Contromano Laterza

Rights List - Spring 2014

Valerio Millefoglie Small world Journey to the places where the second you arrive, you are on your way out again

An amazing tourist-philosophical guide to the smallest places on earth

“A book that immediately triggers the

reader’s tourist curiosities (who

wouldn’t test the hotel with just one

bed?) but that also arouses several

interesting reflections: the "small"

becomes a new lens through which

analyze reality.”

Matteo B. Bianchi

“In his journey, Valerio has not only

visited places, but he has also explored

the concept of “small” through the

encounter with the people: like the only

employee of a German bank or a

sculptor specializing in creations

positioned inside the eye of a needle…”

pp. 152 Published Giacomo Papi

Would you like to know where the smallest bookshop in the world is? Or the smallest house? Would you believe that there are some churches which are so tiny that they only have room for one spouse at a time? Valerio Millefoglie journeys to the smallest places on earth and like an archaeologist armed with a microscope reveals worlds measuring just a few square metres. The smallest theatre, the smallest island, an intimate universe like the restaurant with just two dinner settings, the cinema in a car, the one-roomed hotel, the nightclub that can fit ten at a squeeze. There’s even the smallest jail in the world. In his travels around Italy, Hungary, Poland, the UK, Germany, and as far afield as Tokyo, the author documents places that really exist but are so unique as to seem imaginary, like the lives of who dreamt them up and inhabit them. A new way of interpreting reality and of travelling: to shorten the distance between us.

The stops of the small tour:

The Cathedral of Santa Croce – Nona, Croatia Etgar Keret House – Varsavia The river Aril – Verona Loreto Island – Iseo Lake Halligen – Archipelago between Germany and Denmark Bar Piano – Tokyo Makarta Primary Scholl – Georgia The smallest town: Pedesina – near Sondrio, Italy The smallest hotel: Eh’Haeusl – Amberg, Germany The Cappuccini Prison – San Marino A restaurant just for two – Rieti, Italy One man bank in Gammesfeld – near Stuttgart, Germany Giacalone the Barber – Geneva The smallest bookstore – Pécs, Hungary

Valerio Millefoglie was born in Bari in 1977; in 2012 Einaudi published his book The moment in which we are happy. Baldini Castoldi Dalai previously published his novel Receipts. Tales in the form of purchases (with Matteo B. Bianchi, 2004) and Guide to Becoming Valerio Millefoglie (2005). He contributes to several newspapers and edits the column Based on a Recent Study on Smemoranda.it. He is also a performer, musician, and songwriter for Eugenio Finardi (14 Drops of Valium). He took part in the CapaRezza tour of Fuori dal Tunnel and produced a record My Imaginary Best Friends (EMI music). On his website www.attimofelice.it he collects “medical records” in which the patients describe their moments and places of happiness. He has just released his new single No to the Stock Exchange, Yes to Life, recorded with a 40-piece orchestra in the prestigious Abbey Road Studios of London.

“The world’s equatorial diameter measures 12,756,274 km and its polar diameter 12,713,504 km. It’s excessive. I don’t need all this space.”

Emmanuela Carbé My Pet Salmon Guide to building a world complete with tables for home drills

The most moving story of all time after Silver Skates..

“If one of the things that we entreat literature to do is to reveal us as foreigners in a world we used to inhabiting as landlords, then this is a fundamental book. Gentle, cynical, impertinent and funny”

Andrea Bajani, La Repubblica

“The bravest book of this year”

Andrea Cortellessa, La Stampa

pp. 176 with illustrations

The irresistible tale of a friendship between a girl and a salmon (who says everything the protagonist doesn’t have the courage to say) that arises out of fear of the world. A simple fear, which is that of living, of coming out into open, of being alone: Emmanuela Carbé builds everything anew from a jumbled, disjointed language. Much like that very serious games children play when they take an object, transform it into something else and call on it to do what they cannot do or have no the courage to do: fly, collide, explode, touch the sun, marry, be born, die. The surreal, moving, and extremely poetic diary of a girl in conflict with the world…

Emmanuela Carbé was born in Verona in 1983. She lives in Pavia, where she earned a PhD in Modern Philology. In 2002 she won the Campiello Youth prize with the story Sconcerto in quattro tempi. Since 2005 she has written stories about her pet salmon online, at xanadupublishing. com/lumicino. Her articles have appeared in reviews, collections of short stories and in Nazione Indiana.

