Böcker av Cristina Viti

A representative text of a milieu marked by student protests and aspirations for moral and political renewal.  First published in Italian in 1968, The World Saved by Kids was written in the aftermath of deep personal change and in the context of what Elsa Morante called the "great youth movement exploding against the funereal machinations of the organized contemporary world." Morante believed that it was only the youth who could truly hear her revolutionary call. With the fiftieth anniversary of the tumultuous events of 1968 approaching, there couldn't be a more timely moment for this first English translation of Morante's work to appear. Greeted by Antonio Porta as one of the most important books of its decade, The World Saved by Kids showcases Morante's true mastery of tone, rhythm, and imagery as she works elegy, parody, storytelling, song, and more into an act of linguistic magic through which Gramsci and Rimbaud, Christ and Antigone, Mozart and Simone Weil, and a host of other figures join the sassy, vulnerable neighborhood kids in a renewal of the word's timeless, revolutionary power to explore and celebrate life's insoluble paradox. Morante gained international recognition and critical acclaim for her novels History, Arturo's Island, and Aracoeli, and The World Saved By Kids may be her best book and the one that most closely represents her spirit.

The first English translation of an Italian poet known for his uncompromising integrity and strong leftist sympathy for the working man.   Born in a sub-proletarian ghetto in Italy in 1930 under the fascist regime, Luigi Di Ruscio was an urchin running wild in the countryside, a Communist with clear anarchist leanings, a jack-of-all-trades. In 1957 he emigrated to Oslo, where he worked for forty years in a steel-wire factory, spending his evenings at the typewriter, delving with furious energy into his native Italian. Di Ruscio insisted that whereas the language of power is always a contrived, one-way fabrication, the language of the underprivileged is upfront and direct, aiming straight and sharp for the truth. Caustic as a shopfloor scouring agent, exhilarating in its overabundance, humor, and outspokenness, Selected Poems stands as a testament of tenacity, a record of class struggle, and a vital presence for our times.