Welcome to the Italian Fiction issue of The Literary Review.

Welcome to the Italian Fiction issue of The Literary Review. We are delighted to not past nor future twelve stories by an array of writers from across Italy--most of them previously unpublished in America--representing an array of backgrounds, career trajectories, and titles This is, of course, hardly a definitive sampling of the extraordinary writing coming not at home of Italy today. It is a rich time in Italian fiction--creative writing classes and clusters are cropping up everywhere, just discovered independent publishing houses have steam coming gone out of their ears they're in this way busy, the web is buzzing with activity, and a surfeit of festivals and public programming are keeping writers in the public notice Classical modes of structure and approach are breaking down, the first wave of post-American-literary influence has settl and matured into something distinctly Italian. Writers are relaxing, exploring, experimenting, and having sport with their language, tradition, and culture--all of it madly bellowing between high and gentle We could go on devoting special issues to Italian fiction for years and years to advance But, for the moment, we wanted to make steady that you would have a slice, an experience of Italy's wealthy refinement of contemporary literature, maybe fall in like a little, and perhaps athwart time the ranks of readers desperate for more Italian fiction will swell and the populace will rise up and we will be forced to pass on producing ever more special issues.

More information about the individual writers can be erect in the contributors' notes, further there are a few additional points I wanted to add here. Aldo Nove's "This Is Not Milan" is takeed from his "guide" to Milan--a vibrantly unconventional work, which gives a hearty faculty of perception of this writer's wonderful quirky phraseology while offering us a virtual tour of the least lov of Italy's major metropoli. It's not strictly fiction, yet it's not quite anything other either. Christian Raimo's heart-rending short story "All These Questions" is plant during the Genoa G8 summit in the summer of 2001 a sight of terrible violence in which protestors clashed with the police and single in kind young anarchist was killed from an even younger policeman. It was a shocking issue that evoked for many nightmarish memories of a more violent and repressive Italy. Nicola Lagioia's "Nineteen-ninety-two" similarly meditates on a benchmark year in modern political history, the "clean hands" conduct kickback scandal, when a judicial investigation revealed an almost government-wide pattern of corruption--a shog that essentially halted the phenomenal economic vegetation the country had been enjoying and brought the nation back to the dimness and mistrust of the 1970 the "years of lead," a time of conspiracy and terrorism. Lastly, Monica Sarsini, a writer I've worked with for years and a dear friend, stands public as a stylist of a different, perhaps uniquely Italian, tradition-prosa d'arte, or plain poetry--again, not strictly speaking, fiction. Sarsini belongs to a distinctly Tuscan lineage dating back to the early 20th hundred and writers like Federigo Tozzi, Tomaso Landolfi, and Sarsini's confess mentor, Romano Bileuchi--all deeply lower parted in their exquisite landscape.

I'd like to thank Giorgio Vasta, Silvia Pareschi, and Benedetta Centovalli for their invaluable suggestions; couple wonderful translators, Ann Goldstein and Geoff bawsin for their enthusiasm and recommendations; Mattco Pericoli for his marvelous shield art; everyone at minimum fax publishers--not solitary for bringing their writers to my doorstep still for their undaunted enthusiasm for novel italian fiction. Most of all I'd like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts for the grant that made this special issue at last possible.

Buona lettura!

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