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Title: Wintry, pp146

Author: Dario Voltolini

Publisher: La nave di Teseo

Rigths: r.vivian literary agency

'Winter' is a powerful novel, that knocks you down while lifting you up and grabs you from behind while staring you in the face - and Voltolini is a great writer, there's no getting around it.
Sandro Veronesi - Twice Strega Prize Winner

 

 

“I have seen Voltolini deal with almost all human circumstances in his stories. At first I thought he had a writer's bag full of small tools, procured who knows where, suitable for making people laugh, move them, reveal them, reflect. Now I understand that he has only one tool and he built it himself. He only needs a pocket to carry it around and with that he does everything wonderfully.
No one else has it.”

Davide Longo - Provincial Requiem

 

Author of short stories, novels, radio plays, songs and librettos for the theatre, Dario Voltolini (Turin, 1959) has written, among others, “Una intesa metropolitana”, “Rincorse”, “Forme d'onda”, “10”, “Primaverile”, “Le mostri sono inavvertitamente uscita dalla cabbia”, “Foravìa”, “Pacific Palisades” and “II Giardino degli Aranci”, Invernale (finalist for the 2024 Strega Prize)

The father splits animals, enters their entrails, separates muscles from membranes, removes organs and bones. The father sells parts of animals. The father dives into the biological abyss and pulls out steaks. Cuts of meat are his profession and his art. The father is a butcher. The father's job is to enter dead flesh and come out, delivering it to the living, so that life can continue its voracious chain. He is a ferryman between the two parts of the flesh, between way and chair, between flesh and flesh. At the market stall, he serves the fearful who do not face the bodies they eat, who do not want to know, delegating the dirty work to the butchers. One day something goes wrong in the perfect choreography of the blades and a crooked cut takes off almost a thumb. It is the beginning of another descent into flesh, this time his own. At work, a bacterium has contaminated him. It begins with an infection, continues with exhaustion, a feral diagnosis, medical protocols, trips to clinics abroad. The twenty-year-old son Dario looks into the flesh of his father as it deteriorates and into the melancholy of his departure. A strong intimacy envelops them, as happens almost only in the relationship between daughters and mothers. We enter into the son's gaze, prehensile and precise, as he sees his father collapse. Precision is the form of his devotion and his suffering. Tiziano Scarpa - Strega Prize

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Tiziano Scarpa - Strega Prize

The gaze of the twenty-year-old son is cloaked in humanity, wrapped in modesty; never judgmental,

grazes the life of the parents like a swallow and finally penetrates it. It questions evil, it gives us

his suffering, caresses and cries for his father, page after page. You can feel respect, intelligence, grace. Winter is a novel written in a state of grace, full of lightning reflections, overflowing with love and great respect. Federica De Paolis

I finished Dario's book. What beauty, what power. The last chapter, I was on the train, I read it with tears, not moved, sobbing. I wrote to him. What a champion. Simone Salomoni

“Maestria letteraria, strazio, furore composto, bellezza, disperazione e modestia. Le ultime pagine di questo libro si leggono con le lacrime agli occhi”.

Antonio Moresco autore di I giochi dell'eternità

 

“Tutto ciò che è fatto di carne, e di ossa, è destinato a contaminarsi, scontrarsi e ferirsi. Il set di “Invernale” è un banco da macellaio, quindi un set ideale. Con il suo stile asciutto, tenero e brutale, Voltolini cerca di rispondere a una delle domande che ci accompagnano nel percorso di perdita e riconquista di una persona: quando è iniziato, come? Esiste un momento in cui si comincia a morire? Si dice che la morte fa parte della vita e come tale va intesa. Ma è vero anche il contrario e questo libro ce lo dimostra.
Se esiste un passaggio tra il regno dei vivi e quello dei morti, questo libro lo attraversa: pesando” la materia di cui siamo fatti. Affascinante, vagamente egizio, “Invernale” di Voltolini ci accompagna nel più comune e misterioso dei viaggi in modo originalissimo”.

Letizia Muratori, Spifferi

Title: The Fault is in the Details, pp 240

Publisher: AlterEgo editions, July 2024

Rights: r.vivian literary agency

Elisabetta Foresti was born in Rome. The Fault is in the Details is her first book.

