Mila Venturini London for families (Londra per famiglie)

nottetempo
2016 rights
nottetempo Spring
nottetempo
Mila Venturini
fiction
Giorgio Ghiotti
London for families
(Londra per famiglie)
Swallows for ants
(Rondini per formiche)
While the dreams of a happy, committed and fulfilling life fall apart
for three former radical-chic couples, six teenagers declare war on
them. With great observation powers, a glossy malice and a merciless sense of irony, Mila Venturini recounts what happens when the
forty-years crisis comes to terms with teenage youngsters.
Christmas holidays 2009. Five parents who know each other since high
school, with six children in tow and a dog, gather in an elegant London
house that will soon transform into a fighting ground: excursions and
games around the fire, the typical activities of a peaceful Christmas, give
way to mysterious sabotages, crisis of neurasthenia and fatal accidents.
The incredible adventures of this holiday come to life, through the years, in the memory of some of the members of this extended family.
Among tottering marriages and children breaking parenting chains, the
focus of the story revolves ultimately around a single dilemma: is it possible for parents to understand the desires, inclinations and concerns of
children undergoing a pre-adolescent crisis? The answer is: of course, as
long as they are not their own children.
Praises for Love is not worthwhile:
“The author fully reaffirms herself with a light and breezy
comedy that could replicate D’Avenia’s success among younger generations, while – as in his case – also pleasing more
mature readers.”
Cristina De Stefano, Elle
June 2016
fiction
224 pages
“Our friendship had seen
the light on school benches.
Our children’s friendship –
warmly encouraged at an early
age – would turn out to be a
boomerang that hit us with
unpredictable violence during
that dreadful age that spans
between twelve and fifteen.”
“A book that praises normality and daily life. A story that
propels us into a pastel-coloured world.” Il Tempo
“A funny and smart author that can put her words at the
service of her stories.”
Valeria Parrella
Tommaso and Nicole Ciabatti are siblings and accomplices. They live
in Rome in a nice house in which, however, the father has fled and the
mother has gone crazy. Tommaso and Nicole study and take care of
their parents, responsibly and carefully as children sometimes do. Of
course, they see things that others do not see, and they fall in love with
animals that no one caresses, with people who no one looks at, they
read books that others ignore, they look out of the windows towards a
seductive Rome and they read newspapers aloud to embed their family
events in a collective space and time - the Parmalat crash, the death of
Amelia Rosselli, the attack on the Twin Towers. Their childhood extends
into adolescence and adulthood when Tommaso falls in love first with
Michele and then with Luca, while Nicole dives into her studies as if they
were the sea, with the same lightness.
As Prevert’s youngsters, those of Giorgio Ghiotti, “kiss standing and they
are not there for anyone” but basically, they do not always have a bed in
which to lie down and embrace.
In his debut novel, Giorgio Ghiotti - with a dream-like and visionary
pitch – tells the stories of women, knights, arms and loves of the
youngsters sitting on their scooter, running through streets and alleys,
growing into adults.
April 2016
fiction
112 pages
Praises for God played football:
“He writes as he breathes and his is breath is powerful and wide
ranging yet balanced; essential because it reflects an urgent need
to be heard... The substance of his writing is profound and aware”.
Sandra Petrignani, l’Unità
“Resounding throughout is the mood of a strange, fast-burning and
contorted era where experiences seem to dilate... Ghiotti jumps in
at the deep end with his writing, ready to risk all”.
Leonetta Bentivoglio, la Repubblica
“A lovely novel to discover that it is always worth loving.”
Tu Style
Mila Venturini lives in Rome where she works as a scriptwriter and conducts
creative writing workshops for children. With nottetempo she published Two
of everything and a suitcase (2010), Love is not worthwhile (2014) and in 2016
London for families.
