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This “sharp-edged comedic novel of a semi-hapless Italian lawyer” who finds himself employed by the mob was a finalist for Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize (Kirkus Reviews). Vincenzo Malinconico is a wildly unsuccessful lawyer who spends most of his time at the office trying to look busy. His wife has left him. His teenage children worry him to death. And he suffers from a chronic inability to control his sentence structure. When he is asked to fill in as the public defender for alleged Mafioso Mimmo ’o Burzone, Malinconico seizes the opportunity to turn his life around. Without dwelling too long on what it might mean to be employed by the mob, he rushes to re-learn the Italian criminal code. Soon, Malinconico’s life becomes a comic battle to finish what he has started without falling further into the mafia’s clutches. Diego De Silva’s rollicking, Naples Prize–winning comic novel orbits the irresistible mind of one of contemporary Italian fiction’s most beloved characters. Throughout his travails, Vincenzo contemplates every aspect of the life he sees before him in a wry voice that seduces, entertains, and moves the reader from the first page to the last.
From civilisational frontier risks associated with new challenges like disruptive technologies, to the shifting nature of great-power conflicts and subversion, the 21st century requires a new approach to statecraft. In 21st-Century Statecraft, Professor Nayef Al-Rodhan proposes five innovative statecraft concepts. He makes the case for a new method of geopolitical analysis called ‘meta-geopolitics’, and for ‘dignity-based governance’. He shows how, in an interdependent and interconnected world, traditional thinking must move beyond zero-sum games and focus on ‘multi-sum and symbiotic realist’ interstate relations. This requires a new paradigm of global security premised on five dimensions of security, and a new concept of power, ‘just power’, which highlights the centrality of justice to state interests. These concepts enable states to balance competing interests and work towards what the author calls ‘reconciliation statecraft’. Throughout, Professor Al-Rodhan brings his philosophical and neuroscientific expertise to bear, providing a practical model for conducting statecraft in a sustainable way.
Drawing on the recent renewal of interest in the debate on orality and literacy this book investigates the varying perceptions and representations of orality in contemporary Italian fiction, providing a fresh perspective on this rich and fast-developing debate and on the study of the Italian literary language. The book brings together a number of complementary approaches to orality from the fields of linguistics, literary and media studies and offers a detailed analysis of a broad variety of authors and texts that appeared over the last three decades - ranging from internationally acclaimed writers such as Celati, Duranti and Tabucchi, through De Luca and Baricco, to the latest generation of writers, such as Campo, Ballestra and Nove. By exploring the complementary facets of Italian orality, and its diachronical developments since the seventies, this study questions the traditionally dichotomic approach to the study of orality and literacy and posits a more flexible, cross-modal approach that accounts for the increasing hybridisation of text forms and media and for the greater interaction between the spoken and the written as well as their representations.
Visit Parma following the words of the writers. Petrarca, Stendhal, Proust, Casanova, Bevilacqua, Guareschi, Zavattini and many others. An anthology of quotes and ilterary itineraries
Developing Writing Skills in Italian has been specifically designed for upper-intermediate students of Italian who need to write Italian for personal, business and academic purposes. With a strong focus on writing as a meaningful and valuable skill in itself, Developing Writing Skills in Italian supports the learner throughout the process of writing, from the planning and drafting stages to the revising and editing of a final version, enriching and extending the learners’ lexical, grammatical and communicative writing skills. Divided into four logically structured sections the learner can work through a range of realistic and contextualized writing tasks which will allow them to master a v...
"In our highly literate culture, orality is all-pervasive. Different kinds of media and performance - theatre, film, television, story-telling, structured play - make us ask what is the relation between improvisation and premeditation, between transcription and textualization, between rehearsal, recollection and re-narration. The challenge of writing down what is spoken is partly technical, but also political and philosophical. How do young writers represent the spoken language of their contemporaries? What are the rules governing the transcription of oral evidence in fiction and non-fiction? Is the relationship between oral and written always a hierarchical one? Does the textualization of t...
Who are “intellectuals”? What do they think their role and function in contemporary society is? Are they on the endangered-species list? Is equating conservatism with conservation becoming their dominant survival strategy? This book is a collection of essays that examines some of the changes in the activities, role, function and self-perception of Italian intellectuals since World War II (two major divides are considered to be the crisis of 1956–7 and the fall of the Berlin Wall). The first section examines some of the most influential figures in the early decades, the second the activities of contemporary intellectuals, a third gives voice to some contemporary writers, a fourth contains some comparative essays about the role of intellectuals in influential contemporary Western cultures and a final section is devoted to some cross-disciplinary forays and reflections on the relevance and possible future directions of these inquiries.
Under the Tuscan Sun meets Diary of a Bookseller in this charming memoir by an Italian poet recounting her experience opening a bookshop in a village in Tuscany. Alba Donati was used to her hectic life working as a book publicist in Italy—a life that made her happy and allowed her to meet prominent international authors—but she was ready to make a change. One day she decided to return to Lucignana, the small village in the Tuscan hills where she was born. There she opened a tiny but enchanting bookshop in a lovely little cottage on a hill, surrounded by gardens filled with roses and peonies. With fewer than 200 year-round residents, Alba’s shop seemed unlikely to succeed, but it soon s...
It was a movement so artfully anarchic, and so quickly suppressed, that readers only began to discover its strange and singular brilliance three decades after it was extinguished-and then only in samizdat and emigre publications.