that are new to the English-speaking public.
We start with You, Bleeding Childhood (Tu, sanguinosa infanzia) by multi-award-winning Italian author Michele Mari, in the English version by renowned translator Brian Robert Moore, which will be published in the UK by And Other Stories on 11 July.
On the cusp between autobiography and fiction, at the crossroads of memory and myth, these stories by Italy’s answer to both Stephen King and Jorge Luis Borges find the obsessions of childhood coming back to haunt the present day in hilarious and unsettling ways. Long before the latest vogue for autofiction, Michele Mari, one of Italy’s most beloved authors, cast his mind back to the days of his own childhood, and found it crawling with monsters. Raised on comic books and science fiction, the young Mari constructed an alternate universe for himself untouched by uncomprehending grownups or sadistic peers. Compared to the horrors of real life, Long John Silver and Cthulhu made for positively cuddly company; but little boys raised by beasts may well grow up beastly – or never grow up at all. Waking or sleeping, the obsessions of Mari’s youth haunt his every adult thought. You, Bleeding Childhood stands as his first attempt to catalogue this cabinet of wonders. Cult classics since their first publication, these loosely connected stories stand as the ideal introduction to a fantasist on a par with Kafka, Poe, and Borges
More info and pre-order HERE
Michele Mari is one of Italy’s most renowned contemporary writers. He has published ten novels, in addition to several short story and poetry collections, and has received prestigious awards including the the Bagutta Prize, the Mondello Prize and the Selezione Campiello Prize. A former professor of Italian literature at the University of Milan, he has translated classic novels by Herman Melville, George Orwell, John Steinbeck and H. G. Wells. In a survey published by the magazine Orlando Esplorazioni in 2015, Mari was ranked the contemporary Italian author most likely to be read by generations to come.
Brian Robert Moore has translated A Silence Shared by Lalla Romano, Meeting in Positano by Goliarda Sapienza, and the work of other distinguished Italian authors. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a Santa Maddalena Foundation Fellowship and the PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature. His translation of the novel Verdigris by Michele Mari is forthcoming from And Other Stories.