Giorgio Ghiotti, a finalist in the Campiello Giovani competition in 2011 and 2012,
made his debut in 2013 when he was eighteen, with the short story collection
Dio giocava a Pallone (nottetempo), earning him great attention from critics
and readers. He then wrote the poems Estinzione dell’uomo bambino (Perrone
2015) and Mesdemoiselles. Le nuove signore della scrittura (Perrone 2016). He
collaborates with literary magazines and newspapers.
nottetempo, piazza Farnese 44, 00186 Roma, Italy, +39/0668308320, [email protected]
nottetempo
nottetempo
nottetempo Spring 2016 rights
Ginevra Lamberti
Gabriele Di Fronzo
Actually, the issue is
(La questione piú che altro)
The great animal
(Il grande animale)
“In the end, however, I wanted to say that I’m fine, a part from
the fact that the isolation of a hypochondriac is an automatic
generator of medical records. Yesterday I wrote in my diary
that I want to be cremated after death, and I transcribed a
username and password which, in the case of tragedy, can be
used by my loved ones and relatives to get my things sorted”.
In the valley where she lives, the main problem is that Gaia
gets bored. In her steady present, many people drop by:
granddad-from-downstairs, grandma-from-upstairs, her
mother, who divorced for an excess of removals and her father,
who has traces of lungs left in his nicotine and always feels like
making jokes. Since Gaia hasn’t got enough money to go on a
worldwide trip to cut the globe in two, so it might open and
let her find what she is missing, she then moves to the most
beautiful lagoon in the world. She has petty jobs, her father
gets ill, her grandparents get old and Venice is just a fake
background for tourists’ selfies. With such a peculiar and witty
tone, Lamberti tells about a generation that attempts to make
up a future as far as possible from the absurd present but finds
it sunken in the high water.
September 2015
fiction
160 pages
14 x 20 cm
“Pessimistic blast and
Beckettian animosity at the time
of Twitter. Where’s the future?
You just can’t find it”.
la Repubblica
“A thirty-year-old woman with
a very peculiar tone tells about
a generation that searches
for a future that is sunken
in high water”.
Marieclaire
“I would spent alone with the snake more or less the same time
that I would spend with my father. I had to respect a deadline
that forced me to work on it for days. I would devote myself to
my father when his needs and his rattle called me, otherwise I
would stay in my room with the door closed, and work – as I was
requested to do – to make a dead animal look like a live one”.
Francesco Colloneve has worked for years embalming animals and
knows only too deeply what gestures necessarily follow all separations.
When his father dies and the house where he lives is transformed
into “a goastland that stinks of mushrooms, that when brushed with a
hand, leaves your palm smelling of oxidized nickels”, Colloneve works
on it with rhythmic and tiny gestures, as if it were one of the many
animals on which he spends his nights. Because if “the art of losing
is not hard to learn”, as claimed by the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the art
of surviving one’s losses is far more complicated. With a precise and
sharp language which evokes and echoes the tools of his character,
Gabriele Di Fronzo uses his debut novel to tell us about ways to
preserve things, things like memories, like a goldfish, like a father.
“A kind of writing that with
a little shift of your gaze might
make you giggle, but cannot
hide the discomfort”.
La tribuna
January 2016
fiction
144 pages
“Here and there, along the 125
short chapters, the vocabulary
turns archaic and surgically
precise, the trick of the tense
concordance is mastered while
the syntax is piercing.”
Corriere della Sera
“Cold and clear minded, sharp
and precise.”
Sanzaudio
“To Francesco Collaneve, telling
a story means providing things
with an order and, sentence by
sentence, trying to keep under
control the untamable beast of
reality.”
Giorgio Vasta, la Repubblica
“A tongue cooked in northeastern Italy, very well cooked.”
Corriere della Sera
Ginevra Lamberti (1985) lives in Venice where she works as copywriter, babysitter and
call center operator.
fiction
Gabriele Di Fronzo was born in Turin in 1984. Il grande animale is his first novel.
nottetempo piazza Farnese 44, 00186 Roma, Italy, +39/0668308320, [email protected]
nottetempo
nottetempo
nottetempo Spring 2016 rights
Laura Lepetit
Clara Gallini
Autobiography
of a distracted feminist
(Autobiografia
di una femminista distratta)
Mishaps.
memoir
Anthropology of an illness
(Incidenti di percorso.
