Schede Francoforte · up by sudden tiny mysteries, small scratches in an ordinary day: a forgotten...

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fall 2015

nottetempo new titles

Adrián N. Bravi

The flood(L’inondazione)

In The flood water transforms things while stopping the flow of time and he, Morales, sails over it. If you place a magnifying glass before an object or a fact, you deform it in order to take a better look, don’t you? And that’s what I like to do.

Adrián N. Bravi

Ilario Morales lives with his dog in an attic of Río Sauce, a town named after the river that used to run through it and that has now completely flooded it: only roofs, poles, tree tops emerge… Morales is the only person still living there, every-one else has left as soon as the water began to rise. Bravi tells the stories of lone rangers, madmen and drunkards floating like empty bottles. With his enchanting voice, he tells a story on the surface of water, where all human adventures, threats, promises, losses and affections happen in the measured silence of a suspended life.The river marks the rhythm, coming slowly and surely as fate, mysterious and seductive as time.

Adrián N. Bravi was born in 1963 in San Fernando, Buenos Aires, from a family of Italian origins. At the age of twenty he moved to Recanati (Italy) where he still lives and works as a librarian. With nottetempo he published the novels La pelusa (2007), Sud 1982 (2008), Il riporto (2011), and L’albero e la vacca (2013), winner of the Ber-gamo award in 2014.

“It is the river that marks the rhythm of the story of that flood, which comes slowly

and surely as fate, unexpected and overwhelming as the most intimate and remote memories,

mysterious and seductive as time”.

Corriere della Sera

“Every page is a charming and poetical journey”.

Il Venerdì di Repubblica

August 2015fiction

192 pages14 x 20 cm


Ginevra Lamberti

Actually, the issue is(La questione piú che altro)

“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 2015fiction

160 pages14 x 20 cm

Ginevra Lamberti (1985) lives in Venice where she works as copywriter, babysitter and call center operator.

“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

“A kind of writing that with a little shift of your gaze might

make you giggle, but cannot hide the discomfort”.

La tribuna

Gabriele Di Fronzo

The great animal(Il grande animale)

“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.

January 2016fiction

144 pages

Gabriele Di Fronzo was born in Turin in 1984. Il grande animale is his first novel.



Carla Vasio

Small obstacles to happiness(Piccoli impedimenti alla felicità)

Children playing in the darkness of their room. Flies coming in with the hot summer sun to disturb a lunch. Withering dialo-gues between couples or strangers. Short stories that open up the view like coloured and crisp snapshots where light and dar-kness clearly reveal one another. Vasio’s characters are caught up by sudden tiny mysteries, small scratches in an ordinary day: a forgotten tennis shoe in a crowded place, a hundred snails escaping from a basket, two eggs in a bowl. There is an anxiety, almost a panic, when the surface of things is cracked. Vasio we-aves her stories with a smiling love for words, a sovereign indif-ference to what should or should not be said.

2015fiction

104 pages

Carla Vasio is a writer and poet, member of the Gruppo 63, author, among others, of L’orizzonte – (1966), Laguna (1998) and La più grande anamorfosi del mondo (2009). About Romanzo storico – (1974) that she wrote with Enzo Mari, Italo Calvino said it was “one of the most extraordinary Italian books”. With nottetempo she published in 2013 a lively portrait of the Italian avant-garde, Vita privata di una cultura (Private Life of a culture).

“Stories that are clues, backlit images, perplexities

to be avoided, obstacles to be removed in order to grasp a

little calm”.la Repubblica

“A crystal clear language that makes you feel the mysterious

and delicate place where the obvious and the unintelligible meet”.

Corriere della Sera


Antonella Moscati

A house(Una casa)

“A sensitive pen that, like the one of Isabel Allende, is very good at projecting you in a different world”. La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno

“A story of spaces, distances and proximities that unites the pleasure of reading with the possibility of ploughing through words”. Huffington Post

“A novel of memories but also an ethical and political reflection on how lands, belongings and collective hopes were made unre-cognizable”. Il Mattino

At the centre of the novel is the author’s old family house near Salerno. The smells, the names of the rooms, the hazelnuts and tobacco leaves, the fruit garden bordering the fields, the pla-ne tree peeping through the window, the pergola, the bicycle, the madness besieging the family, the landing of the Allies in Salerno, the mozzarella, the fresh eggs. And people: the gran-dfather, the undisputed master called Signore; Liciuzza “whose imagination was as lazy as her body”; Zia Renata, perpetually in love with a British officer; Clotilde and Elvira, the crazy aunts; and then cousins, children and labourers. With mild irony the narrator looks back like a painter hidden among the group and tells the story of a carefree age, until the death of the grandfather marks the end of such world, the division of the house and the beginning of adulthood.