Sinossi

 

Marco, giovane detenuto, nega di aver ucciso il padre in un impeto di rabbia. Rifiutando la linea dell'avvocato d'ufficio, racconta di un genitore erotomane e violento e di una ex fidanzata nevrotica, Elizabeth. Durante l'interrogatorio, in un'atmosfera estremamente conflittuale, viene rivelata l'ossessione del ragazzo per una parola pronunciata dal padre prima di morire. Ormai convinto di essere stato sottoposto a un trattamento psicotropo, perpetrato dall'avvocato allo scopo di costringerlo a confessare falsamente, arriva a fornire quattro versioni diverse delle circostanze del delitto. La coscienza di Marco diventa sempre più inverosimile, riflettendo elementi della realtà mediati attraverso la lente di un caleidoscopio.

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Title: From eleven meters, pp140

Author: Dario Voltolini

Publisher: La nave di Teseo, October 2025

Rigths: r. vivian literary agency

Author of short stories, novels, radio plays, songs and librettos for the theatre, Dario Voltolini (Turin, 1959) has written, among others, “Una intesa metropolitana”, “Rincorse”, “Forme d'onda”, “10”, “Primaverile”, “Le mostri sono inavvertitamente uscita dalla cabbia”, “Foravìa”, “Pacific Palisades” and “II Giardino degli Aranci”, Invernale (finalist for the 2024 Strega Prize)

Synopsis

 

The book tells the story of a goalkeeper from his youth to the first team.

We talk about elements of an athlete's football life that are a metaphor for our individual life: predisposition, talent, training, care. In particular, we focus on a particular point which is that of "intuition" that we, in the case of alternative choices to make, follow.
This intuitive ability is both a talent and the result of growth, mental, personal, character.

The development of this faculty is told by following the steps of the young athlete's evolution and has a surprise ending in which his entire journey is condensed: at the crucial point of his career, the goalkeeper will find himself face to face with his opponent during the execution of a penalty kick on which the victory or defeat of his team in the final of a very important tournament depends. For the first time in his career, the goalkeeper waits for his intuition to tell him which way to dive to save the penalty (an intuition that once developed in himself psychophysically has always directed him towards the right choice making him an amazing champion), but it does not arrive. The opponent begins his run-up and the goalkeeper waits for the intuition to save the penalty, waits at every step of the opponent, waits until the moment in which he is about to kick. But no intuition comes to his aid and so he stands still on the goal line in despair. But the footballer opts for an arrogant "chip" and the ball simply lands in the arms of the goalkeeper. No intuition, no choice: they were the right thing to do.

Title:The Island and Time

Author: Claudia Lanteri

Film Rights: R. Vivian Literary Agency

Rights sold to Folio Verlag

Claudia Lanteri was born in Caltanissetta. Her parents, who founded a Teatro Stabile here, passed on to her a passion for stories from a very young age.

After graduating in Modern Literature in Palermo, she continued her studies in Rome with a master's degree for creative professions from the Luiss Business School. She lived in London for five years, collaborating with several fashion, theatre, culinary and sports companies as an artworker and web designer. Since 2015 she has returned to live in Sicily, where she works as a consultant in the field of strategic communication and digital innovation, combining her humanistic education with visual skills consolidated abroad.

Passionate about photography and literary criticism, she would like to write much more fiction and fewer editorial plans. The Island and Time is her first novel

In this insular detective story where a tight plot meets very powerful literary writing, the events take place in a time that is both defined (the 1960s) and at the same time undefined, mobile, in a sense: a time in which everything keeps happening , in which the past is mixed with the present.

An anomalous fact, after the initial disturbance, is reduced to nothingness incorporated into the unchanging habits and rhythms of the inhabitants of a small community.

Franco Stelzer

Title: The Light Stretcher

Author: Franco Stelzer

Publisher: Hopefulmonster, pp 2023, pp 88

Kane

5.0 out of 5 stars Refined prose

Reviewed in Italy on 10 August 2023

Purchase verified

Stelzer tells a delicate and poignant love story with exquisite prose and creates an unforgettable character, Bodo.

