The month of March brought many novelties to bookstores, ranging from fiction to essays, up to author interviews: so here is a selection dedicated to some new novels not to be missed over the next month, and to many important cultural reflections . Books to read in April, second Harper’s BazaarI am here.
Betraying Big Brother. The feminist awakening in China
Betraying Big Brother. The feminist awakening in China
Betraying Big Brother
The feminist awakening in China, this is the subtitle of the essay by Leta Hong Fincher that ADD Editore proposes in the translation by Margherita Emo and Piernicola D’Ortona to explore the story of more and more women who, under the government of Xi Jinping, are seeking precisely to Betraying Big Brother, opposing the censorship of the regime and the gender discrimination – and not only – to which they are subjected every day, finding ever new and less identifiable methods to carry on their collective battle. An admirable and now widespread movement, which started from the Feminist Five arrested in 2015 and which has survived until increasingly recent times, in the name of polysemantic emojis and continuous awareness campaigns.
The rude lady
The rude lady
It’s been a while since we’ve seen a book by Vita Sackville-West, an important English poet and writer often associated with the figure of Virginia Woolf, with whom she had a long and stormy relationship. Now for Astoria, in the translation by Henry Furst and Orsola Nemi, comes The Imprudent Lady, an irreverent and modern novel, which in telling us about the decadent British aristocracy presents us with an irresistible character: her name is Lady Sylvia, she has a fiery and unconventional personality. patterns, and thanks also to the author’s elegant and subtle style, she is ready to transport us into a world made of rules to break, of men to confront head to head, and of a roster of unforgettable characters, such as the young Sebastian and the charismatic Viola.
Literary conversations
Literary conversations
How to describe the many facets that make a bookshop unique, especially if the bookshop in question is the famous Shakespeare and Company in Paris? The answer seems to have been found by literary director Adam Biles, who in Literary conversations – published by Neri Pozza, translated by Massimo Ortello – offers us twenty author interviews, collecting the testimonies of intellectuals of the caliber of Annie Erneaux, George Saunders, Olivia Laing, Percival Everett, Rachel Cusk, Claire-Louise Bennett, Madeline Miller and Carlo Rovelli. A mosaic of suggestions, memories, sensations and first-hand experiences, which with mastery and delicacy makes us travel through time and space, to rediscover this temple of books opened in 1951 by George Whitman.
The song of being and appearing
Speaking of rediscoveries, the new edition of The song of being and appearing by Cees Nooteboom, a cult novel published by Iperborea in the translation by Fulvio Ferrari. A story made of numerous Chinese boxes, of reflections on the meaning of writing and of extraordinarily tangible human relationships, which with a refined but always fluent language takes us from Amsterdam to Rome, from the past to the present, from personal dramas to the collective hopes of the twentieth century, in an increasingly unpredictable vortex of actions and reactions that culminates in one of the crucial questions of existence: what value does literature have in our lives? And, above all, how can we learn to really distinguish what is fictitious from what is real?
The wandering mind. What medieval monks teach us about distraction
The wandering mind. What medieval monks teach us about distraction
“The Wandering Mind” explores the universal human concern with distraction and the methods we anciently found to resist it. A work that projects us into the world of the monks of the Middle Ages, making us discover that not even a life of prayer and isolation was ever free from deconcentration. The reduction of the attention span seems to be a typical characteristic of our hyper-technological age, an effect of the influence of social media and the enormous amount of stimuli we receive. How many unfinished books remain on our bedside tables? Who can say they can work without constantly looking at their smartphone? Today, we all feel more distracted. What the historian Jamie Kreiner reveals to us is that even the most unthinkable of our ancestors, the medieval monks and hermits, had the exact same problem as us. From the 4th century ascetic Simeon Stilita, who initiated the practice of living on a column, to the 7th century abbess Sadalberga, who imposed long periods of total silence on herself, to Ugo di San Vittore, who wrote a guide in the 12th century on how to keep busy by mentally constructing the image of an ark, each of them had to invent a way to fight the demon of distraction every day. This book shows us how the struggle to stay focused is something “older than our technology”, inviting us to learn from these ancient masters to trust in our mind’s ability to change. Because it is only by learning to accept our shortcomings that we will be able to overcome them, given that even by hiding in a remote cave we will never be able to escape from ourselves.
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The wandering mind
And we conclude with a book that comes from Il Saggiatore, in the translation by Luisa Agnese Dalla Fontana: The wandering mind, by the American teacher and historian Jamie Kreiner, offers interesting food for thought on the need for the human mind to manage digressions, oversights and lack of attention. According to what he tells us among enlightening and often surprising examples, in fact, it is not a trend typical only of the contemporary age, but of a way of being in the world that was already widespread in the first centuries of Christianity and well into the Middle Ages. Through detailed accounts and wanderings that are always noteworthy, we understand the bond that still unites us today with the most disparate scribe monks.
