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 War, edited 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 IV, translated 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-Turpin, edited 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.