Gianni Celati

The first book-length study in any language of Celati's entire body of work, this monograph ranges over a broad landscape of critical thought and creative writing.

Selected Essays and Dialogues is a collection of translations of Italian writer and filmmaker Gianni Celati’s theoretical and musing work from the late 1960s to the present. Topics range from environmental perception and archaeological conceptions of historical knowledge, to street theatre, writing, photography, cinema and translation. The book provides a framework of key literary, theoretical and artistic movements of the last 50 years, as well as a guide for English-language readers to place Celati’s work in historical, cultural and biographical context, serving to illuminate his books available in English, namely Towards the River’s Mouth, Adventures in Africa, Voices from the Plains and Appearances. There are various paths to take, tempting readers to wander and become lost in webs of daring thought, drawn ever on by Celati’s fondness for the unexpected ordinary and his bonhomie with others. Indeed, a genial adventurousness can be found within all of Celati’s writings collected here, driven by an affectionate and light-hearted engagement with the surrounding world. Herein is a taste of a seemingly endless series of adventures of the mind and body, always tapped into a lithe sensitivity for an encompassing collective imagination not restricted to the so-called high arts or letters, but very much also engaged with the everyday lives, places and tales we all constantly share. Praise for Selected Essays and Dialogues by Gianni Celati ‘Barron’s volume is a very welcome addition to the field. As the first collection of Gianni Celati’s essays in English translation, the book makes accessible a wide selection of his critical work to an Anglophone audience.’ Marina Spunta, University of Leicester

Italian writer and filmmaker Gianni Celati’s 1989 philosophical travelogue Towards the River’s Mouth explores perception, memory, place and space as it recounts a series of journeys across the Po River Valley in northern Italy. The book seeks to document the “new Italian landscape” where divisions between the urban and rural were being blurred into what Celati terms “a new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude.” Celati traveled by train, by bus, and on foot, at times with photographer Luigi Ghirri, at others exploring on his own without predetermined itineraries, taking notes on the places he encountered, watching and listening to people in stations, fields, bars, houses, squares, and hotels. In this way the book took shape as Celati traveled and wrote, gathering and rewriting his notes into “stories of observation” (9). Celati attempts to find meaning by seeking the uncertain limits of our ability to discern everyday surroundings. “Every observation,” as he puts it, “needs liberate itself from the familiar codes it carries, to go adrift in the middle of all things not understood, in order to arrive at an outlet, where it must feel lost.” At the forefront of the then-nascent spatial turn in the humanities, Towards the River’s Mouth is a key text of what in recent years has been variously termed literary cartography, literary geography, and spatial poetics. Its call to carefully and affectionately examine our surroundings while attempting to step back from habitual ways of perceiving and moving through space, has resonated as much with literary scholars and other writers as with geographers and architects. By now a classic of twentieth-century Italian literature, it has in recent years garnered increasing attention, especially with the growth of ecocriticism and new materialism within the environmental humanities. This edition, translated into English for the first time, features an introduction that places Towards the River’s Mouth in the context of Celati’s other work, and a selection of ten scholarly essays by prominent figures in comparative literature and Italian studies.

Celebrated Italian novelist and essayist Gianni Celati's book is both a travelogue in the European tradition and a trenchant meditation on what it means to be a tourist. Hailed as one of the best travelogues on African ever written and awarded the first Zerilli-Marimo prize,

Publisher description

A collection of four novellas by the author of Voices From the Plains, which reflect on the themes of appearance, reality and fiction. Gianni Celati is the recipient of the Mondello Prize for Italian literature.

Since the late 1960's there have been many important Italian writers whose work remains unknown outside Italy. This ground-breaking book offers general critical introductions to fifteen contemporary novelists whose work is of an international calibre.

A series of short stories that illuminate the lives of a variety of people in modern Italy who must cope with the banality of life and the need to keep up appearances.