 

Paolo Dellachà

5.0 out of 5 stars It would take more books like this one

Reviewed in Italy on July 1, 2023

Purchase verified

Dry, rigorous and effective writing.

Franco Stelzer was born in Trento in 1956.

He spent many years in Bologna and Germany: he was a teacher and translator from German . For Einaudi he published Ano di volpi argentate ( 2000) Il nostro primo, solenne, stranissimo Natale senza di lei ( 2003) Cosa diremo agli angeli ( 2018) and for Maestrale Matematici nel sole ( 2009) .

Winner 2024 Bergamo Prize

Bodo lives with his mother near the Lorettoberg (Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany). Bodo and his mother work in their workshop: washing, ironing. Bodo likes ironing shirts. Pillowcases, less so. Whenever possible, before going to sleep, he looks out of the window and the breeze coming down from the Lorettoberg comforts him. Bodo falls asleep melancholy and serene. He is simple-hearted, but has sometimes unsettling enthusiasms, kept calm pharmacologically. Bodo loves his mother. Bodo falls in love with a customer. When she and her family return to her country just over the border in France, Bodo's love takes over all of Bodo. Bodo is a wonderful character, created by the art of Franco Stelzer, a master storyteller, a pen that does not write: it tattoos. Bodo is a gift Stelzer gives us, he is a presence we do not forget. The text has Central European sounds and ribbing, a soul that echoes non-Italian literature, but inlaid with a profoundly Italian language, as beautiful as a snow crystal. A tale whose precise and measured dose of enchantment makes the prose and its rhythm capable of painting such a creature, Bodo, adhering to its delicate dementia with all the complexity and intelligence of the voice that narrates it. The writer demonstrates extreme confidence of hand. His empathy for the figure he is inventing is total, with a hint of cruel harshness that concerns Bodo, but above all, exemplarily through him, all of us. This love story is a powerful whisper. The absolute pain that runs through it, however, only comes in second, because the winner, on a knife's edge, is instead a mysterious and inalienable happiness.

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Title: The Ridiculous age

Author: Margherita Giacobino

Publisher: Mondadori, 2018, pp. 270

Foreign rights: R.Vivian Literary Agency

Rights sold to: Dedalus Publishing

Film Rights:

Kitchen Production exercised the option rights.
The film to be released in the spring of 2025 stars Barbara Bouché

The old woman lives alone with her elderly cat Veleno and with memories (her beloved Lena has been dead for many years now); Fortunately in the old woman's life is Gabriela, a lump of hard-working youth from eastern countries who has survived multiple family disasters. 

A story about love, death, elderly and a relationship between loneliness and being different:  a formidable woman in her ninties and her young foreign domestic helper, in a world where it seems that life is no longer worth anything, but where the protagonist's lucid gaze brings back humanity and meaning, curiosity and fun.

Writer, journalist and translator, Margherita Giacobino was born in Turin, where she lives and works. She made her debut in 1993 with Un'americana a Parigi (Baldini & Castoldi). Her novels include Casalinghe all'inferno (Baldini & Castoldi, 1996), an international bestseller that anticipated the glorious trend of American women's fiction; L'educazione sentimentale di CB (La Tartaruga, 2007); La morte è giovane, written under the pseudonym of Rita Gatto and published by Salani in 2009; L'uovo fuori dal cavagno (Elliot, 2010); Ritratto di famiglia con bambina grasso (Mondadori, 2015), translated in France (Stock), Germany (Kunstmann) and the UK (Dedalus Ltd); Il prezzo del sogno (Mondadori, 2017), a fictionalised biography of Patricia Highsmith and fresh from an era whose translation rights have been sold in the UK (Dedalus); The ridiculous age (Mondadori 2018). Your Look on Me was published on 12 January 2021.

