The first English translation of an Italian poet known for his uncompromising integrity and strong leftist sympathy for the working man.   Born in a sub-proletarian ghetto in Italy in 1930 under the fascist regime, Luigi Di Ruscio was an urchin running wild in the countryside, a Communist with clear anarchist leanings, a jack-of-all-trades. In 1957 he emigrated to Oslo, where he worked for forty years in a steel-wire factory, spending his evenings at the typewriter, delving with furious energy into his native Italian. Di Ruscio insisted that whereas the language of power is always a contrived, one-way fabrication, the language of the underprivileged is upfront and direct, aiming straight and sharp for the truth. Caustic as a shopfloor scouring agent, exhilarating in its overabundance, humor, and outspokenness, Selected Poems stands as a testament of tenacity, a record of class struggle, and a vital presence for our times.  

A comprehensive collection of texts from the most influential and iconic figure of Italian second-wave feminism.   Recently rediscovered in Italy and abroad, the works of Carla Lonzi tend to fall under the remit of art history or feminist theory. Art historians focus on the texts written in the 1960s, when Lonzi was still actively working as a critic, whereas feminist scholars engage with her more openly political interventions, published after her declared embrace of a separatist feminism. In 1970 Lonzi decided to leave the art world for good and dedicate herself to her newly founded feminist collective, Rivolta Femminile. While recognizing the break in Lonzi’s life and work, this anthology maps the overall arc of her intellectual and political production, giving equal weight to her seminal contributions to art criticism and her trailblazing feminist writings. A comprehensive collection of texts from the most influential and iconic figure of Italian second-wave feminism, Feminism in Revolt seeks to shed light on Lonzi’s versatile approach to literary genres and compositions by juxtaposing essayistic texts, poems, diary excerpts, and manifestos.

A beautifully crafted novel set in the late 1960s and 1970s Italy, a tempestuous period that shaped the lives of generations to come in many countries. What was it really like to be a teenager growing up in Italy in the 1970s, during a time it has become all too easy to file away under "years of lead," as the fathers' betrayed ideals came face to face with the sons' and daughters' rebellions? What was happening in schools, in assemblies, social centers, and occupied factories as the postwar "economic miracle" was being dismantled from within? What moved the foremost French intellectuals of the time to sign an appeal against the repression of the student and workers' movement in Italy? What did the bullets and heroin bring to a halt, and where did they come from? How does it feel when strategies of terror and police brutality become as ordinary as a TV dinner and as eerie as the plots of the science fiction novels you are plagiarizing to impress a girl? How are metropolitan geographies alchemized in the muscles of a young body crossing the shady lines between ages and sexes? Luca Rastello raises these and other questions in an astonishing novel that splices chunks of plot and historical reconstruction into the free flow of memory and dream. Rain's Falling Up tracks the trajectory of a generation while refusing to romanticize its protagonists or resolve the tensions that powered its volatile energy.

A representative text of a milieu marked by student protests and aspirations for moral and political renewal.  First published in Italian in 1968, The World Saved by Kids was written in the aftermath of deep personal change and in the context of what Elsa Morante called the “great youth movement exploding against the funereal machinations of the organized contemporary world.� Morante believed that it was only the youth who could truly hear her revolutionary call. With the fiftieth anniversary of the tumultuous events of 1968 approaching, there couldn’t be a more timely moment for this first English translation of Morante’s work to appear. Greeted by Antonio Porta as one of the most important books of its decade, The World Saved by Kids showcases Morante’s true mastery of tone, rhythm, and imagery as she works elegy, parody, storytelling, song, and more into an act of linguistic magic through which Gramsci and Rimbaud, Christ and Antigone, Mozart and Simone Weil, and a host of other figures join the sassy, vulnerable neighborhood kids in a renewal of the word’s timeless, revolutionary power to explore and celebrate life’s insoluble paradox. Morante gained international recognition and critical acclaim for her novels History, Arturo’s Island, and Aracoeli, and The World Saved By Kids may be her best book and the one that most closely represents her spirit.

One of the foremost thinkers of his generation, Furio Jesi began to publish scholarly essays in academic journals at the age of fifteen. By the time of his early death in 1980, he had accumulated a body of work that astonishes with its abundance and diversity, its depth and scope, and, above all, for its unfailing rigor and brilliance. In Time and Festivity, Andrea Cavalletti collects Jesi's finest essays, ranging from his groundbreaking work on myth and politics to his reflections on time, festivity, and revolt. He explores the significance of texts by Rimbaud, Rilke, Lukacs, and Pavese and the mythological language of the biblical story of Susanna. Carefully annotated and referenced, and enriched by a first-person account of Jesi's intellectual biography, Time and Festivity provides a precious guide to the methodology and approach at the core of Jesi's thought, displaying how his personal, vitally intense via negativa might in fact originate from his early statement: "All I have ever written is poetry."

Gezim Hajdari (b. 1957) was born in Lushnja, Albania, but has lived in Frosinone, Italy, since 1992, initially in the ruins of an abandoned building, but now in an apartment that he was awarded by the town council after he was awarded the prestigious Montale Prize. He writes in both Albanian and Italian, but is perhaps more recognised in his adopted country than in his native land. Stigmate / Vrage appeared in a bilingual edition in 2002 and here receives its first complete English translation. "My identity is Gezim, my body is my fatherland," says the author.