Antropologia di una malattia)
With each chapter centred on a book surrounded by meetings,
anecdotes and reflections, Laura Lepetit tells her story and that of
her publishing house, La Tartaruga. An autobiography built like a
portrait gallery, including her friends and authors, forming together
an almost entirely feminine community.
Laura Lepetit has created and directed one of the most amazing
Italian publishing houses: La Tartaruga. An editor that published only
women authors, based on literary, not only political, criteria and that
has helped promote many of the greatest writers of our time: Doris
Lessing, Alice Munro, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf,
to mention only a few. Laura used to act with the same distracted grace
with which she now tells us about her “paper adventures” and her
life: the experience of feminism with Carla Lonzi, the travels to meet
her authors, Radio Popolare, the Libreria delle Donne, the cats and
horses. Everything and everyone becomes part of her narration, of her
‘distracted’ considerations, a target of her humorous and candid gaze.
A book made of meetings, friendships, epiphanies that have marked
the cultural and Italian publishing history set in the background of a
Milan in its most lively, cultured and European years.
March 2016
memoir
128 pages
“With books I feel like a truffle
dog. I hunt them with my nose,
I smell them, I pick up the signals
they emit and beat the ground
with my snout in the bushes.
It used to happen to me when
I was an editor and it still
happens to me now at home”.
“Laura Lepetit has sorted out a lifetime of memories and
emotions. There is something light when she writes.”
Gallini reflects in a precise, exact, ruthless but at the same time
strong and loving way on old age, on disease, on pain and on the
“seduction of dependence” on the people, relatives and carers, who
take care of us.
What happens when a woman who has travelled all her life to collect
evidence and study people’s behaviour, is forced into a hospital bed?
The woman, a great anthropologist, discovers that her will to travel
and study is stronger than pain, stronger than physical impediments,
than the loving care of relatives and friends, than the obsession of
the healthy for the hygiene of the ill... so that the new geography that
she explores is her body and its new habits, movements and visions,
memory gaps, future obstacles and, last but not least, the prospect
of becoming dependent on others.
After investigating Madonnas and seers, apocalypses, miracles and
sleepwalkers, Swarovski crosses and pilgrims, Clara Gallini – with the
intelligence, humour and patience of the great scholar, and using the
tools of anthropology – travels, supported by her trusted caregiver
Abilia, in her sick body, bringing back stories, sacred and profane
objects and most of all assumptions, with the curiosity and the joy
that often accompany new findings.
A powerful, accurate and easy-going book about the disease of our
time: the fear of growing old.
February 2016
memoir
280 pages
“In short, red does not look
good on me, neither with
respect to the past nor to the
present, and anyhow it wouldn’t
help me to get rid of my pale
condition. Plus no one had
asked me anything. Or so I
thought. Washed and ironed,
the red pull-over now lies at the
bottom of a drawer.”
La Repubblica
“This memoir has a simplicity and grace from another time.”
Il Manifesto
Laura Lepetit, intellectual and feminist. In 1975 she founds the publishing house
La Tartaruga, which she directs until 1997, when having to comply with the laws
of an increasingly rigid publishing market, she was forced to sell the brand and
catalogue.
Clara Gallini is one of the most important Italian anthropologist and ethnologist,
student and cultural heir of Ernesto de Martino. Among her best known works
La sonnambula meravigliosa, Il miracolo e la sua prova. Un etnologo a Lourdes
(1998) and Il ritorno delle croci (2009).
nottetempo, piazza Farnese 44, 00186 Roma, Italy, +39/0668308320, [email protected]
nottetempo
nottetempo
nottetempo Spring 2016 rights
Laura Pigozzi
Luca Molinari
My child adores me.
