Publishing rights: r vivian literary agency
Gherardo Bortolottiwas born in 1972, in Brescia, where he lives and works. He deals with experimental and avant-garde literature and the impact of new communication technologies on the production and use of literary texts. His works explore margins and border areas between prose and poetry, in a path that goes from Francis Ponge to Italo Calvino and also touching authors such as Sterne or Xavier De Maistre.
Influenced by online production and the forms of mass media, he especially tests short and very short writings and applies them to the themes of the infra-ordinary, normality, the globalized economy, the sentimental and everyday wear and tear.
With Michele Zaffarano he edited the Chapbooks series for Arcipelago Edizioni, publishing experimental literature from France, Italy and the USA. He has published texts and translations online and in magazines. His translation work mainly focused on American experimental literature and he was among the first to bring into Italian texts by Language Poetry (Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, Barrett Watten, etc.) and by Flarf Poetry (K. Silem Mohammad, Gary Sullivan). He currently collaborates with Michele Zaffarano in the second series of the same series at TIC. He was one of the founders and editors of the translation and experimental literature blog GAMMM (gammm.org) and editor of the literary blog Nazione Indiana (www.nazioneindiana.com).
Books: "Low-level techniques" (Lavieri, 2009); “Without comparison” (Transeuropa, 2013); “When the Aliens Came” (Benway Series, 2016); "The stories of the floor" (Tic, 2018); “Low. A trilogy” (Tic, 2020); ′′ Summer romance ′′ (Tic, 2021); “All the hotel rooms in the world” (Hopefulmonster, 2022). Plaquette: "Binary solutions" (The green room, 2007). Anthologies: "Prose in prose" (Le Lettere, 2009); "Poets of the Zero Years" (Ponte Sisto, 2011); “The land of prose. Italian storytellers of the Zero years (1999-2014)” (L'Orma, 2014). Essays: "Beyond the public: literature and the transition to the web" (Nuova prose, 2014).
Fine August is the new work by Bortolotti being read by publishers.
Synopsis
uA season of life reduced to the turning on and off of moments, almost epiphanies in the endless body of history.
In a few days, between the end of the holidays and the return to work, in an almost suspended phase of the year in which even daily life takes on the aspect of legend or hallucination, a narrative voice lists minor episodes, hints at plots inconclusive, he names characters and places that cross his thoughts and attention.
Bortolotti's short prose tested on the distances of an unwritten but intuitive novel, a narrative architecture that gradually rises in the reader's imagination, made up of aperitifs in the center, walks overlooking the lake, work meetings, summer nights in which silence is almost exotic, almost revealing.
A continuous meditation on the ephemeral but inexhaustible value of human lives, of our affections, of the cases that concern us, even minor ones, substitutes, obtuse but in any case indelible from the deepest matter of reality.