Every evening salmon falls asleep in a punnet of strawberries. He has problems with depression and sessions with a psychologist. He is hopelessly in love with Medusa but too shy to tell her so and every time he tries, ends up hiding behind a trapdoor in order not to be seen…The girl, whose relationship with Coso has just come to an abrupt end, embarks on a new adventure with Palomar: this is the inspiration for the goldfish designs that decorate the book…

“My pet salmon, who at two in the morning turns a bit psychologist, says that I am suffering from urban claustrophobia, and that the city I picked to study in is so small that its borders could be enclosed in a silk handkerchief you can blow your nose in. The city you picked, he says, has high walls, always the same people, same places, same movements. Everything is done and undone in a handful of places. If I move a little ball, it bounces off that of my neighbour, the neighbour’s off his neighbour’s, and so on, and then the same little ball comes back and hits me on the shoulder, in a vicious circle that works for any subject matter: information, invitations, studies, conversations, meetings, friendship. The small places always create the most stink and make people worse than they are. And this is why salmon and I like complicated, big urban cities, because they are places in which our meanness and bad habits are dispersed in the atmosphere, and we ourselves are scattered into infinite possibilities, as though in an ocean, when a chance current washes us away.”

Antonella Anedda The Art of Living on Islands Journey to the archipelago of the Maddalena

The first lesson of islands is that you can’t leave on foot

Revisiting the places once known to us means discovering that in reality they are not known to us at all. Each journey teaches us that there is no place for arrogance.

pp. 144

Travelling in the Archipelago of the Maddalena, Antonella Anedda records rocks, water, houses, and spaces altered by time but above all by the wind and light. The atmospheric variations, the Maestral wind, the power of the sea, are recurring motifs in her description of a landscape at once utterly familiar and ever new. Anedda rediscovers some of the most beautiful inlets and beaches of the Mediterranean, wanders in the pinewood of Caprera where Garibaldi’s White House stands, and stops off at the Camposanto of the Maddalena where Gian Maria Volontè was laid to rest. Silence, stones, in the company of dogs, wild boars and cats: these are the characters of a deliberately planar book, shorn of any sentimentalism or nostalgia.

Antonella Anedda (Anedda-Angioy), poet and essayist, has written extensively on art for newspapers and reviews and has translated classical and modern poets. She has written lyrics for musicians such as Paolo Fresu, Dario Minciacchi and Rozalie Hirs, and has worked with artists such as Jenny Holzer and Ruggero Savinio. Her books of poetry have received numerous awards, from the Premio Montale for Nights of Western Peace (Donzelli 1999) to the Viareggio-Rèpaci Prize for Save As (Mondadori 2012). Her play A Lunar Woman was staged in November 2012, starring Nicoletta Braschi. Her most recent essays include The Life of Details (Donzelli 2009).

Simone Lenzi Immobile among the sands and cliffs of Livorno

An amazing tale on a different Tuscany… but perhaps the most authentic?