March 2015fiction

132 pages

Antonella Moscati (Napoli, 1955) is a writer and philosopher. With nottetempo she published Una quasi eternità (2006) and Deliri (2009).


Giorgio Agamben

Pulcinella or Fun for children(Pulcinella ovvero Divertimento per li regazzi)

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.

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, cre-ating 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.

October 2015124 pages

46 illustrations105.000 signs

18 x 24 cm

Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher and political theorist whose works have been transla-ted worldwide. With nottetempo he has published Profanazioni (2005), Nudità (2009) Pilato e Gesú (2013), Il fuoco e il racconto (2014) and L’avventura (2015).

Giorgio Agamben

The adventure(L’avventura)

An ancient legend identifies Demon, Chance, Love and Need as the four gods who preside over the birth of every man. Sooner or later we all need to deal with them. But to face these simultaneously obscure and positive deities means – as Agamben suggests in this new, surprising book – to live one’s life as an adventure. And not in the trivial sense of the term, with lightness and disenchantment, but considering adventure as the most profound experience in our human existence, of which Demon, Chance, Love and Need are but mere masks. Through a fascinating itinerary that unfolds from poems of chivalry to philosophy, from Lancelot to Beatrice, these four deities are ultimately joined by a goddess, the most elusive and mysterious of all: Elpis, Hope, who in Greek mythology remains closed in Pandora’s jar whereas it is here presented as the ultimate symbol of the human adventure on Earth.

May 2015non-fiction

80 pages

Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher. His wide body of work has been translated worl-dwide. His recent works include Homo Sacer (Einaudi, 1995), Stato di eccezione (Bol-lati, 2003), Il sacramento del linguaggio (Laterza, 2008). Other titles with nottetempo: Profanazioni (2005), Che cos’è un dispositivo? (2006), L’amico (2007), La chiesa e il regno (in 2010).


Rights sold to:Matthes&Seitz (Germany)Ropi (Greece)Sijbbolet (Netherlands)Autêntica (Brazil)

Goffredo Fofi

A praise for civil disobedience(Elogio della disobbedienza civile)

Since Thoreau refused to pay a tax imposed by the U.S. government to fund the war against Spain, and accepted the prison sentence resulting from his action, “civil disobedience” has become a system of protest. There had been many precedents, such as Antigone, but Thoreau was the one who clarified this approach in modern terms, as well as its relevance and necessity. His short essay was studied by Tolstoy and Gandhi, who put it into practice on a large scale to successfully fight British colonialism. With the failure of the revolutions that have focused on producing new violence and oppression, with the assertion – in the so-called democratic world – of a financial power that is now challenged by various forms of fundamentalism or Mafia, and with the new winds of war blowing on the planet, civil disobedience goes back to being the wisest and most radical answer to the direct and indirect violence of those who decide and control, who manipulate and offend. Describing the forms of civil disobedience developed in the past by the labour and the nonviolent movements, the author insists on a fundamental concept: civil disobedience can do without nonviolence, but nonviolence can not exist without its fundamental political component: civil disobedience.

April 2015non-fiction

70 pages

Goffredo Fofi (1937) is an essayist, activist, journalist and critic. He writes on cinema, literature and theatre.


nottetempo selected backlist

Paolo Colagrande

Listen to the frogs(Senti le rane)

“A divertissement based on a torrential narrative and on a pervasive humor that derides everything. A sound and full narrative, a lunar and lunatic imaginary that recalls Fellini’s Amarcord”. Corriere della sera

“The reader laughs and suffers along with this handsome and bewildered provincial priest”. la Repubblica

“The reader smiles at every step, in a story that is full of (secular) holiness”. Amica

Sitting at a café table, Gerasim tells Sogliani the story of a third friend, sitting nearby. It is an extremely adventurous story. Zuckermann, a Jew converted to Catholicism following a celestial call, take his vows and becomes “the handsome priest” of a small town on the coast of Romagna. He is seen as a saint by the faithful inhabitants and tourists, brilliant in his sermons, brisk and innocent. But while rumors of miracles begin to cluster around his name, one late summer afternoon Zuckermann meets Romana, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a couple of parishioners. The priest falls madly in love with her. After the initial hesitations and some pale efforts of penitence, the passion quickly spreads through the young bodies and with it the jealousy towards other admires of the girl: soon the whole community finds itself embroiled in a sentimental tragedy, which ends on the bank of a stream with a singing frog... With his dense and amused writing, Colagrande tells a story through the voice of two perfectly unreliable witnesses.