The houses we are
(Le case che siamo)
Hostage children and ideal parents
(Mio figlio mi adora.
non-fiction
Figli in ostaggio e genitori modello)
Laura Pigozzi questions the myth of the natural family and reflects on
its contemporary cultural status, where the family is seen as the “navel
of the world”. She denounces the failure of a model that has led to an
overestimation of blood ties, to the idea of motherhood as a natural
destiny, to the construction of claustrophilic ties: parental narcissism
that produces a sort of psychological kidnapping of the children.
The idea of the family as “navel of the world” is now all the more
rampant, despite appearances and despite those family patterns that
seem to have been expanded and questioned. Under the unconventional gaze of the author, even apparently different patterns show the
attraction to a sort of “normality” guaranteed by a “claustrophilic”
bond with the children. The world is thus sucked into the family,
that becomes a hyper-satisfying and all-inclusive unity in which one
tends to fulfil all needs, even those that are anthropologically referred
to the relationship with the outside world, with the group and the
community.
With her sharp critical analysis, the use of case studies drawn from her
profession and a broad spectrum of references ranging from the Bible
to psychoanalysis, from literature to cinema, from law to chronicle, the
author analyzes the various forms in which this model is expressed,
through a wide variety of phenomena: the “maternal” obsession and
the symbiotic relationship, the family “claustrophilia”, the Pygmalion
parent, the difficult fate of fatherhood, the “social” inertia of the child.
Laura Pigozzi breaks the suffocating rhetoric of the family and that of
a certain type of motherhood and parenting that afflict us so pervasively, showing how “the true parentage is to have received from one’s
parents the opportunity to leave them.”
April 2016
non-fiction
216 pages
“Family is now a word and an
idea on everyone’s lips: recalled
for various purposes, used to fill
many voids, it seems to contain
a reassuring potential for several
uses.”
Laura Pigozzi, Lacanian psychoanalyst and singing professor, lives and works
in Milan. She deals with the relationship between psychoanalysis and modernity
with particular reference to women and families. Among her recent books Voci
smarrite. Godimento femminile e sublimazione (Antigone, 2011) and Chi è la più
cattiva del reame? Figlie, madri, matrigne nelle nuove famiglie (et al., 2012) also
published in France by Albin Michel.
“Home is a word that we never question, yet its nature is changing.
I believe that going back to reflect on the profound meaning of this
term for each of us is important in order to rediscover the value of
one of the foundations of our private and public life”. Luca Molinari
The stable of baby Jesus and the Cabanon of Le Corbusier. The houses of
the Three Little Pigs and the glass house, which starts off as being avantgarde and democratic to become the Panopticon or the Big Brother
house. The house as a material good that belongs to us, young bourgeois
dream, up to Bill Gates or Silvio Berlusconi’s villas. The collective house
or the cooperative home, the townhouse, co-housing and the common
house. From 7 days by Buster Keaton to the houses in TV series, from
Happy Days to Desperate Housewives. The moving house, the trailer
home and the house with no roots. The house of privacy and the closed
house, the house of dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde, the Raumplan by Adolf Loos,
the Ikea house.
Starting from a real home, where you can walk in, and returning to
the concept of a space to live in, Luca Molinari tells us which home we
are and we were, which house we should or we could be in our current
time in which public spaces are continuously discussed, because without
houses there is no architecture.
May 2016
non-fiction
96 pages
Luca Molinari, architect and critic, professor at the University of Naples, is
currently responsible for the architecture sector and member of the Scientific
Committee of the Milan Triennale. He collaborates with many Italian and foreign
magazines such as Abitare, Lotus and Vanity Fair. His books have been widely
translated.
nottetempo piazza Farnese 44, 00186 Roma, Italy, +39/0668308320, [email protected]
nottetempo
nottetempo
new titles
nottetempo Spring 2016 rights
non-fiction
Margherita Morgantin
Giorgio Agamben
Wittgenstein. Drawings on certainty
(Wittgenstein. Disegni sulla certezza)
Pulcinella or Fun for children
(Pulcinella ovvero Divertimento
per li regazzi)
With lightness and irony Margherita Morgantin uses her drawings to
face some aphorisms taken from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. And
while patrolling the statute of certainty and common sense, the limits
of knowledge and the weight of doubt, the intersection of beliefs and
conventions, the artist’s visual imagination moves acrobatically on the
edge of the philosopher’s words.
In reading Wittgenstein we grasp a clarification that better confuses
us. And this is what Morgantin’s visual “captions” do. They “confuse” with the words and somehow, in various ways, they bring an
explanation back to light. Not one single meaning among the many
possible ones, but many possible ones among the impossible
“What is the relationship between Margherita and Ludwig? Answer:
the two play, as brother and sister. They do not argue, they do not have
sex, he does not play the role of Master, and they understand each
other. Whoever looks at them understands and does not understand,
she mimics him but then she directs him and makes fun of him”
Luisa Muraro
February 2016
non-fiction
102 pages
“Morgantin’s drawings are poetic,
enigmatic, dark, illuminating, just like
Wittgenstein’s aphorisms”.
Corriere della Sera
“A sort of retroversion of onself: going
back to being a child, but without
drawing like a child.”
La Stampa
Margherita Morgantin was born in Venice in 1971 and graduated in Architecture
at the I.U.A.V. with a degree in Technical Physics. She is an internationally
renowned visual artist. Her research moves through different artistic languages,
from performance to installations, from video to photography and drawing. She
has published Titolo variabile (Quodlibet, 2009) and Agenti autonomi e sistemi
multiagente (with Michele Di Stefano, Quodlibet, 2012).
Pulcinella’s secret: the comedy of life has no secrets, but only, at
all times, a way out.
Pulcinella’s lesson: one can only act beyond – or afore – action, one
can only speak beyond – or afore – words, one can only live beyond
– or afore – life.
October 2015
124 pages
46 illustrations
105.000 signs
18 x 24 cm
Giorgio Agamben
Pulcinella or Fun for children is the title of Domenico Tiepolo’s
album that depicts the life, adventures, death and resurrection
of Pulcinella. But who is Pulcinella? Is he a man, a demon or a
god? What does he hide behind his black mask? And what is the
connection between philosophy and comedy? Just like Tiepolo
at the end of his life, Agamben seems to use the enigmatic figure
of Pulcinella to connect the various threads of his thought, creating a kind of imaginary philosophical autobiography. Perhaps
comedy is not only more profound and ancient than tragedy,
but it is also closer to philosophy – so close in fact that, as in this
book, it almost merges with it.
Rights sold to:
Seagull (world English),
Macula (France), Autêntica
(Brazil), Chongqing UP
(China), Adriana Hidalgo
(world Spanish)
Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher and political theorist whose works have been translated worldwide. With nottetempo he has published Profanazioni (2005), Nudità (2009)
Pilato e Gesú (2013), Il fuoco e il racconto (2014) and L’avventura (2015).
nottetempo, piazza Farnese 44, 00186 Roma, Italy, +39/0668308320, [email protected]
nottetempo
nottetempo Spring 2016 rights
Daniele Giglioli
Recent rights sales
Giorgio Agamben
The adventure: Matthes&Seitz (Germany), Ropi (Greece), Sijbbolet (Netherlands), Autêntica (Brazil)
The fire and the story: Stanford (world English), Payot-Rivages (France), Sexto Piso (world Spanish), S.
Fischer (Germany), Boitempo (Brazil), Gundrisse (Russia), Henan UP (China), Chack-Se-Sang (Korea)
Pilate and Jesus: Stanford (world English), Payot-Rivages (France), Adriana Hidalgo (world Spanish),
Matthes&Seitz (Germany), Boitempo (world Portuguese), Courrier (Korea), Sijbbolet (Netherlands),
Gundrisse (Russia), Rubato (Czech Rep.), Ekdoseis tou Eikostou Protou (Greece), Henan UP (China),
Znak (Poland)
The church and the kingdom: Payot-Rivages (France), Merve (Germany), PekingUP (China), Humanitas
(Romania), Seagull (world English), Adriana Hidalgo (South America), Adresa (Serbia), Moonji (Korea)
Critics of the victim
(Critica della vittima)
“A sharp pamphlet, somewhere between moral philosophy and
sociology.” Corriere della sera
“A vibrant and inspired style. A detailed reflection on the
topic.” Il Sole 24 Ore
“Giglioli writes a manifesto aimed to relaunch the political
image of a human being who is capable of fighting
helplessness” Die Zeit
“With its sharp comments on such an important topos of the
political rhetoric, it’s a book that stimulates your thought”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
How can a victim generate leadership and proselytes just as a
religion does? And how can it encompass at the same time the
feeling of shame and pride? From politics to society, from history
to literature, from law to psychology, Giglioli analyzes the symptoms of the contemporary victim. Among its expressions: the
obsessive celebration of memory; the humanitarian belief that
“keeps the defenceless unarmed” and “leaves intact the arsenals
of the powerful”; the capitalist claim for the right to well-being
that turns into frustration and inadequacy; the contemporary
mythology of the “conspiracy”. In all these cases the liability of
evil is elsewhere, outside of us. In a sharp and clear essay, the author investigates the origins of the ideology of the victim and the
established strategy of today’s lamentation that divides society
into guilty and innocent. Ultimately, Giglioli highlights the crisis
of “a form of life” – our form of life.
2014
non-fiction
136 pages
Rights sold to:
Matthes & Seitz (Germany),
Ayiné (Brasil)
English sample available
«The victim is the hero of
our time. Being a victim
gives us a status. It forces
other people to listen to us.
[…] The victim lives with a
sense of absence and request,
weakness and claim, and with
the desire to have and to be».
Milena Agus and Luciana Castellina
Beware of my hunger: Liana Levi (France), Al-Arabi (Arabic)
Milena Agus
Upside down: Liana Levi (France), Alfaguara (Spain/South America), Edhasa (Argentina), DTV (Germany)
While the Shark Sleeps: Liana Levi (France), De Geus (Netherlands), Klett-Cotta (Germany), Edhasa (South
America), Siruela (Spain), Keter-Hakibutz (Israel), W.A.B. (Poland), Munhaksegya-sa (Korea), Telegram
(world English)
Franco Arminio
Postcards from the dead: Ad Marginem (Russia)
Adrián N. Bravi
The tree and the cow: Edhasa (world Spanish)
The combover: Frisch&Co. (world English)
Dust: Dalkey Archive (world English), Payot-Rivages (France)
Luciana Castellina
The discovery of the world: Actes Sud (France), Verso (world English), Laika (Germany)
Paolo Morelli
Handbook for getting lost in the mountains: Guérin (France)
Antonella Moscati
An almost eternity: C. Bertelsmann (Germany), Agra (Greece), Alfabia (Spain), Arléa (France), Barbantesa (Galitia)
Antonio Prete
The animal order of things: Chemin de ronde (France)
Daniele Giglioli is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Bergamo.
He collaborates with the newspaper Corriere della Sera. He has published, among other
works, Tema (La nuova Italia, 2001), Il pedagogo e il libertino (Bergamo University
Press, 2002), All’ordine del giorno è il terrore (Bompiani, 2007), Senza trauma (Quodlibet, 2011).
Silvia Ronchey
The tortoise’s shell. Truer than true lives of eminent people: Arléa (France)
Elisa Ruotolo
I stole the rain: Frisch&Co. (world English)
nottetempo piazza Farnese 44, 00186 Roma, Italy, +39/0668308320, [email protected]