Three houses over the course of twenty years to depict a city where each time it is easy to feel at home; a place that lures you like a mousetrap from which it seems impossible to flee, unless you are willing to pay the price of an infinite nostalgia…

pp. 112

The land Simone Lenzi describes is Tuscany at its most authentic, the wild and barely civilized Tuscany, suffocated under the hackneyed rhetoric of good oil and farmers who are part philosopher, part randy old men, with their flasks of wine and limitless supply of dirty jokes. We are light years from Florence, Siena and the celebrated cradle of the beautiful and of artistic splendour, grown rigid under the weight of centuries of marvel. Livorno boasts no frescoes or palazzi that strike you dumb, no piazzas to bewitch the tourists: as Henry James put it in Italian Hours: “The most striking fact as to Leghorn (Livorno), it must be conceded at the outset, is that, being in Tuscany, it should be so scantily Tuscan.” But if it is true architectonically, at narrative level there is no sense of inferiority. On the contrary, there is a life in ferment which demands to be told. Punctuated with episodes from the author’s personal life and quest for a home and subsequent homes (from Livorno to Livorno, of course), the book regales us with sparkling anecdotes, memorable characters and great life lessons that may taste bitter in our mouth…but are always framed by our smile.

Simone Lenzi was born in Livorno in 1968. He studied Philosophy at the University of Pisa (he finished the exams but didn’t complete the thesis). Since 1990 he has sung and written texts for Virginiana Miller, with which he made six records considered among the best in the Italian indie scene. With Simone Marchesi he translated the first book of Martial’s Epigrams (2008) and An Explanation of America by Robert Pinsky (2009). Paolo Virzi based his film Tutti I Santi Giorni on his debut novel, The Generation (2012). Enrico Remmert - Luca Ragagnin Bacchus’s Berry On the wine roads

Two friends with a shared passion for literature and fine wines in a great road trip

The two authors have recorded everything they saw, collected, heard and imbibed, like we do in stories about travelling somewhere, losing our way and serendipitously finding our soul instead.

At times kings of the cellars, at others frequenters of taverns, their journey takes them past stunning views and abandoned petrol stations, on the roads between the Langhe and Monferrato, in a magical and spellbinding Piedmont.

pp. 144

Do you remember Sideways? Remmert and Ragagnin take us on an adventure whose homeland becomes an Atlantis and the water that submerges it a sea of chattering cellars, a territory crisscrossed by wine-bar rivers and small-vintner lakes, with rivulets of words that stream out of the taverns and the bars in the small town squares – voices that preserve the memory of a learned and reserved land, brought to life with each sip, through the measuring out of an ancient secret handed down through the ages. A book that unfolds on the state roads of the Langhe, the Monferrato and the Roero, with the car windows rolled down and a string of corks trailing from the exhaust pipe like the tail of a placid, crafty animal devouring tales of great vintages and divine wines.

Enrico Remmert was born in 1966 in Turin, where he lives and works. He published three novels with Marsilio: Rossenotti (1997), The Rascals’ Ballad (2002) and White Roads (2010). With Luca Ragagnin he co-authored the trilogy Bacchus, Tobacco and Venus, a fairytale, and a collection of what he terms the greatest examples of modern bull, a sort of dictionary of the inopportune.

Luca Ragagnin was born in Turin in 1965. He is the author of a vast collection of poetry and prose. With Enrico Remmert he wrote: In Praise of the Self-aware Drunk (2012); In Praise of Defective Love (2006) and Smokiana (2007), all for Marsilio; The Journey of Ulysses the Flying Fish (2010) for Edizioni BD; The Universal Dictionary of the Inopportune (inevitably incomplete) (2012) for Espress Edizioni. Francesco Forlani Paris Without Passing GO

A Dadaist and surrealistic journey discovering Paris and the mysteries of the last bohém

If you don’t pass “go” the game of life becomes complicated but helps us to dwell on the small things, the colours, on finding meaning in unforeseen events and apparently unimportant objects. Just like Monopoly.

