Clash Of Civilizations Over An Elevator In Piazza Vittorio

The immigrant tenants of a building in Rome offer skewed accounts of a murder in this prize-winning satire by the Algerian-born Italian author (Publishers Weekly). Piazza Vittorio is home to a polyglot community of immigrants who have come to Rome from all over the world. But when a tenant is murdered in the building’s elevator, the delicate balance is thrown into disarray. As each of the victim’s neighbors is questioned by the police, readers are offered an all-access pass into the most colorful neighborhood in contemporary Rome. With language as colorful as the neighborhood it describes, each character takes his or her turn “giving evidence.” Their various stories reveal much about the drama of racial identity and the anxieties of a life spent on society’s margins, but also bring to life the hilarious imbroglios of this melting pot Italian culture. “Their frequently wild testimony teases out intriguing psychological and social insight alongside a playful whodunit plot.” —Publishers Weekly

An Italian journalist gets wrapped up in the criminality and cultural controversies of modern Turin in this “very funny” satirical novel (The New York Times). It’s October 2006. The northern Italian town of Turin has been rocked by a series of murders involving Albanians and Romanians, and journalist Enzo Laganà is determined to get to the bottom of the crime wave—even if he must invent a few sources to do so. But first he’s been conscripted to mediate the issue of a pig running loose in a mosque. Gino the pig belongs to Enzo’s Nigerian immigrant neighbor, Joseph. The Muslim community wants Gino killed, an animal rights group wants him saved, and Joseph is pleading his pig’s innocence. As Enzo navigates various calamities large and small, he scrambles to keep track of his lies even as he uncovers some uncomfortable truths about contemporary, multicultural Italy. “This very funny novel examines a town’s heightened ignorance and hostility toward foreigners, and what it means to be a “true” Italian, even if the native in question is a small pig.” —The New York Times

Delving into topics from immigration to sustainability, this is “an original, rich, and important contribution to the study of Rome” (H-Italy). Is twenty-first-century Rome a global city? Is it part of Europe’s core or periphery? This volume examines the “real city” beyond Rome’s historical center, exploring the diversity and challenges of life in neighborhoods affected by immigration, neoliberalism, formal urban planning, and grassroots social movements. The contributors engage with themes of contemporary urban studies—the global city, the self-made city, alternative modernities, capital cities and nations, urban change from below, and sustainability. Global Rome serves as a provocative introduction to the Eternal City and makes an original contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship.

A fun and farcical novel, this new "whodunit" about life in multicultural Italy by Amara Lakhous will delight fans of Lakhous' earlier bestseller, Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, and readers of novels such as The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany. Bittersweet, like any self-respecting Italian comedy, The Prank is a Pirandellian exploration of identity in today's multicultural, polyglot societies. Lakhous draws inspiration from everyday reality, describing his approach to writing as "total literature," a term he has adapted from soccer's "total football." He plays in attack, describing in this work the realities of an Italy of the future with colorful characters portrayed in limpid but lively prose. From the Trade Paperback edition.

“Utterly sublime . . . Aduatells a gripping story of war, migration and family, exposing us to the pain and hope that reside in each encounter” (Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King). Adua, an immigrant from Somalia, has lived in Italy nearly forty years. She came seeking freedom from a strict father and an oppressive regime, but her dreams of becoming a film star ended in shame. A searing novel about a young immigrant woman’s dream of finding freedom in Rome and the bittersweet legacies of her African past. “Lovely prose and memorable characters make this novel a thought-provoking and moving consideration of the wreckage of European oppression.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Igiaba Scego is an original voice who connects Italy’s present with its colonial past. Adua is an important novel that obliges the country to confront both memory and truth.” —Amara Lakhous, author of Dispute over a Very Italian Piglet “This book depicts the soul and the body of a daughter and a father, illuminating words that are used every day and swiftly emptied of meaning: migrants, diaspora, refugees, separation, hope, humiliation, death.” —Panorama “A memorable, affecting tale . . . Brings the decolonialization of Africa to life . . . All the more affecting for being told without sentimentality or self-pity.” —ForeWord Reviews “Deeply and thoroughly researched . . . Also a captivating read: the novel is sweeping in its geographical and temporal scope, yet Scego nonetheless renders her complex protagonists richly and lovingly.” —Africa Is a Country

“[A] masterly investigation of evil, resistance and guilt, billed as the first Arab novel to confront the Holocaust” from the Nobel Prize–nominated author (Publishers Weekly). Banned in the author’s native Algeria, this groundbreaking novel is based on a true story and inspired by the work of Primo Levi. The Schiller brothers, Rachel and Malrich, couldn’t be more dissimilar. They were born in a small village in Algeria to a German father and an Algerian mother and raised by an elderly uncle in one of the toughest ghettos in France. But the similarities end there. Rachel is a model immigrant—hard working, upstanding, law-abiding. Malrich has drifted. Increasingly alienated and angry, a bleak future seems inevitable for him. But when Islamic fundamentalists murder the young men’s parents in Algeria the destinies of both brothers are transformed. Rachel discovers the shocking truth about his family and buckles under the weight of the sins of his father, a former SS officer. Now Malrich, the outcast, will have to face that same awful truth alone. “The German Mujahid deals with the fine line between the destructive power wielded by Islamic fundamentalism today and the power of another movement that left an indelible mark on history: Nazism.” —Haaretz (Israel) “With extraordinary eloquence, Sansal condemns both the [Algerian] military and the Islamic fundamentalists; he decries that Algeria crippled by trafficking, religion, bureaucracy, the culture of illegality, of coups, and of clans, career apologists, the glorification of tyrants, the love of flashy materialism, and the passion for rants.” —Lire (France) “The German Mujahid, winner of the RTL-Lire Prize for fiction, is a marvelous, devilishly well-constructed novel.” —L’Express (France)

Since antiquity, the she-wolf has served as the potent symbol of Rome. For more than two thousand years, the legendary animal that rescued Romulus and Remus has been the subject of historical and political accounts, literary treatments in poetry and prose, and visual representations in every medium. In She-Wolf: The Story of a Roman Icon, Cristina Mazzoni examines the evolution of the she-wolf as a symbol in western history, art, and literature, from antiquity to contemporary times. Used, for example, as an icon of Roman imperial power, papal authority, and the distance between the present and the past, the she-wolf has also served as an allegory for greed, good politics, excessive female sexuality, and, most recently, modern, multi-cultural Rome. Mazzoni engagingly analyzes the various role guises of the she-wolf over time in the first comprehensive study in any language on this subject.

"Durastanti casts the universal drama of the family as the sieve through which the self—woman, artist, daughter—is filtered and known." —Ocean Vuong A work of fiction about being a stranger in your own family and life. Every family has its own mythology, but in this family none of the myths match up. Claudia’s mother says she met her husband when she stopped him from jumping off a bridge. Her father says it happened when he saved her from an attempted robbery. Both parents are deaf but couldn’t be more different; they can’t even agree on how they met, much less who needed saving. Into this unlikely yet somehow inevitable union, our narrator is born. She comes of age with her brother in this strange, and increasingly estranged, household split between a small village in southern Italy and New York City. Without even sign language in common – their parents have not bothered to teach them – family communications are chaotic and rife with misinterpretations, by turns hilarious and devastating. An outsider in every way, she longs for a freedom she’s not even sure exists. Only books and punk rock—and a tumultuous relationship—begin to show her the way to create her own mythology, to construct her own version of the story of her life. Kinetic, formally dazzling, and spectacularly original, this book is a funny and profound portrait of an unconventional family that makes us look anew at how language shapes our understanding of ourselves.