February 2015fiction

336 pages14 x 20 cm

Paolo Colagrande (Piacenza, 1960) is a writer and lawyer. With Fídeg, his debut novel, he won the 2007 Campiello Award. He has also published Kammerspiel (2008) and Dioblú (2010).

Shortlisted for the Campiello Award 2015


Giuseppina Torregrossa

To Santiago with Celeste(A Santiago con Celeste)

“The pilgrimage as a quest for lightness, narrated through the gradual lightening of the backpack, of the equipment for existence”. la Repubblica

To Santiago with Celeste is the story of a three hundred kilometers journey, eleven days, a long bad mood and a scarf. The path starts off with a filled backpack and ends with an empty one. From Rome to Santiago, by train, on foot (and by taxi-cabs too), stopping by hostels and shelters, SPAs and pools, it’s the pilgrimage on one of Christianity’s classic route walked by the writer and her friend Celeste: a journey mate “is not the one you get by chance or the one you chose, but the one you find next to you at the end”. The time window between departure and return becomes a spiritual, sentimental and physical lapse, the thoughtful and amused transition from impatience to recognition.

2014fiction

112 pages

Giuseppina Torregrossa, a doctor and a writer, lives between Sicily and Rome. Among her bestselling novels, Il conto delle minne (2009), Manna e miele, ferro e fuoco (2011) and La miscela segreta di casa Olivares (2014). For nottetempo she wrote Adele (2012).

“The journal of Giuseppina Torregrossa is sincere, lovely, ironic, goes straight to the end

of the journey”.Il Foglio

“The Sicilian writer – with the irony and the wisdom we’re

acquainted through her novels – tells her personal journey in her

heart of darkness”.il Venerdì di Repubblica


Eleonora Sottili

Il futuro è nella plastica(There’s a great future in plastics)

“Adventures and misadventures of a postmodern graduate in search of his place in the world. A very nice first novel, by an au-thor who has things to say and knows how to do it”. Marieclaire

“Eleonora Sottili gives voice to that stage of life when you have to decide what to do and everyone commends you to be sensible while you have something else in mind, even if you don’t know how to explain what it is”. La Repubblica delle Donne

Arturo is thirty and has a piece of plastic in his heart, a small, tangible diaphragm between himself and reality. He’s a psycho-logy graduate but works for the same insurance company as his father. He lives with Giulia, a tranquil girl who’d like to marry him, and he shares his dreams with Sebastiano, an old friend and accomplice in improbable projects. When Arturo’s father dies he inherits his position in the office, but he can neither mourn nor handle the job. He’s a Graduate without Mrs. Robinson, immobile by the pool contemplating the surreal promises of a future of plastic and policies. He does have a camera however, and starting with his father’s funeral he begins to divide reality into shots and poses, to break down and recompose, to join the dots between people and things. Taking advantage of his job he visits his clients at home and, when nobody’s looking, steals some objects which he then leaves at the next client’s house. In this way he builds up an apparently random itinerary which ends up being the improbable road towards the realisation of dreams and pain.

2010fiction

180 pages

Eleonora Sottili (Viareggio, 1970) is an insurance agent, psychologist and teacher of crea-tive writing. Il futuro è nella plastica is her first novel.

“All I actually had to do was slide my hand through the handle, pull it towards me,

then once the door was open let one foot out after the other.

But I looked at my feet and they wouldn’t move. I wasn’t

even absolutely sure any longer whether they were my feet at all. As if someone had passed

by and left a pair of shiny shoes for special occasions in my car and now I didn’t really know

what to do with them”.

Clio Pizzingrilli

Portrait of an armchair(Ritratto di una poltrona)

“Pizzingrilli’s previous novels portrayed the epos of a small and chaotic society, anonymous yet full of nicknames, unidentified yet dense with grimaces and faces. However, in the buzz of this teeming multitude, one could see a genuine political thirst, so-mething like the map of a future city, clear yet unreadable, so exotic as to seem familiar.In this amazing new novel, once again set in the city “whose name tells the place-that-fits-to-happiness”, people have disap-peared and the political vocation has vanished. The map is torn. The rhythm and movements of epic give way to the detailed plots of a mystery novel. The vastness of the political project ma-kes space for dark cabals and conspiracies that, as in all mystery novels, culminate in a murder, relentlessly consumed and at the same time undeniably failed. Beyond the gray, pale mannequins of the conspirators and the delirious voice of the narrator who meticulously exposes “the reasons for his crime”, the story ap-proaches its end and the true protagonist of the book emerges, as both executioner and victim, cop and Mabuse, a non-human allegory of our empty cities: an armchair.”

