“A danse macabre for millennials” from the author of 70% Acrylic 30% Wool, winner of the Campiello First Novel Award (Los Angeles Review of Books). A finalist for the PEN Literary Award for Translation, this courageous, inventive, and intelligent novel tells the story of a suicide and what follows. Viola Di Grado has given voice to an astonishing vision of life after life, portraying the awful longing and sense of loss that plague the dead, together with the solitude incited by the impossibility of communicating. The afterlife itself is seen as a dark, seething place where one is preyed upon by the cruel and unrelenting elements. Hollow Heart will frighten as it provokes, enlighten as it causes concern. If ever there were a novel that follows Kafka’s prescription for a book to be an axe for the frozen sea within us, it is Hollow Heart. “The writing is pristine. Each sentence lures us further into the flies and blood-filled spirals of Di Grado’s dreamworld and, most importantly, we are willing to follow her.” —The Independent “Di Grado plays an inventive, self-aware game with language that saturates her macabre landscapes, transforming them into darkly comical expositions of death and unhappiness.” —Music & Literature Magazine “Hollow Heart has the authentic ring of autobiography. Pure imagination is incapable of inventing something this assured, this intense and vivid . . . A writer this powerful is scary.” —Sarah Wu “Hollow Heart . . . is just as strongly written as its predecessor, taking the black, manic tone of the earlier book and pushing it into a new territory—beyond the grave.” —Tony’s Reading List
Dopo aver perso il fratello gemello, un’italiana solitaria lascia Roma e si trasferisce a Shanghai, la città dove lui sognava di vivere e aprire un ristorante. Lì, mentre insegna italiano ai cinesi, incontra una ragazza enigmatica: Xu. Anche Xu è in fuga da un passato turbolento: un padre violento, una madre evanescente, una famiglia numerosa che la voleva maschio. Accomunate da una solitudine che somiglia a una fame implacabile, le due ragazze si avvicinano sempre più l’una all’altra, divise tra il bisogno di affetto e la tentazione oscura di superare il limite oltre il quale il linguaggio si disgrega e l’eros diventa divoramento. Tra fabbriche tessili abbandonate e mattatoi degli anni Trenta scoprono una dimensione estrema in cui mordersi, appropriarsi dell’altra, è parte essenziale del rito amoroso. In una Shanghai tentacolare e aliena che contiene ogni altra città e ogni altra storia, in cui le culture e i simboli dell’Asia si mescolano all’Europa, la ricerca dell’amore diventa un percorso vertiginoso in se stessi che annienta ogni tabù, ricordandoci i nostri sogni più bizzarri e potenti.
A Campiello Award–winning novel “Di Grado’s black comedy, pungent metaphors and controlled ambiguity announce the arrival of a considerable talent” (The Times Literary Supplement). Camelia is a young Italian woman who lives with her mother in Leeds, a city where it is always December and winter has been underway for such a long time that nobody is old enough to have seen what came before. She’s dropped out of university and translates instruction manuals for an Italian washing machine manufacturer. Her mother, Livia Mega, once a renowned flautist, spends her days inside taking photographs of holes she finds in the house. Camelia and her mother communicate in a language of their own invention, in which words play no part. The lives of these two women have been undone by a calamity in their recent past, and there seems little or no possibility of ever finding their way back to a normal life. But one day Camelia meets Wen, a local shop owner. To win Camelia’s affections, Wen begins teaching her Chinese ideograms. Through this new language of signs and subtle variations, Camelia learns to see the world anew and, in it, a chance for renewal. “70% Acrylic 30% Wool is incredibly sculpted and tight, with carefully woven images and language that repeat in chiseled arcs, creating a rhythmic narrative that radiates with Di Grado’s mastery of craft.” —Music & Literature Magazine “This offbeat novel is rather more sophisticated than it first appears . . . a subtle meditation on language and its failures.” —Financial Times “Written in lavish language and with beautiful metaphors.” —The Star Tribune
London, a city of constant transition, transaction, translation. London does not exist; London is a language without a place and it is the aphasic city; it's the mother of all languages. Lucifer Over London is a new anthology nine narrative essays written by a host of international prize-winning authors including Chloe Aridjis, Viola di Grado, Xiaolu Guo, Joanna Walsh and Zinovy Zinik. First published in Italy by Humboldt Books, Lucifer Over London is now appearing in English for the first time. This is a version of London as seen from the immigrants of recent migrations, of deportations to come, from those who create London even as they contradict it.