pp. 176

A sentimental guide (of sorts) to the French capital designed by a young intellectual who, in pursuit of his dream of founding an avant-garde review with a group of friends, explores the arrondissements and describes the least-well-known corners of Paris. Corners where the pulse races while the discomforts of a life lived in poverty channel creativity along new paths and towards unknown shores, including from the perspective of language. The important routes are all there: from the Musée d’Orsay to Père Lachaise cemetery, from Montparnasse to the Latin Quarter, from Beaubourg to the parade of 14 July. But they are seen from inside the postcard looking out, from the perspective of those fleeting human silhouettes that every so often accidentally end up in photos. Casual passers-by: perhaps on their way to an Italian lesson or to speak about literary reviews over a glass of wine, to attend the opening of an exhibition or rush to a romantic rendezvous… Places are thus transformed into encounters (“there are always incredible surprise meetings. In the end you think – dammit! – so this is Paris!”), revealing an unmistakeably Parisian and simultaneously multiethnic atmosphere.

Francesco Forlani is a translator from French, a writer but also a poet, a cabaret artist and a performer. He was born in Caserta in 1967. He lives between Paris and Turin and writes for various international reviews. He has published several book s in French and Italian including Métromorphoses (Paris 2002), The Manifesto of the Dandy Communist (Rome 2007) and Autoreverse (Neaples 2009),

Tommaso Pincio Zero star hotel Infernos and paradises of a writer with no fixed abode

pp. 240

A curious and poetic journey between life and literature in a sui generis hotel in which the guests are these twelve illustrious writers:

room 101: room 102: Graham Greene room 103: Jack Kerouac; room 201: Georges Simenon room 202: Francis Scott Fitzgerald room 203: David F. Wallace; room 301: Philip K. Dick room 302: room 303: Herman Melville; room 401: Pier Paolo Pasolini room 402: Gabriel Garcia Marquez room 403: George Orwell

Tommaso Pincio debuted as a novelist in 1999 with M., almost a literary re-visitation of the film BladeRunner set in an imaginary Berlin in 1969. He later published An Other Worldly Love Einaudi 2002); The Girl Who Was Not Her (Einaudi 2005); China City (Einaudi 2008) and The Infinite Space (Minimum Fax 2010). With Laterza he published: Lots of Little Me’s in I Am As You Want Me. Tales on the job (2009). He is a regular contributor to the magazine Rolling Stone.

Paolo Cognetti New York is an Open Window

pp. 160

Rights sold to Chicago UP (English)

The intensive and measured prose of Paolo Cognetti has marked him out as a rising star in the new generation of Milanese writers. His last work won some three literary prizes. This time round he takes on New York.

“Like Batman’s city, the place I have tried to describe is very similar to New York, but it is not really New York. Like New York it is built on granite, but also on the intangible material of the imagination. It is made up of islands, bridges, buildings, and of countless pages of paper. It is populated by eight million inhabitants and by those who nobody has ever counted, the characters of stories, novels and poems. This city is both a physical place and a place of the mind, and to remind myself of this, I have sometimes used its other name. The city of the writers and their stories – Gotham.”

Paolo Cognetti is the author of documentaries, screenwriter and editor of shorts. Among his works : Manual for Successful Girls ( Minimum Fax 2004) A Small Thing on the Verge of Exploding (Minimum Fax 2007). His last work is Sofia always wears black (Minimum Fax 2012). Cristiano Cavina Romagna Mia!

pp. 134

Cristiano, granddad, grandma, mamma, uncle, Giovannona, Don Leo: these are the protagonists of a story that traces a non celebratory but true-life portrait of the character of the people of Romagna. The family’s story serves as a construct on an imaginary place, of a Romagna not as an administrative or geographical space, but as a state of mind. Poetry and irony mingle with an unmistackeable levity, in enchanting prose, mature and straightforward, producing stories in which readers will revel in Fellinesque delight.

Cristiano Cavina was born in Faenza in 1974. He has worked as a pizza maker for over twenty years. His novels, In Great Style, In Tolintesàc’s Village, A Last Season as Beginners, The Forgotten Fruit, and Digging a Hole, are all published by Marcos Y Marcos.

