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Italy's great chronicler of the macabre and hilarious terrors of growing up geeky arrives in English at last.
Long before the latest vogue for autofiction, Michele Mari, one of Italy's most beloved authors, cast his mind back to the days of his own childhood, and found it crawling with monsters.
Raised on comic books and science fiction, the young Mari constructed an alternate universe for himself untouched by uncomprehending grownups or sadistic peers. Compared to the horrors of real life, Long John Silver and Cthulhu made for positively cuddly company; but little boys raised by beasts may well grow up beastly—or never grow up at all. Waking or sleeping, the obsessions of Mari's youth seem to color his every adult thought. You, Bleeding Childhood stands as his first attempt to catalog this cabinet of wonders.
Cult classics since their first publication, these loosely connected stories stand as the ideal introduction to an encyclopedic fantasist on a par with Kafka, Poe, and Borges.
"Mari makes his English-language debut with a dazzling and sometimes surreal collection of reminiscences on childhood obsessions...Mari delivers trenchant satires of nostalgia with deadpan grace and wit, resulting in stories that are as heartfelt as they are humorous, with great care given to descriptions of the characters' foibles and idiosyncrasies. This is not to be missed." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Freud would have a field day unpacking the many neuroses bundled up in Mari's stories. Readers will, as well...Amusing, disturbing, intoxicating tales of childhood terrors and obsessions." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"If you were to give a book award to a living Italian writer, man or woman, whom would you pick and why? Many of my friends, men and women, are good writers whom I've been following for years and for whom I have high regard and affection. It would be difficult for me to give an award to this one rather than that. But I want to name a writer I don't know personally, and yet I've been reading his books with pleasure because they are outside the box. I'm referring to Michele Mari." —Domenico Starnone, I-Italy
This information about You, Bleeding Childhood was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michele Mari is one of Italy's most renowned contemporary writers. He has published ten novels, in addition to poetry and short story collections, and has received prestigious prizes including the Premio Mondello and Premio Bagutta. He teaches Italian literature at the Università degli Studi di Milano, and his translations from English include novels by John Steinbeck, H. G. Wells, Jack London, and George Orwell. In a survey published by the magazine Orlando Esplorazioni in 2015, Mari was ranked the contemporary Italian author most likely to be read by future generations.
Brian Robert Moore is a literary translator whose published and forthcoming translations from the Italian include novels by Goliarda Sapienza and Lalla Romano. He received the 2021 PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature and a 2022 Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His translation of the novel Verdigris by Michele Mari is forthcoming from And Other Stories.
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