After generations of humans who talked too much and tried to sound sincere, an egg was elected. And not just any egg, but the mysterious and perfect Egg. Silent and seraphic, it has in its own roundness a whole cosmogony. While ovophile religions start spreading all over the world and chickens rise to the role of new Madonnas, the Egg speaks for the first time: fine intellectual, in its calm roundness it could hide a grudge that couldn’t be predicted even by his most ardent fans, the Ovoists. Number of characters: 31.115.
London, a city of constant transition, transaction, translation. London does not exist; London is a language without a place and it is the aphasic city; it's the mother of all languages. Lucifer Over London is a new anthology nine narrative essays written by a host of international prize-winning authors including Chloe Aridjis, Viola di Grado, Xiaolu Guo, Joanna Walsh and Zinovy Zinik. First published in Italy by Humboldt Books, Lucifer Over London is now appearing in English for the first time. This is a version of London as seen from the immigrants of recent migrations, of deportations to come, from those who create London even as they contradict it.
“A danse macabre for millennials” from the author of 70% Acrylic 30% Wool, winner of the Campiello First Novel Award (Los Angeles Review of Books). A finalist for the PEN Literary Award for Translation, this courageous, inventive, and intelligent novel tells the story of a suicide and what follows. Viola Di Grado has given voice to an astonishing vision of life after life, portraying the awful longing and sense of loss that plague the dead, together with the solitude incited by the impossibility of communicating. The afterlife itself is seen as a dark, seething place where one is preyed upon by the cruel and unrelenting elements. Hollow Heart will frighten as it provokes, enlighten as it causes concern. If ever there were a novel that follows Kafka’s prescription for a book to be an axe for the frozen sea within us, it is Hollow Heart. “The writing is pristine. Each sentence lures us further into the flies and blood-filled spirals of Di Grado’s dreamworld and, most importantly, we are willing to follow her.” —The Independent “Di Grado plays an inventive, self-aware game with language that saturates her macabre landscapes, transforming them into darkly comical expositions of death and unhappiness.” —Music & Literature Magazine “Hollow Heart has the authentic ring of autobiography. Pure imagination is incapable of inventing something this assured, this intense and vivid . . . A writer this powerful is scary.” —Sarah Wu “Hollow Heart . . . is just as strongly written as its predecessor, taking the black, manic tone of the earlier book and pushing it into a new territory—beyond the grave.” —Tony’s Reading List
A Campiello Award–winning novel “Di Grado’s black comedy, pungent metaphors and controlled ambiguity announce the arrival of a considerable talent” (The Times Literary Supplement). Camelia is a young Italian woman who lives with her mother in Leeds, a city where it is always December and winter has been underway for such a long time that nobody is old enough to have seen what came before. She’s dropped out of university and translates instruction manuals for an Italian washing machine manufacturer. Her mother, Livia Mega, once a renowned flautist, spends her days inside taking photographs of holes she finds in the house. Camelia and her mother communicate in a language of their own invention, in which words play no part. The lives of these two women have been undone by a calamity in their recent past, and there seems little or no possibility of ever finding their way back to a normal life. But one day Camelia meets Wen, a local shop owner. To win Camelia’s affections, Wen begins teaching her Chinese ideograms. Through this new language of signs and subtle variations, Camelia learns to see the world anew and, in it, a chance for renewal. “70% Acrylic 30% Wool is incredibly sculpted and tight, with carefully woven images and language that repeat in chiseled arcs, creating a rhythmic narrative that radiates with Di Grado’s mastery of craft.” —Music & Literature Magazine “This offbeat novel is rather more sophisticated than it first appears . . . a subtle meditation on language and its failures.” —Financial Times “Written in lavish language and with beautiful metaphors.” —The Star Tribune
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