Giorgio Vasta Lost

pp. 128

Rights sold to Gallimard (France)

“Here you can see Italy really well. What you have discovered is that Italy is an extension of Palermo using identical resources. You have discovered, he says, that Palermo is Italy.”

A country that defies comprehension – this is how Italy appears today. Giorgio Vasta rises to the challenge, borrowing from geology the tricky technique of core sampling – extracting a specimen from the earth and studying it to extend the results across a broader spectrum.

Giorgio Vasta is a writer. He lives and works in Turin. He is the author of the novel The Material Time (2008, forthcoming in France, Germany, Holland, Spain, the United States and the UK), selected in the Premio Strega 2009.

Silvia Dai Pra’ Hey, Teacher!

pp. 168

A tragicomic novel not about school, but inside school. A story about two different worlds that meet together…

A thirty-year-old who would never have dreamed of being a teacher, a professional school in the Roman suburbs, among sentimental adolescents, young fascists, quick-tempered adults, teachers on the edge of an abyss: three terms in the shambles that are schools today, in a book that will amuse and move at the same time.

Silvia Dai Pra’ (b. 1977) is a teacher and a writer. An Arts graduate, she went on to complete a PhD dedicated to the work of . She is the author of the book The Happy Child (Gremese 2007) and of the reportage Crucified Heart (in The Body and Blood of Italy, Minimum Fax 2007). She lives and teaches in Rome.

Fabio Genovesi Morte dei Marmi

pp. 144

An ironic and smart travel in the Italian Beverly Hills, Forte dei Marmi. the most famous tourist location in Tuscany .

At Forte dei Marmi or Morte dei Marmi (in a rhyming pun on the Italian for ‘fortress’ and ‘death’), the food shops are closing to make way for boutiques and chic restaurants. At Forte dei Marmi there are only villas, bigger villas and mega villas with swimming pools, but the primary schools are disappearing, the streets are shrouded in an unearthly quiet, the gardens are trodden only by troops of gardeners paid to look after plants and trim bushes hidden from the majority of the townspeople. Forte dei Marmi is teeming with celebrities in the summer; in the winter it is a ghost town. At Forte dei Marmi, the tourists, bloated VIPs and Russian billionaires are treated as Signori…

Fabio Genovesi (b. 1974) is the author of the collection of stories The Can of Worms (Franche tirature 2007), Versilia rock city (Transeuropa 2008, Mondadori 2012) and Esche Vive (Mondadori 2011), translated into languages. He contributes to Vanity Fair, GQ, Corriere della Sera, Il Tirreno and Satisfiction.

Other titles in the series

Giuseppe Culicchia Turin is My Home The Hyenas of Circeo

Marco Covacich Michele Mari Trieste upside-down Philology of the boot. A military diary Sold to: Wagenbach (German) Nndu Popu Roberto Alajmo Salento Fire and Smoke Palermo is an Onion Sold to: Laurella & Wallin (Swedish) Tommaso Giartosio La fosse aux ours (French) The O in Rome Haus Publishing (English) Hanser (German) Emanuele Trevi Simurg (Spanish) A Roman summer

Gianrico Carofiglio Francesco Longo Neither Here or Elsewhere. One night in Bari The sea of Stone. Eolie or the 7 place of the Sold to: Esfera (Spanish) spirit Randomhouse (German) Luca Ricci Franco Arminio How to write a bestseller in 57 days A Strong Wind between Lacedonia and Candela Beppe Sebaste Benches Franco Arminio It’s snowing. I can prove it Beppe Sebaste Lost object and other ghosts Marcello Fois There is no Sea in Sardinia

Marco Cassini Typos. Diary of an incorrigible Publisher Sold to: Trama Editorial (Spanish)

Antonella Cilento Neaples on the Sea Twinkles Sold to: Atticus (Russian)

Vincenzo Magrelli The Other-Life. Train and train journeys

Elena Stancanelli Florence as a child Sold to: Atticus (Russian)

Editori Laterza Foreign rights

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Foreign rights