"Great book [...] A hard book, but surprisingly hilarious." - Margherita Oggero, TuttoLibri (La Stampa)

 

 

"Delicious, bright, vibrant." - Conventional

 

The ridiculous age is a novel that seems like a long conversation between different generations in which, however, the problems are always there, halfway between love and pain. [...] A novel that wants to underline how much the meaning of growing up is transversal to age, to ways of being and becoming. "

- Cosebelle Magazine

 

 

"A novel with a hilarious, amusing, but never banal plot, in which an accurate investigation of human behaviour, the conflict between different cultures, the true value of love and loneliness are mixed." - About the Novel

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Synopsis

The narrator of Simone Salomoni's operaprima, published by Alter Ego, is a painter on the threshold of forty. At the beginning of the novel the protagonist receives an unexpected visit from Marie Bertrand, the woman who has rented the house next to his in the mountains near Monghidoro. Marie is interested in his art and in him too; but the man focuses his attention on her son, Simone, who is eighteen, very handsome and in great pain. A great trust develops between the two, a relationship between master and student: they talk about art and life. Simone has the painter read her stories, poses for a portrait, goes with him to the river: their relationship is both chaste and full of sensuality, but will lead to unexpected outcomes.

Title: Operaprima

Author: Simone Solomoni

Publisher: AlterEgo, pp 176

Foreign Rights: r.vivian literary agency

English sample: available

Title: The coincidence, pp 224

Publisher: Laurana, September 2024

Rightsi: r.vivian literary agency

Synopsis

 

A crime, a robbery, a cover-up, a journalist, a private investigator, a girl with a double life and her partner with a triple one, a mysterious junk dealer, a night watchman who reads novels, a mob boss and his cruel henchmen, an ordinary man - Massimo, the protagonist - who finds himself in the middle of all this one very hot summer and, driven by a mixture of curiosity, nostalgia and pain, decides he wants to understand something about it: La cocorrenza , the third novel by Edoardo Zambelli, has all the ingredients to be a noir of the highest quality; but it isn't; or rather, it's something more.

With La coincuencia Edoardo Zambelli has happily found the narrative balance he was looking for in his previous works. Conceived as a relentless game of misunderstandings and appearances, the novel resolves itself in a web of events and encounters that can at times be irrelevant or fatal, but are always inscribed in that dimension of destiny that is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the writer. La coincuencia is a detective story that unfolds in itself, as in the unsurpassed model of Dürrenmatt's Promise (not by chance, explicitly cited in the text together with many other literary references), but it is also an unforgettable love story: it is the desperate pursuit of Sara, who at a certain point could even be transfigured into Anna, but who in the end vanishes into thin air, like a coincidence that never had the chance to come true. Alessandro Zaccuri - author of Poco a me medesimo

Title: Brasilampi, pp 156

Publisher: Hopefulmonster 2023

Rights: r.vivian literary agency

Marta Cai's writing is difficult to classify: one can only be taken aback by the novelties of style, thought, approach, relationship between the word and the meaning that emerges from it. The unusual mix of intelligence and sensoriality, the mirroring between syntactic progression and perceptive gestures of this author who recently moved from Italy to Brazil gives us these "Brasilampi", texts that recall the so-called "chronicles", short compositions without genre, epiphanies of everyday life or reflections on the greatest systems where everything is allowed except the obvious, solidly present in Brazilian literature but not so codified in Europe. Marta Cai (a "psychogeographic" and "situated" writer) does not tell us about Brazil, does not force it into categories, descriptions, interpretations, but on the contrary and with absolute respect lets it permeate her. She thus reaches a fascinating space, both geographical and interior. She enters (and we with her) an ancestral clearing: that of non-comprehension, of the preverbal impact with the existent. She records in its presence, like a highly sensitive seismograph, her native illuminations, as if they were babblings (while instead they are dizzying lexical and syntactic acrobatics). Thus from Brazil unexpected flashes flash, expertly set up in a hidden, but powerful, circular, omnipresent structure. We cannot call them "stories", although they are populated by characters caught in peculiar moments; we cannot call them "chapters of a novel", although the author composes them in a unitary narrative arc; we cannot call them "sketches", although the writer proceeds here too, as in her previous works ("Enti di ragione", SuiGeneris, 2019 and "Centomilioni", Einaudi, 2023), with rapid angles, unexpected divarications, unpredictable core samplings in the depths. We can call them “Brasilampi”, and so we will.

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