Saturday, December 10, 2016

Catalog 54 Now Available

Our Catalog 54, Winter 2017, is now available for download.

To celebrate the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition, “Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven,” Italica Press will soon issue a new print edition of The Holy Land in the Middle Ages: Six Travelers’ Accounts. This edition presents texts written by medieval Christian, Muslim and Jewish travelers to the Holy Land.

Also forthcoming this January is the new Dual-Language Edition of Annibal Caro’s The Scruffy Scoundrels by Donald Beecher & Massimo Ciavolella. Written in 1543, this remains a masterpiece of humanist playwriting in which drama both imitates and helps construct life. Rome itself is the main character in Caro’s comedy, as the new city of Paul III both unleashes and ultimately civilizes a wild assortment of comic types and plots.

Luigi Pirandello is also universally known for his drama, and Italica Press offers two excellent new English editions, of his Henry IV and his Six Characters in Search of an Author. But Pirandello was also a master poet, and George Hochfield’s new dual-language edition of Luigi Pirandello’s Selected Poems presents for the first time a selection from the entire range of Pirandello’s poetic output. Hochfield’ translation offers a sensitive and wise interpretation of that poetry.

This year saw the publication of  The Complete Literary Works of Lorenzo de’ Medici, edited and translated by Guido A. Guarino. This volume presents, for the first time, the entire corpus of Lorenzo’s literary achievement in English translation. This edition provides a fresh opportunity for a thorough re-evaluation of Lorenzo’s endeavors in the light of contemporary scholarship and new critical methodologies.

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels have lately taken the literary world by storm. We are pleased to remind our readers that Italica Press published the first English translation of Ferrante’s work in 2004, in our anthology After the Waredited by Martha King. From that collection we now offer readers a digital version of Ferrante’s “Delia’s Elevator.” This selection, translated by Adria Frizzi, offers early and important insights into both the author and the subject matter of the Neapolitan novels.

Holiday stocking stuffers may also want to have a look at two titles offered by The Pierrepont Street Press. The first, A Year in Union Square: 52 Seasonal Pasta Dishes by Eileen Gardiner & Ron Musto, presents 52 seasonal pasta dishes from the publishers’ home kitchen. This handy pocket-sized guide draws recipes from family, Italian and southern French cuisines, along with influences of other Mediterranean cooking based on the changing vegetables and produce, fish, meats and dairy at the New York Union Square Market’s stands.

Pierrepont Street Press also offers René Vieuxvin’s The Pope Takes a Holiday: A Roman Romance. Vieuxvin combines the romance of Roman Holiday with a (serious) send-up of papal politics and policy that predicts many of the new turns in an age-old Church.
Got a charming little book you think we might like to publish? Founded in Brooklyn Heights in 1974, The Pierrepont Street Press has become an imprint of Italica Press that might be just the right match for your work.

Thursday, October 6, 2016

To celebrate the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition, Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven, Italica Press has issued a new edition of The Holy Land in the Middle Ages: Six Travelers’ Accounts. This updated digital edition presents texts written by medieval Christian, Muslim and Jewish travelers to the Holy Land, including:

* St. Jerome, The Pilgrimage of Holy Paula, c.382 CE 
* Paula & Eustochium, Letter to Marcella on the
Holy Places, 386
* Mukaddasi of Jerusalem, Description of Palestine, 985
* Nâsir-i-Khusrau, Diary of a Journey through Syria and Palestine, 1047 
* Theoderich of Würzburg, Guide to the Holy Land, c.1172
* Benjamin of Tudela, Description of the Holy Land,
from his Itinerary, c.1173.

The Holy Land in the Middle Ages also features:
* 410 pages
* Nearly 100 black & white and color photos, historical drawings, and prints
* 7 building plans
* Gazetteer of places, buildings, and holy sites
* Gallery of 9 City Views of Jerusalem from the 6th to the 16th century
* Gallery of 8 Maps of the Holy Land from c.1200 to 1630

* Maps of the Holy Land and Jerusalem
* Bibliography
* Index

In a region often caricatured by the images and rhetoric of crusade and jihad, it’s important to realize that through most of its medieval history the Holy Land was host to countless curious and devout travelers of all three faiths. They sailed to the same ports, walked and rode the same roads, lodged in the same cities and towns and visited and revered the same secular and sacred sites. The Holy Land in the Middle Ages offers important texts documenting these centuries of peaceful co-existence.

Friday, September 23, 2016

Luigi Pirandello Selected Poems

We’re happy to announce the publication of George Hochfield’s new translation and dual-language edition of Luigi Pirandello Selected Poems.
Luigi Pirandello, an author best known for his plays, novels, and short stories, was also a life-long poet. At the age of twenty- two, he published his first collection, Mal giocondo (1889, Troubled Joy), followed quickly by three further volumes, Pasqua in Gea (1891, Easter in Gea), Elegie renane (1895, Rhenish Elegies) and Zampogna(1901, Bagpipes). In 1912 he published his final volume of poetry, Fuori di chiave (Offkey), but he continued to publish poetry in literary journals and anthologies, until his death in 1936. 
In a literary career that spans the turning of the twentieth century, his poetry reflected many of the currents of his time: modernism and relativism, the tension between faith and science and the place of the individual in a world devoid of coherence. He writes movingly of nature — silent, indifferent, unconscious, enduring — as the very antithesis of chaotic human activity. He writes of life and death, children and coffee, of love, earth and dreams. His style might seem traditional — more traditional than would be expected of an author whose work for theater surpassed mere innovation — and while his forms might be conservative, his ideas matched the spirit of his age.
As the translator George Hochfield writes in his introduction, “These poems reveal a somber and sensitive man, the dramatist, who, when the play is over and the curtain is drawn, comes to the front of the stage and addresses the audience directly.”
This dual-language edition presents for the first time in English translation a selection of work from the entire range of Pirandello’s poetic output. George Hochfield offers a sensitive and wise interpretation of that poetry. 
Appendices include a selection from Arte e coscienza d’oggi (1893, Art and Consciousness in Our Time) and from Pirandello’s Biographical Letter of 1914.
Italica Press has also published new editions of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and his Henry IV.

