Author: Paul Mathlouthi
The headless horseman. Washington Irving, the dark face of America
Washington Irving knows the value of orality as a privileged means of preserving and handing down memory; his short stories have the rhapsodic trend, the polyphonic sonority typical of speech and the writer entrusts improvised storytellers with the task of reconnecting the scattered threads of a shared cultural identity, weaving, between one side of the Atlantic and the other, the warp and weft of an idem feel through their stories, in a dense network of references and quotations.
Escape from the prison of the mind: "Gormenghast" by Mervyn Peake
Hallucinated and imaginative painter, multifaceted and visionary artist, forced by continuous nervous breakdowns to prolonged stays in nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals, Mervyn Peake entrusts the written word with the task of exorcising the dark obsessions that will eventually devour him. On the stormy sea of ββa dreamlike universe both nourished and threatened by the excesses of a self-destructive insanity, the arabesques, acrobatic architectures of the castle of Gormenghast, monstrous, tangled, gigantic concretion of the uncontrollable fears that grip the soul of the English writer.
The "Sulphurous Gothic" by Leo Perutz
Talented and tormented outsider who is rightly celebrated today as one of the most refined masters of the gothic genre, Leo Perutz, to escape the distressing bottlenecks of reality, turns his gaze to the vast field of memories of Antiquity and weaves a very personal dialogue with the shadows of the greats of the past, the only ones capable of alleviating his exacerbated solipsism.
βIndomiteβ: the witches' tales of Simona Friuli
In the collection "Indomitable. Stories of crowned and beasts ", published by Vocifuoriscena, there is an echo of the best Sylvia Townsend Warner, among forests, hunter goddesses, bacchantes, kings and queens. A contemporary update of witch literature halfway between the "cruel tale" and the "black fairy tale".
Sarban, the pilgrim from the heart of darkness
On April 11, 1989, 32 years ago, the English writer John William Wall, better known under the pseudonym of Sarban, one of the few traveling writers of our era, left us. Let's recap two works by him that Adelphi has published in Italian in recent years: the short story βZubrowka. A Christmas story βand the novelβ The call of the horn β.
Venus in fur: Sacher-Masoch's medusea antimoral
On March 9, 1895, the Austrian baron Leopold von Sacher-Masoch died, a notorious exegete of an anti-moral of Sadian and Medusean derivation, founded on the mixture of pleasure and pain and aimed at seeking an elevation devoid of eschatological elements.
