Voyage is at the heart of all narrative, and in the seven thoroughly original tales comprising All the Errors the voyages are heightened into a condition of metaphysical urgency. One story is the valedictory address of a soul about to be born. Another tale tells of a labyrinth that seems to describe its own pathways. Forming another, two monologues are interlaced, tracing the disavowals of love between a man and a woman. The principal characters of another story are Fires, Essences, Lights, Places, Edified Beasts, Centers, Thrones, Thunders, and Rings—and this cosmology of abstraction is brought into an almost palpable presence. In still another fable, the narrator journeys on foot with an unknown itinerary, propelled through an unchanging landscape awash with deja vu. Far more than the sum of its parts, this challenging work is also Giorgio Manganelli’s long-awaited debut in the English language.

All the Errors

Literature & Fiction

Manganelli, Giorgio

Henry Martin, translator

Contemporary

McPherson

Italo Calvino once remarked that in Giorgio Manganelli, "Italian literature has a writer who resembles no one else, unmistakable in each of his phrases, an inventor who is irresistible and inexhaustible in his games with language and ideas." Nowhere is this more true than in this Decameron of fictions, each composed on a single folio sheet of typing paper. Yet, what are they? Miniature psychodramas, prose poems, tall tales, sudden illuminations, malevolent sophistries, fabliaux, paranoiac excursions, existential oxymorons, or wondrous, baleful absurdities? Always provocative, insolent, sinister, and quite often funny, these 100 comic novels are populated by decidedly ordinary lovers, martyrs, killers, thieves, maniacs, emperors, bandits, sleepers, architects, hunters, prisoners, writers, hallucinations, ghosts, spheres, dragons, Doppelgängers, knights, fairies, angels, animal incarnations, and Dreamstuff. Each "novel" construes itself into a kind of Möbius strip! , in which, as one critic has noted, "time turns in a circle and bites its tail" like the Ouroborous. In any event, Centuria provides 100 uncategorizable reasons to experience and celebrate an immeasurably wonderful writer. Brilliantly translated from the Italian by Henry Martin. (Three stories appeared in the March 2005 issue of Harpers magazine, and twelve stories in the spring 2005 "Zukofsky" issue of Chicago Review.)

Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels

MARTIN, Henry

Short Stories & Anthologies

This combination of two key works by the Italian avant-garde writer Giorgio Manganelli (1922–90) is a major addition to the small number of his works available in English. In the 1960s Manganelli was a member, along with Umberto Eco and Eduardo Sanguinetti, of the Gruppo 63 movement, and a close friend of Italo Calvino, who provides an enthusiastic foreword that describes “To Those Gods Beyond” (1972) as a “heraldic bestiary” that “launches into a crescendo of variations on its main theme, the self-aggrandisement of a lucid megalomaniac.” Perhaps the best known of his works included here, “An Impossible Love,” comprises an epistolary exchange between Hamlet and the Princess of Cleves conducted with a “verbal catapult” as the universes about them descend into oblivion. All is overseen by gods beyond whom an endless array of other gods lie in wait, intent on torment. Everything seemingly finite or known in our world becomes infinite and unknown. The book is prefaced by Manganelli’s notorious manifesto “Literature as Deception” (1967), in which he describes the “literary object” as something cynical, corrupt and devoted only to turning human suffering into exquisite figures of speech. This is a major new offering of work by this important writer, heralded by Calvino as an “erudite acrobat who twirls around the trapeze of rhetoric above the timeless void of meaning.”

To Those Gods Beyond (Atlas Anti-classics)

CALVINO. Italo

Literary

Atlas Press

Pinocchio / Un livre parallèle

BOURGOIS

La ciénaga definitiva (Libros Del Tiempo) (Spanish Edition)

Genre Fiction

Siruela

Agli Dei Ulteriori

Adelphi Edizioni

Centuria. Cento piccoli romanzi fiume (Biblioteca Adelphi) (Italian Edition)

Adelphi

Le interviste impossibili (Piccola biblioteca Adelphi) (Italian Edition)

Reference

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Centuria. Cento piccoli romanzi fiume

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