Monday, June 13, 2016

Catalog 53, Summer 2016, published.

Our new  Catalog 53, Summer 2016, is now available for free download. Here are some of our offerings.
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels have lately taken the literary world by storm. We are pleased to remind our readers that Italica Press published the first English translation of Ferrante’s work in 2004, in our anthology After the Waredited by Martha King. From that collection we now offer readers a digital version of Ferrante’s short story, “Delia’s Elevator.” Ferrante’s short story, translated by Adria Frizzi, offers early and important insights into both the author and the subject matter of the Neapolitan novels.  
Next is The Complete Literary Works of Lorenzo de’ Medici, edited and translated by Guido A. Guarino. This volume presents, for the first time, the entire corpus of Lorenzo’s literary achievement in English translation. This edition provides a fresh opportunity for a thorough re-evaluation of Lorenzo’s endeavors in the light of contemporary scholarship and new critical methodologies.   
The third is Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IVtranslated by Martha Witt and Mary Ann Frese Witt, with an introduction by Mary Ann Frese Witt. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Pirandello plays with the theme of madness — or the pretense of madness — involving a consummate theatricality. The Witts’ edition includes the one-act play The License (La Patente), which offers an earlier version of this theme.  
Our fourth offering this season is Gianna Manzini’s Threshold. First published in 1973, this short novel still packs an immediacy of emotion and personal subjectivity unique in experimental fiction. We follow the first-person narrator on a trip not quite like others from a train station not quite of this world. Threshold captures the conflicting emotions and the closeness of loved ones through the intimacy of material objects. It joins Game Plan for a Novel (2008) and Full-Length Portrait (2011), two other novels by this highly original Italian writer published by Italica Press.  
Forthcoming titles for this Summer and Fall include Selected Poems of Luigi Pirandello, dual-language edition translated, with an introduction and notes, by George Hochfield; Torquato Tasso, Rinaldo, dual-language edition with an English verse translation, introduction and notes by Max Wickert; and Annibal Caro, The Ragged Brothers: A Prose Comedy (Gli Straccioni: The Scruffy Scoundrels), a new, dual-language edition translated with introduction and notes by Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella. 
Recently published titles include Patronage, Gender & the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Essays in Honor of Carolyn Valone, edited by Katherine A. McIver and Cynthia Stollhans; The Chronicle of Pseudo-Turpinedited and translated by Kevin R. Poole from Book IV of the Liber Sancti Jacobi(Codex Calixtinus); The Holy Land in the Middle Ages: Six Travelers’ Accounts. Digital Edition;Pseudo-Petrarch’s The Lives of the Popes and Emperors, translated by Aldo S. Bernardo and Reta A. Bernardo, with an introduction by Tania Zampini; and Kiril Petkov’s edition and translation of The Deeds of Commander Pietro Mocenigo by Coriolano Cippico.    
Our Catalog 53 offers all our hardcover, paperback and a variety of digital editions, including searchable PDF downloads and Kindle versions.

Monday, March 21, 2016

Threshold by Gianna Manzini

We’re happy to announce that this Spring will see the publication of Threshold  (Sulla soglia)Gianna Manzini’s third novel with Italica Press. Manzini (1896–1974) is considered one of the most accomplished writers in Italy, praised by important literary critics and writers, and widely known by Italian readers. Her fiction has been compared closely to that of Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann and Paul Valéry. 

Manzini’s Threshold was first published in 1973. It still packs an immediacy of emotion and personal subjectivity unique in experimental fiction. This short novel takes an introspective look at a daughter’s relationship to her mother’s last days. We follow the first-person narrator on a trip not quite like others from a train station not quite of this world. Threshold captures the conflicting emotions and the closeness of loved ones through the intimacy of material objects. By highlighting the power of materiality, Manzini develops a storyline that frames her reflections on the relationship between parent and child.

Manzini skillfully constructs a virtual reality through a language that leads her readers to imagine other possibilities. The dreamlike quality of her writing moves the reader across the border of the real to the imagined and back again. The novel’s evocative and slippery use of symbolism self-consciously confuses temporality and the blurry boundaries between space and perspective. Threshold joins Game Plan for a Novel (2008) and Full-Length Portrait (2011), two other novels by this highly original Italian writer published by Italica Press.

“With this astutely presented and translated novella, Threshold, Laura E. Ruberto and Irena Stanic Rasin give readers a rare opportunity to experience Gianna Manzini’s art of storytelling, among Italy’s finest. The first lines sweep us into a suspenseful journey on the verge of life beyond life, amidst sights, sounds, and sensations as traces of meanings for understanding the mysteries of love, disease, the power of memory and writing, and death.”
— Robin Pickering-Iazzi, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee