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.