Giorgio Agamben

2009fiction

152 pages

Clio Pizzingrilli directs the series of notebooks on criticism of work “questipiccoli”. She made her debut in 1990 with Emidio Rosso (“marka” notebooks). Among her works are I profondissimi (Bompiani, 1992), Uscita dei uomini secondari (Feltrinelli, 1994) and Il tessitore (Quodlibet, 1997).



Elisa Ruotolo

Protect us, anywhere(Ovunque proteggici)

“If it is true that we are architects of our own future, the past is a family matter. Elisa Ruotolo wrote with wisdom and intelligence, fabricating a novel that is bitter yet light, private yet universal”. Dacia Maraini

“There is only one way of being contemporary and at the same time embracing all the traditions of the ordinary until it becomes extraordinary: great writing. Elisa Ruotolo is a great writer”. Marcello Fois

Elisa Ruotolo is back with a novel that runs along the arc of a century: the story of a family and of its shame.On an ordinary day, Lorenzo Girosa in his fifties and alone after the wreck of his family, receives a letter in which someone claims to know a secret that had ceased to haunt him since years: a crime committed at the dawn of his teens. From here the story of a buried past, of a family and of its large house, generous in spaces but burdened by the bad luck of a childless home. It is the story of Domenico, who emigrated to America to seek a fortune in the early twentieth century and found instead a life of crime. The story, of his son Nicola, who on the death of his father, without a job or a talent, embarked for Italy and settled as a stranger in an unfamiliar house, to become a rude jester with shaded eyes, known to all as Blacmàn.The one who picks up the threads is Lorenzo, son of Blacmàn, who comes to Villa Girosa determined to protect the dark shadows in his past.

2014fiction

328 pages

Elisa Ruotolo (Santa Maria a Vico, 1975) lives near Caserta where she teaches Italian at high school. With nottetempo she also published her short stories collection Ho rubato la pioggia (2010).

A novel that runs along the arc of a century:

the story of a family and of its shame.

Shortlisted for the Strega Award 2014

Daniele Giglioli

Critics of the victim. An experiment with ethics(Critica della vittima. Un esperimento con l’etica)

“The victim is the hero of our time. Being a victim gives us a status. It forces other people to listen to us. It encourages and supports recognition while powerfully generating a sense of identity, justice and self-esteem. It immunizes from criticism, guarantees innocence beyond any reasonable doubt. How could the victim be guilty, and indeed responsible for something? S/he does not play, s/he is played. S/he does not act, s/he suffers. The victim lives with a sense of absence and request, weakness and claim, and with the desire to have and to be. We are not defined by our actions, but by what we have suffered, by what we could lose, and by that which others have taken from us”.

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.

2014non-fiction136 pages

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 (Quodli-bet, 2011).

Rights sold to:Matthes & Seitz (Germany)


Furio Jesi

Feast time(Il tempo della festa)

“Furio Jesi always manages to stamp out the barriers between the categories on which the fragile certainties of Italian ideology had been based: rationalism/ irrationalism; myth/history; laicism/reliousness; left/ right; militant criticism/academia”. Giorgio Agamben

“An essential collection”. Marco Dotti

“The finest words Jesi has ever penned”. Marco Filoni

A rare and brilliant figure with the ability to diversify from anthropology, mythology, philosophy and literary criticism, Furio Jesi was one of the great Italian masters of 20th century essay writing. The book comprises some of his masterpieces: the first time he defines his famous interpretation of the “mythological machine”, his reflections on feast time and mythological time, or his examination of the poetics of Rimbaud and Pavese. Alternatively, in a strongly autobiographical text, we are invited into and guided through the most secret and intriguing rooms of his personal workshop.Il tempo della festa is also a sort of manifesto of political and cultural resistance: in the sombre climate of modern-day Italy, Jesi’s intelligence proves to be both a weapon and an example of happiness.

Edited by Andrea Cavalletti.

2013non-fiction236 pages

Furio Jesi (1941-1980) was an anthropologist, historian of religions, Germanist and a my-thologist. Shifting skilfully through the various disciplines he produced ground-breaking interpretations on the myth. His books include: Letteratura e mito (1968), Il mito (1973), Spartakus (2000).

Rights sold to:Seagull (UK/USA)


Schede Francoforte · up by sudden tiny mysteries, small scratches in an ordinary day: a forgotten...

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